NSF Grant Proposal for vBNS Connectivity

NSF "Connections to the Internet" Program (NSF 96-64)
Kansas State University
January 31, 1998

A. Project Summary

While collaboration with colleagues at other research and education institutions in the state, nation, and around the world has always been important to researchers at Kansas State University, the need for real-time interactive collaborations and access to remote facilities over communications networks is now considered an essential part of research efforts in nearly every field of study. However, activities central to these contemporary collaborative research projects, such as transfer of extremely large data files, access to remote supercomputer facilities, distributed parallel computations, visualization, real-time collaboration tools, and video-conferencing, have been at best prohibitively slow or entirely impossible over the commodity Internet. By connecting to the National Science Foundation's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) through the "Connections to the Internet" program (NSF96-64), K-State intends to tear down this road block and partner with other vBNS and Internet2 sites to dramatically advance knowledge not only in high performance computing and networking, but in science and the arts as well.

Meritorious research projects at K-State with significant and specific high-bandwidth and/or bounded latency requirements for network communications with remote sites have been identified in the following areas:

• High performance scientific computations
  
• High energy physics
  
• Software verification
• Digital libraries
  
• Distributed simulation modeling
  
• Collaborative circuit design
  

These network enhancements will involve four components: the local campus infrastructure, the state-wide Kansas Research and Education Network (KANREN), the regional Great Plains Network (GPN) consortium, and the portion for which NSF funding is sought - the connection to the vBNS. At the local level, the core network will be enhanced to connect more buildings with 100 Mbps full duplex ethernet. Within buildings, network electronics will be upgraded and new wiring installed where needed. At the state level, the KANREN backbone will be upgraded from a single T1 to ATM over a DS-3 to connect K-State with the regional GPN GigaPoP to be located in Kansas City and operational by August 1, 1998. The GPN is a consortium of institutions of higher education in six states in the great plains region: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The GPN will not only enhance the network communications among its member institutions, but the GPN GigaPoP will also serve as a regional aggregation point for connecting to the vBNS. All institutions in the GPN that receive a vBNS grant from the NSF, possibly along with the University of Missouri, will cooperate to design an appropriately sized and managed connection to the vBNS out of the Kansas City GigaPoP routing node.

With these network improvements and cooperative efforts, K-State will take its place among the leaders not only in research but in bringing next generation network technologies to the nation and to the world.

C. Project Description

C.1 Introduction

Kansas State University proposes to connect its campus network to NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) as part of the "Connections to the Internet" program (NSF96-64). K-State researchers have long been involved in collaborations with colleagues at other research and education institutions, but have been severely hindered by the limitations of wide area network connectivity over the commodity Internet. Transfers of multi-gigabyte to terabyte sized data files, synchronization of distributed computations, visualization, video conferencing, and even at times a simple telnet session to a remote supercomputer facility have proven to be at best prohibitively slow, if not impossible. Access to high-speed low-latency vBNS connections to other institutions is essential to the future success of and would greatly accelerate the progress of numerous research projects at K-State.

As one of the first land grant institutions, K-State has a 135-year history of teaching, research, and outreach. In fiscal year 1997, K-State's total research funding base was $82.4 million. Extramural research funding reached $52.3 million, of which 68 National Science Foundation grants totaled $6.9 million. In 1997, the university received one of only 10 of the National Science Foundation's Recognition Awards for the Integration of Education. The RAIRE award cited K-State's strong collaborations between its research scientists, education faculty and teachers to put modern research techniques and concepts into K-12 classrooms. This, along with strong collaborations within the state's scientific community due to Kansas being an EPSCoR state, positions K-State to quickly and effectively share the results of its meritorious vBNS-supported projects and thereby contribute to the emerging national and global high performance computing and communications infrastructure.

