| Client/Server DEC-Customer Partnership
This is an ASCII copy of the Partnering paper which was distributed to Digital
VPs during their visit to Iowa State University. This describes an ISU/DEC
long-term partnership that emphasizes client/server computing.
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Achieving Excellence Through Partnering Iowa State University
Iowa State University and Digital Equipment:
Achieving Excellence Through Partnering
Background on Iowa State University
Iowa State University of Science and Technology has developed from a
land-grant college into a national university of science and technology.
From its origins, Iowa State is committed to providing the benefits of
research and education to its students, the citizenry of the state, and
to the national science and technology communities.
Computing as we know it was given shape by the digital electronic
computer, a device invented at Iowa State in the late 1930s by John
Vincent Atanasoff. With the help of Clifford E. Berry, his graduate
student, he constructed a prototype that embodied the basic electronic
computer concepts to which all modern computers can trace their lineage.
Computing has changed much since then, but Iowa State today has as much
pride in its world-class computing resources as when claiming
Atanasoff's significant role in ISU's and computing's history.
The Iowa State motto of Science with Practice advocates the use of
technologies to be transferred, and even more so, advocates
participation in their development. This is particularly true in
computing. As computing has grown to be one of the dominant technical
forces of this century, it has moved from the single machine of its
origin to the networked distributed computing system as exemplified by
DECathena and Project Vincent today. While diverse computing
alternatives will exist, it is networked distributing computing which
will provide Iowa State's computing for the 1990s and the enabling
technology for the university of the 21st century.
Alliances with Partners
Iowa State's goal of being a world-class university in the 21st century
requires that it form alliances with industrial partners.
Digital's relationship began in Iowa State University's early computing days
with the placement of PDP computers on the campus. As Iowa State
looked to the replacement of several of the PDP line of computers to expand
its computing options, Digital had moved from the minicomputer to the
mainframe arena. In 1978, ISU acquired a VAX mainframe (11/780), the third
one to be manufactured, which joined its IBM and ITEL mainframes.
From the base of a mainframe environment with an extremely strong
networking ability, Digital evolved to a distributed computing model.
And so, as Iowa State was evaluating its transition from a centralized
computing model to a distributed computing environment, Digital was
again able to set the stage for this evolution via the Athena
technology.
The relationship between Digital and Iowa State had been further
fostered when in 1983, ISU undertook a Lighthouse program in conjunction
with Digital. ISU participated in testing and refining the Courseware
Authoring System and, as a result, developed courseware assisted by a
$1.3 million equipment grant from Digital. Consistent with Digital's
strong commitment to education, the scope of ISU's activities and volume
of products led Digital to support a Clearinghouse for Academic Software
which was housed at ISU. A major Digital grant to ISU in 1988 yielded
the development of an object-oriented system for the development and
delivery of software under Digital sponsorship.
As Athena technology emerged from its early development, Digital was
looking for a partner to provide realistic product development.
Following from their history, it was a natural progression for Digital
to consider an alliance with ISU. To achieve the goal of improving
computing resources, ISU had made a decision to acquire high-end
workstations. As Iowa State was exploring ways to provide management
for a large number of workstations in what was to become Project
Vincent, in the competitive environment, a continuing partnership with
Digital again promised many beneficial aspects.
New Directions
Through the provision of specialized computing equipment and network
access, ISU sought to enhance its creative teaching and research
environment by making accessible the high-level computing resources
required for many instructional and research methodologies and for
competition for research grants. The goals were to extend computing
capacities in an open systems architecture utilizing UNIX in conjunction
with providing various facilities, services, and applications to the end
user. A distributed system would enable expansion without the financial
challenge of adding personnel. The client/server concept was adopted as
an available and emerging technology providing a unified distributed
system with an ubiquitous network.
In the process of evolution, it was necessary to rethink and re-engineer
the centralized computer machine room practice to achieve a new paradigm
with improvements in cost, quality, service, and speed. The end result
was to re-invent computing to provide an environment with distributed
control and centralized, cost-effective management.
The first phase in developing Iowa State's current networked distributed
computing system saw Iowa State porting Project Athena to its campus to
run on DECstations. This project, named Project Vincent to honor John
Vincent Atanasoff, today provides both the distributed power in
computation and visualization required for research and development as
well as the network services crucial for prudent management, timely
support, and distributed community services.
Partnership Results: Project Vincent
Iowa State drew on its considerable resources and background in
providing production-level service from a centralized point to meet its
goal of providing facilities and services to its distributed
constituencies. Highlights of the results are presented following:
1990 -- The Athena technology was ported from MIT in its then current
form. Several extensions to Athena were developed in adapting the
system to the production environment at ISU. The close collaboration
between ISU and Digital engineers resulted in accomplishing this major
porting effort (and the deployments) within six months. Short course
material and an integrated user's guide were developed. An FDDI
Backbone was installed to augment the campus network. Three hundred
DECstations were acquired and deployed in 26 buildings including every
college of the university. This initial deployment was focused to the
research and development areas of the university. At the end of 1990,
there were approximately 2,000 registered user-ids.
1991 -- Locally developed distributed printing was fully deployed and
the campus network was upgraded to a routed sub-netted network. The AFS
file system was obtained and integrated into Project Vincent.
Undergraduate students were provided access to Project Vincent. Efforts
begun in late 1990 to provide local administrative control for
departments over their workstations and printers were extended.
Development of tools and procedures for the kahuna (i.e., workgroup
administrator) concept was continued. An additional 200 DECstations
were acquired and deployed in research areas and teaching laboratories,
bring the total number of workstations to 500. At the end of 1991,
there were approximately 5,000 registered user-ids.
1992 -- Further development occurred in the kahuna concept.
