Annual Report Home | Executive Summary | New, Improved and Continued Services | Research Services | Project/Initiative Highlights | Professional/Personal Activities | By the Numbers

Again, most initiatives happened in the Emerging Technologies space during the past year; note the changes from last year's initiatives and project highlights. Initiatives and projects have become much more focused as general areas of interest with specific projects under each area. Much of ET's mission is to investigate new information technologies to determine how and if further investigation and/or prototyping is warranted. The projects noted below reflect some of ET's efforts during 2003 - 2004.

In order to be able to make technology decisions that support ITS' business strategies, ET's investigations always have in mind alternative product options. ET aims to evaluate solution options from a variety of vendor, including open source options, to position ITS to make information technology decisions based on fact and thorough analysis.

Desktop Linux
Emerging Technologies staff continued to examine the Desktop Linux alternative. The objective of this initiative is to develop a platform for novice end-users tht users a graphical user interface (GUI) to provide applications and services available on competing operating system platforms. More detailed information is available at http://et.aset.psu.edu/public/Annual2004/desktoplinux.html.

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Emerging Technologies staff continued to test point-to-point wireless in a joint effort with the College of Agriculture Sciences to provide prototype network connectivity to the Air Quality Learning and Demonstration Center in the Penn State Arboretum. A point-to-point connection was designed and installed by ET staff using unlicensed spectrum and IEEE 802.11b technology. The College of Agriculture Sciences provides operational support for this open-ended test. When available, standards-based (e.g., IEEE 802.16) technology will be tested.

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Course management systems enable faculty to manage course materials, communication, quizzing and certain aspects of grading from one online location without needing to know HTML or other Web-based programming languages.

The Sakai Project
Sakai is a software development project founded by The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project is producing open source Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software with the first release in July 2004. The Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP) extends this community source project to other academic institutions around the world, and is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and SEPP member contributions.

Emerging Technologies recommended that ITS actively watch this project rather than become an early participant. In January 2004, ET participated in the first Web cast for the project, which defined the initiative; ET continues to watch its developments. In June 2004 the Sakai Project held a SEPP members conference in Denver, Colorado. Presentations from this conference are online at: http://www.sakaiproject.org/conferenceJune_04/presentations.html As planned, the first public beta for Sakai was released on July 15, 2004. For more information, visit http://www.sakaiproject.org/press/sakai-rc1.html. When appropriate, ET will download Sakai and begin to evaluate its capbabilities.

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During 2003 - 2004, Emerging Technologies provided a supporting role in a group working to acquire dark fiber between University Park and the Pittsburgh GigaPoP for connectivity to the National Lambda Rail (NLR). NLR is expected to provide fully dedicated Gigabit-per-second and 10-Gigabit-per-second connections among participating individual researchers. Dark fiber is also expected to provide circuit redundancy between University Park and the Pittsburgh GigaPoP for connectivity to the Internet and Internet2 as well as between University Park and a location to be designated for disaster recovery.

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The growth of the Internet presents the challenge of managing secure access to information across a wide range of Penn State and non-Penn State computing systems and services. Penn State is responsible for providing access to faculty, staff and students without diminishing security or exposing sensitive information. The Penn State Access Account provides the foundation for this identity within the University. Because this identity is used to access secure applications both internal and external to the University, the management of this identity becomes extremely important. During 2003 - 2004 Emerging Technologies continued to aggressively research new technologies related to identity management and federated identity.

Shibboleth
Shibboleth is being used at Penn State to provide access to Web-based resources residing outside of the University community. Shibboleth allows students, faculty and staff to login to external Web resources using their respective Penn State Access Account userids and passwords. Currently, there are two production services, Napster and WebAssign, that employ Shibboleth to provide authentication and authorization for Web resources. Shibboleth allows external resources to make access control decisions without compromising the privacy of the faculty, staff or students. This year, Emerging Technologies continued to partner with Digital Library Technologies and the Internet2 Shibboleth Development Team to pilot with various library vendors.