K-State's proposed project to connect to the vBNS involves five components described in the following sections. First, meritorious research applications with high bandwidth and/or bounded latency requirements are described. Secondly, the local campus network infrastructure must reach the researchers' servers and desktops with guaranteed levels of service adequate to meet the special requirements of their applications. The third component involves the state-wide Kansas Research and Education Network (KANREN) that will connect the campus to a regional collection point at high speeds. Fourthly, K-State will participate in the establishment of that regional collection point (GigaPoP) as an institutional member of the Great Plains Network. Finally, this Great Plains GigaPoP routing node, located in Kansas City, will connect to the nearest vBNS connection point. This is the circuit for which NSF funding is requested.

C.2 Meritorious Research Projects Requiring High Speed Network Connectivity

Kansas State University has identified research projects in six major areas that have applications with wide area network requirements not readily satisfied by the commodity Internet: high performance scientific computing, high energy physics, software verification, digital libraries, soybean simulation model, and ASIC design. For each application area, the K-State scientists are identified, collaborators at other institutions listed, and network requirements described. Much excitement was generated when the K-State research community was apprised of the possibility of connecting to other institutions over the vBNS. As a result, several other research projects are listed that, while not highly meritorious, would benefit greatly from a vBNS connection since they are limited by current wide area technologies and involve collaboration with researchers at other major institutions. These projects are listed in section C.2.7.

C.2.1 High Performance Scientific Computing Applications

High performance computing applications in the sciences and engineering at Kansas State University (K-State) has undergone a big leap in the past three years with the establishment of a state-of-the-art computational and visualization facility, highlighted by the 48-processor HP/Convex Exemplar SMP's, with partial funds from NSF--ARI and MRI grants in 1994 and 1997, respectively. This activity has brought together a group of scientists and engineers in four key research areas declared as "grand challenge" initiatives by the National Academy of Sciences. These research projects share the common thread of high-performance computing applied to the simulation of physical, chemical, or biological systems. Simulation coupled with visualization allows researchers to carry out "computer experiments" to observe complicated phenomena that are extremely difficult to isolate in the laboratory. The three seemingly disparate research areas: modeling of novel materials and macro-molecules, atomic and molecular structure and collisions, and reactive fluid dynamics employ similar algorithms and visualization techniques in the pursuit of a more fundamental understanding of the system at hand. These three areas have a common link with the fourth initiative, engineering software development for parallel scientific application (section C.2.3), which provides the tools necessary for the large scale simulations required to bridge the gap between the microscopic and the macroscopic realms.

In parallel with the above developments, NSF-EPSCoR together with the State of Kansas has funded a subset of investigators in these four research areas at K-State, the University of Kansas (KU) and Wichita State University through the Kansas Center for Advanced Scientific Computing (KCASC) for collaborative research. In this connection, a computational facility consisting of a 16-processor SGI-Origin2000 was installed at KU in 1997. To give these research groups further legitimacy, centers for Scientific Supercomputing were formed at K-State and KU with approval of the Kansas Board of Regents in 1996. High speed connectivity and large bandwidth for data transfer between the computational facilities at K-State and KU will greatly increase the level of collaborative activity of these researchers.

Finally, the availability of funds through this vBNS grant would provide another impetus in the collaborative research that these same group of high performance computing experts are seeking (or continuing) through the recent NSF initiatives at the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA),Urbana, Illinois, and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), San Diego, California, in which they are partners. A brief overview of the research interests of some of the scientists and engineers who have a stake in the funding of this proposal for a high speed connection to the vBNS follows.

Computer Modeling of Materials: Surfaces and Nanocrystallines. [KARA97] [KUER97] Dr. Talat S. Rahman, Department of Physics, Kansas State University; Dr Brian Laird and Benjamin Leimkuhler, University of Kansas; Dr. Lubos Mitas, University of Illinois, Urbana; Dr. John Connolly and co-workers, University of Kentucky; and Dr. Dwight Jennisen, Sandia Laboratories.