Significant expansion occurred in software offerings and in use of
license servers. Specialty workstation clients were developed for use
by the instructional and research communities. The provision of
binaries was moved from NFS to AFS file servers for effectiveness. Use
of Project Vincent for formal classwork began. An easy-to-use
information access tool called EasyVincent was developed. An additional
150 DECstations were acquired and deployed in research areas and
teaching laboratories. Approximately 100 of the initial DECstations
were upgraded to higher performance systems. At the end of 1992, there
were more than 8,000 registered user-ids.
Early 1993 -- An effort begun in late 1992 to place the file servers
directly on the FDDI backbone was completed and the FDDI backbone was
restructured. Server functions were redistributed to specialty servers
for system efficiency. The base code for Project Vincent was
transitioned from the MIT source to the DECathena source version 1.1.
The production system now includes more than 650 workstations. Of
these, approximately 30 are servers and the rest are client
workstations. This distributed computing system is located in more than
350 rooms in more than 40 buildings on the ISU campus using a dual-ring
FDDI backbone with extensive Ethernet connections. There are currently
more than 12,000 registered users. Over 5,000 users have attended short
courses. A typical day supports 5,000 discrete sessions with peaks
nearing 7,000 sessions.
1993-94 Development -- Three major areas of development are the use of
Alpha workstations; the incorporation of system performance and
accountability functions; and the incorporation of NT technology. The
incorporation of NT will extend DECathena services to PC and Macintosh
users in a familiar environment. System performance and accountability
functions are facilitated by the client/server architecture of
DECathena. Development work with Alpha workstations requires OSF/1
which is introduced in DECathena 1.2.
Benefits for Iowa State from Digital's involvement are:
Achieve goal of providing a computing environment to the overall campus
community that allowed ISU to improve its science and technology
capabilities.
Digital and its business partners deliver the power to use effective
integrated solutions in open information environments. Digital offered
the best price/performance in their workstations and DECathena offered
support for a multi-vendor environment.
Digital has access to the computing industry as a whole, and to the
standards process in particular, which assisted Iowa State in its desire
to generate solutions within standards.
As Iowa State completes the conversion to DECathena, we move toward a
supported base platform for Project Vincent. In turn, we are able to
continue research and development on a supported product and to share
enhancements with Digital.
Iowa State utilized Digital's significant engineering resources and
talent for consultation and collaboration in developing the class of
distributed computing network it requires. Such resources included
concept meetings with DECathena engineers to the mutual benefit of each
partner.
Digital provided resources to Iowa State, both material and human, which
has significantly accelerated the pace of Iowa State's effort. For
example, Digital supplied considerable technical knowledge and support
with Motif, the window manager, during critical development phases of
Project Vincent.
Because Iowa State received access to information on internal systems
modules of Athena as well as staff support, the design, development, and
implementation process was speeded up and more productive than it would
have been without such essential information.
Benefits for Digital from Iowa State's involvement are:
Project Athena has been adapted in a workable environment for research
and development computing beyond the academic environment, enabling
Digital to realize a continuation of their effort in distributed
computing.
As a customer, Iowa State has showcased a comprehensive wide-area
networked distributed computing solution using UNIX workstations as
the underlying engines and firmly based on industry open standards.
Iowa State has successfully and rapidly ported Athena into a different
and complex environment. Due to ISU's extension of several system
facilities and the wide variety of workstation users throughout the
campus, ISU has been able to suggest and implement software enhancements
to the DECathena software environment.
Iowa State offers a test bed for the practical application and testing
of scalability and functionality concepts. Iowa State can provide test
beds for subsequent development of distributed services and applications
as well as the dissemination of these to the customers.
As a large-scale site utilizing DECathena, Iowa State has hosted several
of Digital's customers and potential customers who have visited the
campus to see the client/server concept exemplified in a production
environment.
As a result of the experience learned by both Digital and ISU, Digital
is able to provide expertise to commercial customers on the process of
moving from a centralized timesharing computing environment to a
distributed computing environment with a new machine room concept.
This issue of downsizing is of particular importance to the commercial
and educational community today.
Iowa State has the resources in its Computation Center, Engineering
College, and other research areas to perform the applied research and
product development of system and application software.
Iowa State has the leadership and commitment at the university
administrative level to allocate and use necessary resources to achieve
the vision of providing leadership in science and technology.
Iowa State has a history in computing efforts from the birthplace of the
digital computer; on to application efforts such as the Statistical
Laboratory; through early use of VAX technology; to its intensive use of
the Distributed Computing Environment today; and will continue to
explore and utilize progressive, innovative computing resources.
Iowa State and Digital in a Shared Vision
In April of 1990, Digital and Iowa State University collaborated to
establish the first-in-the-nation, distributed computing network geared
toward advancing university research. Digital's path in developing its
distributed computing infrastructure is the same path Iowa State must
take; Iowa State is committed to this development for its own use and
long-term growth. In sharing their vision, the Iowa State
University/Digital Equipment Corporation working partnership which
developed is a win-win situation for both parties.
The major result is the development in product form of a distributed
computing network. This provides the user at a workstation with a
cornucopia of computing services and applications, all seemingly at the
workstation in a familiar environment. The distributed system, through
its wide-area network, provides the facilities and the services of the
enterprise to its most remote clients.
Both Iowa State and Digital are committed to distributed computing. By
utilizing DECathena in addition to other open standards, both are able
to achieve cost-effective management tools empowering end users.
Digital and Iowa State are both committed to computing technology in
whatever form it may take in the future, building on their success in
devising and developing key aspects of the computing environment.
Digital and Iowa State have partnered to transform their shared vision
into the distributed computing environment. As the future brings new
developments and opportunities such as NT and DME, the shared vision
will continue to provide the opportunity for Digital and Iowa State to
collaborate.
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