Federations
A federation is an association of organizations that come together to exchange information as appropriate about their respective users and resources in order to enable collaborations and transactions. With an emphasis on privacy within university communities and a need for collaboration, the capability to federate identities becomes critical for day-to-day business. Federations allow users to share resources within an agreed upon trust fabric. Based on the work of the Internet2 Middleware Initiative (NMI), a federation called InCommon has been created to support collaboration for education and research. Penn State is one of the first universities to join InCommon and participate in the InCommon working groups that define policy, determine costs and packaging and provide technical advice. Penn State uses the Shibboleth architecture on which the InCommon Federation is built.

Credentials Management
Emerging Technologies participated in the investigation and implementation of a Web Single Sign-On service called Penn State WebAccess. WebAccess is based on CoSign, software developed at the University of Michigan as part of the National Science Foundation's National Middleware Initiative-Enterprise and Desktop Technologies program, which has been designed to develop the nation's higher education community's readiness for emerging middleware standards and practices. Emerging Technologies in collaboration with AIT continued to provide resources to integrate the WebAccess software with the Administrative Information Services (AIS) Hydra architecture. WebAccess will provide a single common gateway for authentication to various Web services including Penn State WebMail, the Penn State Portal and eLion.

Multifactor Identification
Penn State currently uses a combination of Kerberos and SecurID (smart card) tokens for multifactor authentication. With the growing number of Web applications, the need for stronger authentication increases to a much larger audience and hardware tokens can be expensive. Emerging Technologies continued to work with Administrative Information Services (AIS) to evaluate and recommend a less expensive alternative to the current hardware.

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Integrated Communications (IC) is an umbrella initiative that includes specific projects such as Open-Source VoIP/SIP, Mobile Platforms and eLion on the Prowl. It is primarily a driving philosophy that the many disparate means of communicating (e-mail, file storage, cell phones, desktop phones, voicemail, group calendars, Web pages, task lists, fax, videoconferencing, etc.) can eventually be interconnected based on an open-system, open-source, standards-based, distributed, extensible and multi-platform approach. The current reality is that very small baby-steps are needed to make real headway. Based on feedback from a Focus Group initiative in which people were asked for their views on IC, Emerging Technologies worked with others during the year to identify specific elements of an IC system that are both of interest and feasible to address.

Focus Group Report
Emerging Technologies staff are talking to several different sources to follow up on a recent meeting, organized by ET, about Integrated Communication (IC), and to get a better focus on what other areas of the University mean when they talk about IC. The results of the interviews are available at http://et.aset.psu.edu/public/IntCom/.

Mobile Platforms
Mobile platforms encompass all portable computing devices, such as laptop computers, tablet computers, personal digital assistants (PDAÕs, including BlackBerry, iPAQ, Palm, etc.) and wireless phones. This year, Emerging Technologies lead an initiative to explore the ways in which these devices can be utilized to best serve the students, faculty, staff and administration at the University. Successful deployment of mobile platforms will result in members of the University community maximizing their use of University and worldwide computing services on the mobile platforms of their choice. Investigation thus far has focused on PDA devices with integrated wireless phones that allow Internet access. Approximately 30 BlackBerry, Palm and Pocket PC-based devices have been tested, with emphasis on the BlackBerry. The key component of the BlackBerry trial is integration with Penn State's POP e-mail servers.

eLion on the Prowl
ET and AIS have taken the first few steps to port eLion to mobile computing devices. Preliminary work has been done with Palm and Pocket PC devices.

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These are technologies that help instructors take advantage of information technology to enrich the educational experience of their students, and that actively engage learners in acquiring and assimilating the core principles and experiences of a discipline.

Render Farm
Several courses taught at Penn State require students to create animations or complex images that require rendering, a process by which realistic looking images are transformed, taking into account effects such as lighting sources. The rendering process can be a time consuming one, and it is very processor-intensive. A student project could easily require over eight hours of dedicated desktop computer time each time it is rendered. Emerging Technologies' objective is to provide a usable background rendering service that allows for the submission of work from machines in the ITS Student Computing Labs. The idea is to allow a student to leave a computer and later return to obtain the finished results. ET has a working prototype system, and is looking both for a test case course to test the service as well as a "home" for this service if it proves to be useful. More information about the rendering and animation processes is available at: http://et.aset.psu.edu/public/Annual2004/render.pdf.