Surfaces and interfaces play a critical role in environmental engineering (contaminated soil, waste disposal, ozone depletion), micro-machining, heterogeneous catalysis, corrosion, and thin film growth. To fully understand the implications of controlled atomic processes like adsorption, desorption, dissociation, diffusion, chemical binding, and thermal motion for some of the above technological and environmental issues, and to facilitate the production of novel materials like nanocrystallines, Dr. Rahman is engaged in accurate, atomistic calculations and simulations using several computationally intensive techniques like molecular dynamics and kinetic Monte Carlo using either many-body interaction potentials or ab initio electronic structure methods. Through systematic studies of large-scale systems trends in behavior are understood as a function of surface geometry, orientation, temperature and elemental composition. Through selective studies using ab initio methods, deeper insight is obtained in the nature of the bonding and electronic structure at metal surfaces. The end goal is to build a theoretical machinery for tailoring novel materials in which input from ab initio calculations is used to carry out large-scale computer simulations which predict behavior of complex systems. Parallel algorithms are developed for the purpose and are currently run on local multiprocessors. A high speed connection between the national computational centers would facilitate the application of the codes to more realistic systems under conditions prevalent in laboratories and manufacturing industries, thus bridging the gap between the microscopic and the macroscopic. Dr. Rahman's work is funded by DOE, NSF and NSF-EPSCoR.

The importance of polymers in many industrial processes and biological systems often arises from their specific behavior near a solid-liquid interface. A detailed knowledge of conformations and cooperative motion of polymer chains at or near a solid-liquid interface is essential for the development of artificial materials with specifically engineered properties. For such complicated materials, Dr. Chakrabarti carries out computer simulation studies of realistic model systems to obtain insight into the fundamental properties of polymers at an interface. Large-scale molecular dynamics simulations of spreading and dewetting behavior of thin polymer layers for various chain lengths of both homopolymer and end-functionalized polymer molecules are being performed. Recently, a hybrid Monte Carlo simulation was done for the Gay-Berne model for liquid crystals in the presence of a substrate surface to study the effects of the substrate surface on the bulk alignment of the liquid crystals. Molecular dynamics simulations of such a model will be carried out to study liquid crystal spreading near the bulk isotropic-nematic transition temperature. These studies will provide important new insight into the "molecular hydrodynamics" of spreading. Dr. Chakrabarti's research is funded by PRF, NSF and NSF-EPSCoR.

Various molecular simulation techniques are used to understand experiments on different aspects of nanotribology, novel membrane separation and environmental remediation problems. In the case of popular engine wear inhibitors like Zinc dithiophosphates, for example, structural, conformational and vibrational analysis are performed using ab initio quantum calculations. With accurate force fields developed from ab initio results, Dr. Jiang has carried out large-scale molecular dynamics simulations to study the effects of temperature, surface separation, shear force, and thin films on thermodynamic, dynamic, and tribological properties for systems of wear inhibitors confined between two surfaces in sliding contact. Using this modeling approach, new wear inhibitors have been designed. Additionally, an equation of state to describe various thermodynamic properties of electrolyte solutions for a wide range of temperatures and pressures from statistical mechanical considerations has been developed. The equation is very useful in the design of chemical processes involving electrolyte solutions and in geochemical studies of natural water. In another initial study the fundamental thermodynamic and dynamic properties of confined fluid mixtures, and effects of temperature, pore variables, and surface roughness on phenomena like adsorption, diffusion, selectivity, and phase transitions are examined. This has set the stage for the development of low-pressure storage media for natural gas and for the design of microporous materials for removal of pollutants. Dr. Jiang's research is supported by NASA-EPSCoR.

Drs. Krishnamoorthi and Smith use Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to study the solution structures and dynamics of trypsin inhibitors isolated from pumpkin seeds (Cucurbita maxima trypsin inhibitors, CMTIs) as a model system for characterizing the effects of structure and dynamics on protein function. The two systems CMTI-III and CMTI-V, developed by Krishnamoorthi and Smith to probe the role played by dynamics in protein function, are found to exhibit different three-dimensional solution structures, different hydrolysis constants, and differential interactions with solvent water molecules. Molecular dynamics simulations are used to characterize protein-solvent interactions by NMR, develop a suitable computational model, predict favorable interactions by computation, and verify the results by protein engineering. In the second stage, enzyme-inhibitor interactions in solution will be characterized by NMR, and, using the computational model, favorable amino acid substitutions will be engineered with the aim of producing more effective inhibitors. Computer simulations of these large systems will be performed most effectively at a regional supercomputer site (SDSC). Analysis of the resulting data will require the routine transfer of 10-20 GBytes of data to and from the supercomputing center. These types of transfers are prohibitively slow on the current Internet. Successful completion of this project depends on high-speed data transfer and acquisition, data processing, and high performance computing. Funding for this research is from NIH and NSF/EPSCoR.

