Technology for Education 2000

Submitted by:

Lee L. Huntsman, Provost

George Lake, Department of Astronomy
Edward D. Lazowska, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Gregory L. Zick, Department of Electrical Engineering

The University of Washington is one of the nation's preeminent research and educational institutions. For more than twenty years, UW has ranked among the top five institutions in annual Federal research obligations. (Currently UW is second behind Johns Hopkins, with MIT and Stanford in third and fourth positions. Currently UW ranks third nationally in industrial research support, and fifth in licensing revenues from inventions.) The UW faculty includes nearly one hundred members of the National Academies, eight MacArthur Foundation "genius" award winners, and four Nobel laureates in the past decade. Programs from across the campus are ranked among the top ten in the nation in their disciplines: programs in Medicine such as primary care, family medicine, rural medicine, and nursing (each of which is ranked #1 in the nation); programs in Engineering such as bioengineering and computer science & engineering; programs in the Sciences such as astronomy, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, statistics, and zoology; and programs in the Fine Arts such as creative writing and drama. And the University of Washington's Office of Computing & Communications also has established a national leadership position, both for campus infrastructure and for national initiatives such as Internet2 and Research TV. It is simply a fact that there is no institution comparable to the University of Washington in the entire quadrant of the nation that lies north of Berkeley and west of the Mississippi -- and there is only a small handful of comparable institutions nationawide. At the University of Washington, first class research, first class education, and first class outreach are seamlessly intertwined, across the campus.

This breadth and depth of excellence is one reason for the strength of the existing partnership between Intel and the University of Washington. In 1995, for example, 85 University of Washington students took employment with Intel, making the University of Washington the #1 supplier in the nation to Intel -- first among 38 "Strategic" campuses. This is particularly remarkable since until very recently Intel has had no "geographic advantage" in recruiting UW students. (It is less surprising, for example, that UW is the #1 supplier in the nation to Microsoft.) Intel has invested heavily in UW's Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & Engineering, to the enormous benefit of those programs, and, we hope, to the enormous benefit of Intel as well.

The entire University of Washington community looks forward to the current Request for Proposals as an opportunity to dramatically intensify this already-strong relationship. We propose to partner with Intel in undertaking three campus-wide initiatives that will serve as national models for driving the demand for Intel Architecture systems in the research and education communities, and for transforming those communities with Intel as a partner.

Our proposal is predicated upon two key observations:

• High performance applications are of enormous importance in science and engineering, and in the education of scientists and engineers. These applications are ripe for moving to Intel Architecture systems -- individual systems, shared-memory multiprocessors, and cluster-based systems -- not only because of the performance of IA systems, but also because the move will facilitate the integration of these applications with education and with modern educational technology. This integration of research and education defines UW's mission as a state-funded research institution.

• While the demand for cycles in these high performance applications will continue to grow, in the long term, "traditional" high performance applications will be consuming a diminishing percentage of the world's cycles. One does not need to be clairvoyant to see the emerging importance of:
  • Advanced digital media applications for science, engineering, education, and entertainment. Visualization, animation, images and video all play an ever-expanding role in enabling learning on demand, distance learning, collaboratories, etc. This presents an enormous opportunity and challenge to the University. UW must continue its fundamental research in the enabling technologies for these changes (computer graphics, digital media, human/computer interaction, Internet2/NGI, etc.) and integrate them into our "core business" of education. There is a fundamental risk to our very survival; if we don't become educational content providers using all the available technology, we may be reduced to an "educational theme park." Conducting these activities on IA systems provides enormous leverage both for Intel and for the University.

  • Infrastructural support / data management / user management. Today, the "educational enterprise" -- mail services, web services, file services -- runs on a mixture of mainframes and Unix clusters. Moving these activities to IA systems again provides enormous leverage. Universities such as UW have tremendous experience with the kinds of large-scale, cost-effective, open systems that the commercial world is increasingly demanding.

1. Creating a showcase for high performance applications on Intel Architecture systems -- cutting-edge high-demand scientific and engineering applications such as Computational Astrophysics and VLSI design, and programs aimed at educating the next generation of experts in these fields, such as our new Applied and Computational Mathematical Sciences program.

2. Developing and deploying advanced digital media applications for the educational environment, based upon Intel Architecture systems. Applications and underlying fundamental research include computer graphics, computer animation, digital video, scientific visualization, multimedia libraries, desktop telecollaboration, and digital learning on demand (including digital video servers and the distribution and desktop infrastructure for streamed and non-real-time digital video). Much of this work will be conducted within the framework of our multi-institutional Next Generation Internet (NGI) and Research TV (RTV) consortium initiatives. We firmly believe that the potential for growth in this arena over the next five years transcends all others.

3. Demonstrating the use of highest-end Intel Architecture server clusters for supporting the "educational enterprise" -- administrative computing, electronic mail, large scale shared file systems, and multimedia web services. As one of a number of examples, the University of Washington currently supports 60,000 email accounts on two clusters of 50 RISC Unix workstations each; this has served as a national and international reference for the (unnamed) vendor of these workstations and has propagated similar architectures across higher education and the private sector. We wish to begin the migration of this enterprise support to the Intel Architecture. We have a commitment from Microsoft to partner in this endeavor.

• Between the University of Washington and Intel
• Between the University of Washington and Microsoft
• Between the University of Washington and other key national institutions of higher education
• Between the University of Washington and NSF's National Computational Science Alliance
• Between the University of Washington and regional partners in medical information technology
• Between Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computing & Communications, and other programs in engineering, the sciences, and the arts.

Section 2 elaborates further on the University of Washington and its relationship with Intel.

Sections 3 through 5 provide a high-level view of our proposed initiatives in advanced scientific computing applications, digital media, and support for the educational enterprise.

Section 6 describes the institution-wide coordination plan, and suggests a national coordination effort that the University of Washington is eager to undertake on Intel's behalf.

The appendices provide more detailed information concerning a number of our proposed initiatives.