Network and Academic Computing Services
Strategic Goals -- June 26, 2006
This document summarizes key Network and Academic Computing Services (NACS) goals in support of UCI strategic plans (A Focus on Excellence: A Strategy for Academic Development at UCI through 2015). Three overarching themes for NACS strategic activities are growth, state of the art facilities, and professional services:
Growth: It is anticipated that approximately 8,000 additional students, 840 additional faculty, and a commensurate number of additional staff will join UCI. At the same time, the pervasive reliance on network and computer technologies will continue to intensify. NACS must scale its network and other infrastructure services to provide the capacity needed to support this expansion.
State of the Art Facilities: Attracting high quality students and faculty and creating an environment in which they can thrive requires top-notch information technology infrastructure and central services.
Professional Services: Optimal information technology solutions depend on the advice and assistance of skilled professional staff to help faculty and students navigate the plethora of technologies and tools available and make effective use of same.
NACS will be in a better position to respond to specific academic program needs after it has opportunity to review and assess plans coming out of each school. It is also important to carry out a campus planning exercise to assess the current status of information technology at UCI and plan for the future. Many goals and areas of emphasis for NACS are already clear. They are summarized below.
Network and Telephone
- Continue to upgrade campus network equipment and cabling to provide a minimum of 100 megabit per second (Mbps) connectivity in all campus offices and labs, and 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) wherever it is needed. Provide 10 Gbps connectivity and other advanced services in support of research needs.
- Upgrade UCI's off-campus connection to multiple, redundant 10 Gbps paths.
- Extend campus wireless service to all campus indoor locations and most outdoor locations; increase bandwidth as wireless technology evolves.
- Upgrade campus telephone services to provide modern, integrated services
Layered Network Services
- Enhance current UCInetID/ Kerberos/ LDAP based central identity management services to provide for extended campus affiliations (applicant, alumni, friends of the University, parents, academic collaborators, campus visitors, etc.)
- Further strengthen network security by upgrading the campus firewall and intrusion detection system (IDS), by adding internal firewalls and heuristic IDS, and through comprehensive UCI-wide vulnerability scanning. Expand professional security services in support of campus departments and research groups.
Central Productivity Services
- Increase the capacity, reliability, and performance of central electronic mail services; investigate adding UCI-specific functionality to promote collaboration.
- In concert with the Alumni Association, provide UCI email addresses to all Alumni
- Deploy and support robust interactive communication systems such as instant messaging, and systems to support scholarly collaboration.
- Facilitate collaboration by extending UCI's common electronic calendar to everyone on campus.
Academic Personnel
- Support the expanding faculty community by working with UCI Academic Personnel to deploy and develop online faculty recruitment, electronic dossier, review, promotion and related services.
Instructional and Student Computing
- Support UCI's educational mission by continuing to expand the functionality and use of the Electronic Educational Environment. Track national developments such as Sakai to support evolving national standards for sharing educational materials.
- Expand the capacity of centrally run instructional computing labs throughout the campus and ramp up facilities and services in support of student-owned portable computing.
- Provide advanced computing and network resources for graduate students.
- Evolve NACS help desk services into a distributed operation with locations in the Student Center, NACS and elsewhere as dictated by student needs. Provide help desk services for all student technology services, not just those operated by NACS.
- Participate in the development of a campus-wide student web portal to better integrate student information technology services.
Research Computing
- Provide expanded professional, discipline-specific, research computing and networking expertise to meet the needs of UCI's expanding research agenda.
- Provide additional computer cluster system administration services in a variety of models to meet researcher needs. This includes shared compute clusters that can host faculty owned compute nodes, as well as standalone cluster support. Expand distributed system administration and web site support services.
- Enhance the capacity and functionality of the Academic Data Center in Engineering Gateway to provide an effective and secure means of housing compute engines owned by research groups.
- Implement compute "Grid" technology at UCI to create a UCI Grid as a component of a larger UC Grid. Use the Grid to facilitate access to the immense distributed compute power of UCI and the UC system.
Comments to Dana.Roode@UCI.EDU