NuTeV is a high energy neutrino scattering experiment that has just completed its data gathering at Fermilab. High performance network needs of this project that are severely limited by the current commodity Internet connectivity include:


• Software management and code distribution between K-State and Fermilab. All operating system and applications software is maintained by a networked code management system.
  
  
• Data management and code distribution between K-State and Fermilab. We currently cannot transfer large data files efficiently on the network. We must resort to mailing magnetic tapes back and forth.
  
  
• Document distribution between K-State, Fermilab, and other national and international high energy physics laboratories. Modern physics documents contain increasingly complicated graphical and dynamical features. These documents now can take prohibitive amounts of time to download.
  
  
• Use of large computer systems at Fermilab. This is currently possible only at night due to slow network connections. Single keystroke entries to remote Fermilab computers require 10 seconds to echo in the middle of the work day. Considerable funds have been expended to maintain local computing because of the effective inaccessibility of the national lab computers.
  
  
• Desktop conferencing and collaboration tools. Tens of thousands of dollars are spent each year for travel in order for collaborators to meet and many hundreds of hours of work time are lost. Deployment of desktop video conferencing and collaboration tools such as a shared whiteboard would save a significant amount of time and money. It would also ensure that K-State stay connected to important developments at Fermilab and thereby possibly eliminate the current need to base a full time post-doc at the lab.
  

E791 is a high-statistics heavy quark experiment with excellent sensitivity for rare decays of charged particles. Data was collected at Fermi National Lab in 1990-91, and amounted to 25,000 tapes, or 50 Terabytes of data. Analysis is well underway and will be mostly completed by late 1999. About 25 publications in referred journals are expected as a result of this project.

The main thrust of this experiment is to demonstrate the existence of the tau neutrino, which has not been directly observed to this point. The Standard Model of particle physics contains three generations of quarks and leptons, implying the existence of three neutrinos: electron-neutrino, muon-neutrino, and tau-neutrino. Forty years after the first direct observation of electron neutrino interactions, very little is truly known about the neutrinos in their own right. In particular, we do not know whether neutrinos have mass, and to date physicists have directly observed the interactions of only electron-neutrinos, and muon-neutrinos. This on-going experiment recorded data at Fermi National Lab during May - September, 1997, and is expected to run again in mid-1999. Final analysis and publication of results will extend through 2002.

COSMOS is an experiment which is approved, if funded, to run at Fermi National Lab in 2003-2006. The experiment is designed to measure the mass difference, if it exists, between the neutrino types, and to search for the oscillation of the neutrino types into one another. The experiment, a collaboration of 80 physicists around the world, is most sensitive to conversion of muon-neutrinos into tau-neutrinos.

C.2.4 File Servers for Digital Libraries [ANDRE97] [ANDRE98] [SMITH96]
Dr. Daniel Andresen, Department of Computing and Information Sciences, Kansas State University
Members of the Parallel and High Performance Processing team of the Alexandria Digital Library Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara (project director, Dr. Terence R. Smith, and the leadership of the PHPP team. The team includes Computer Science Dept. chair Dr. Oscar Ibarra, Dr. Tao Yang, Dr. Klaus Schauser, Dr. Omer Egecioglu, and others); San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Dr. Andresen collaborates with members of the Parallel and High Performance Processing team (PHPP) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) regarding scheduling distributed and parallel digital library applications such as image processing, database query, and content distillation. These applications typically involve moving large amounts of data combined with major computational requirements and must be allocated properly to insure the fastest possible response times and assist project scalability. Properly distributing Internet requests and maximizing the use of existing computational and analytical resources demands high-bandwidth networking capabilities.