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LionShare

LionShare is a Mellon funded peer-to-peer (p2p) project to develop an application that facilitates legitimate file-sharing between individuals and institutions. This p2p application will integrate authentication, authorization and accountability into a well known p2p technology. Staff in Emerging Technologies worked this year to develop LionShare's security, identity management and interoperability with existing Internet2 Middleware Initiatives. A beta version of the software will be available in September 2004. This version will include support for Kerberos authentication and accountability for file sharing.

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Emerging Technologies has begun an effort to extend videoconferencing and video over IP broadcasting to include high-definition video at various levels of compression as well as uncompressed streams. The high-bandwidth data connections provided by the Integrated Backbone, Internet2 and National Lambda Rail provide the enabling infrastructure to support such high-end applications.

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Open Source VoIP/SIP

Staff members in Emerging Technologies continued to support Telecommunications and Networking Services (TNS) in testing Voice over IP (VoIP) systems using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). As an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard, SIP is expected to provide interoperability and capabilities in the future that are currently unavailable. SIP is also expected to be a key component in an Integrated Communications infrastructure. Emerging Technologies has also been operating an open source VoIP PBX system (http://www.asterisk.org/) for test purposes in order to investigate its feasibility at Penn State and gain additional experience with SIP.

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This initiative will continue to explore advances in storage systems and protocols and how they may be used to improve Penn State's ability to access, backup, restore and manage data. Fiber channel and IP-based Storage Area Networks (SANs) are solutions for many of the same kinds of issues, but are at different price/performance points. Emerging Technologies plans to investigate the conditions under which it makes sense to implement IP SANs rather than fiber channel SANs. Other areas of interest are hierarchical storage management and storage used for high performance computing applications.

DFS Replacement
Emerging Technologies continued to investigate the replacement of ITS' current DFS enterprise filesystem as well as new storage hardware and network storage protocols. The ultimate goal is to provide ubiquitous network access to files, Web documents, e-mail, Penn State Portal and WebMail data and business information. Current investigations on filesystems involve the use of OpenAFS, NFS version 4 (NFSv4) and a combination of services from IBM collectively known as Global Storage Architecture, which includes General Parallel Filesystem, NFS version 3 (NFSv3), and gateway access for filesystem clients.

Fibre Channel Over IP
On the hardware front, Emerging Technologies has been working with fibre channel (FC) attached storage, integrating this into some of the filesystem solutions mentioned above. Recently, ET has obtained equipment to investigate Fibre Channel over Internet Protocol (FCIP) and iSCSI, which implements SCSI disk protocols over IP networks. Investigations will continue through 2004-2005.

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Emerging Technologies is involved in ongoing investigations of various aspects of wireless networks with an emphasis on security.

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Some projects undertaken by Emerging Technologies do not fall into defined initiative categories; however they are worthwhile and valuable to Penn State. The initiatives/events noted below provide a "collecting point" for those types of projects.

zLinux
Emerging Technologies participated in a study on the viability of using Linux virtual machine "partitions" on the same type of IBM zSeries servers that run the administrative computing provided Administrative Information Services (AIS). The study is focused on whether Linux on the mainframe can decrease the total cost of ownership (TCO) with regard to providing Web services relying on data from mainframe databases. Emerging Technologies found zLinux to be a particularly strong code development environment; as a result, ET recommended that secure Web service from zLinux "partitions" will probably necessitate the purchase of hardware encryption devices. Further study will include the means to move information between the Linux and mainframe zOS "partitions" to allow for more secure transport of administrative data.

The Taxonomy of Tags / Internet Search Strategies
Search engines have become essential research tools for the discovery and context relevance of online information. Emerging Technologies investigated methods for improving the quality of those searches by the use of metadata (data about data), proper tags and interconnecting hypertext links. By incorporating standard metadata schemes, and controlled vocabularies (a subset of allowed values for words describing content and data), Emerging Technologies hopes to improve the usefulness of the Penn State Search Engine as a tool for collaboration.

Retreats
During 2003 - 2004, Emerging Technologies hosted several off-site retreats with other ITS units, specifically Consulting and Support Services (CSS), Administrative Information Services (AIS) and Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT). The retreats were held to help other ITS organizations stay current with ET's activities and interests. These retreats also served as a benchmark to ET initiatives against concerns or questions held by these organizations.

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