There are several major research thrusts which would benefit greatly from very-high-speed Internet connectivity between research sites. First, as information becomes distributed beyond simple server clusters into physically and logically separate locations, effectively scheduling computations across heterogeneous server and storage resources requires an efficient computational transfer mechanism. Without such an infrastructure, most computation is limited to the data storage locale, causing significant difficulties when computation requires data from multiple sources or the computation resources available at data storage centers are insufficient. Additionally, continuing research in the national digital library projects, particularly those at Stanford University and UCSB, in conjunction with the San Diego Supercomputer Center, indicates that just such an information architecture will be the reality for next-generation distributed knowledge systems.

Performance and scalability issues are especially important for the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) project at UCSB, with which members of the faculty at K-State are conducting research. The fundamental goal of this project is to provide users with the ability to access and process broad classes of spatially-referenced materials from the Internet. Materials that are currently in the collections of ADL and accessible through the ADL World Wide Web (WWW) server include geographically-referenced items such as digitized maps, satellite images, digitized aerial photographs, and associated metadata. When fully developed, ADL will comprise a set of nodes distributed over the Internet supporting such library components as collections, catalogs, interfaces, and ingest facilities. The collections planned for include millions of items requiring terabyte levels of storage. The catalog component alone contains a metadatabase of significant size. Many collection items have sizes in the gigabyte range while others require extensive processing to be of value in certain applications. At K-State, we are collaborating with members of the PHPP team of the ADL project regarding scheduling distributed and parallel digital library applications.

Our collaborators include the project director, Dr. Terence R. Smith, and the leadership of the PHPP team which includes Computer Science Dept. chair Dr. Oscar Ibarra, Dr. Tao Yang, Dr. Klaus Schauser, Dr. Omer Egecioglu, and others. Dr. Daniel Andresen, of Kansas State University, is a member of the ADL Systems and PHPP teams; and is actively contributing to the systems research segment proposed for the next generation of ADL.

Typical digital library (DL) applications include image processing, database query, and content distillation. These applications usually access large amounts of data and have major computational requirements. They must be allocated properly across the DL structure to insure the fastest possible response times and assist project scalability. For example, a user might request a subimage of a Landsat picture from ADL at UCSB, requiring both significant amounts of data and computation for completion. If the data were stored at K-State, the current Internet architecture would virtually demand the computation for the request be moved from ADL at UCSB to K-State, despite the fact that K-State's computer systems might be heavily overloaded. If high-bandwidth communication links were available, delivering the data to the powerful servers at UCSB could lead to significant overall time savings for the user and better load balancing across the various DL sites. Properly distributing Internet requests and maximizing the use of existing computational and analytical resources demands high-bandwidth networking capabilities like those of vBNS. The emergence of gigabit information superhighways further enhances the vision of transparently accessible world-wide global computing resources.

C.2.5 Multidimensional Parameter Estimation for Soybean Model
Dr. Stephen M. Welch, Department of Agronomy, Kansas State University; Dr. James W. Jones, University of Florida; Dr. William D. Batchelor, Iowa State University.

Currently, the United Soybean Board is funding a multi-state project to adapt an existing soybean simulation model to on-farm decision support. The model performs well in this application given the availability of appropriate "genetic coefficients" to describe the growth habits of individual soybean varieties. However, direct measurement of these values can take longer than the commercial lifetime of a new variety. Alternatively, the coefficients can be estimated by fitting the model to the large sets of less-focussed variety testing data collected routinely in most states. Unfortunately, the current implementation of the model is microcomputer legacy code whose rewrite could take two years. Dr. Welch is working on an alternative to the above which consists of parallel processing on networked microcomputers. A system of 100 Pentium 166 machines could execute 50,000 iterations of a global optimization routine with a moderately large data set in 200 hours and thereby simulate 50 million growing seasons in about one week. The soybean modeling community is closely knit but distributed across the soybean belt. Collaboration and hardware availability mandate that the optimization network be similarly distributed. In coarse-grained MIMD systems, it is necessary to maximize the ratio of compute time to communications delay. Interprocessor messages are short in these application and node computations requiring 15-30 min are easily arranged. This leaves network latency as the major limiting factor. Therefore, a low-latency, interstate network such as the vBNS is necessary for the completion of this project.

C.2.6 ASIC Design for a Global Tracking System
Dr. Don M. Gruenbacher, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Wil Devereus and Lloyd Linstrom, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab

Dr. Gruenbacher currently is developing an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) for use in processing Global Positioning System (GPS) signals in spaceflight applications. Specifically, this system will provide precise spacecraft position and attitude measurements. Under a contract with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), Dr. Gruenbacher is required to use design software tools on computers at the JHU/APL. Current Internet capabilities severely limit his ability to perform simulations of the system design because of the large amount of textual and graphical data that must be exchanged between JHU/APL and Kansas State University. The vBNS is vital for realistic real-time simulations involving large amounts of graphical data to be performed on remote computing facilities.

C.2.7 Other Research Projects That Would Benefit from a vBNS Connection

Much interest in high-performance wide area network connectivity was generated when the research community at Kansas State University was apprised of the possibility of a high speed connection to their collaborators via the vBNS. While not deemed to be major projects with substantial bandwidth or bounded latency requirements, the following applications nonetheless would benefit from a vBNS connection because they involve collaboration with other major research institutions and have network communications requirements not currently satisfied by the commodity Internet. The diversity of these projects reflects the broad range of disciplines at K-State that would benefit from the proposed vBNS connection.

• Modular and Flexible Quality of Service (QoS) Control in Multimedia Systems. Dr. Gurdip Singh, Department of Computing and Information Sciences, Kansas State University. Design of configurable end-to-end protocols to guarantee application-specific QoS parameters over high-speed networks. Funded by NSF and ARPA.
  
• Parallel Software in Computational Science and Engineering. Dr. Virgil Wallentine, Dr. Mitch Neilsen, Dr. Matthew Dwyer, and Dr. Gurdip Singh, Kansas State University in collaboration with Sandia Laboratories. Developing a PASO system which provides a high-level programming framework to model simulation space that unifies several types of simulations. Large simulations are run on a teraflop computer system at Sandia and require transmission of visualization data to K-State to control the simulations in real-time.
  
• Computational Quantum Chemistry.[ZAKR96] Dr. J. Vincent Ortiz, Department of Chemistry, Kansas State University. Parallel computations aid the development of propagator techniques for the calculation of molecular spectra and other properties. Dr. Ortiz's work is funding by NSF.
  
• Multimedia Instruction in Physics. Dr. Dean Zollman, Department of Physics, Kansas State University. Delivery to remote sites of introductory physics course materials that include video, databases, interactivity, collaborative learning, and video analysis. Also wishes to develop "interactive classrooms" to deliver specialty upper level undergraduate and graduate courses with small enrollments to distant sites.
  
• Nonlinearity, Vortices, and Fluctuations in Magnetic Systems. [DIMIT96] Dr. Gary Wysin, Department of Physics, Kansas State University. High performance computing, parallel computations, and visualization is used to analyze static and dynamic configurations of the spin degrees of freedom in magnetic models. This project is presently funded by NSF.
  
• The Quantum N-body problem. [KUANG96] Dr. Chii Dong Lin, Department of Physics, Kansas State University. Visualization is used to understand quantum few-body systems. Funding comes from US-DOE.
  
• Ion and Electron Interactions with Atoms, Clusters, and Surfaces. [KURP96] Dr. Uwe Thumm, Department of Physics, Kansas State University. Visualization and a network of computational instrumentation is needed to study fundamental interactions in ion-atom, ion-surface, ion-cluster, and electron-atom collisions. Dr. Thumm's work is funded by NSF and US-DOE.
  
• Highfield Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory for Biological Macromolecules. Dr. Om Prakash and Dr. Thomas E. Roche, Department of Biochemistry, Kansas State University. Remote researchers access this regional NMR facility and must transfer resulting data sets that are up to one gigabyte in size.
  
• Reactive Fluid Dynamics. [FOX96] Dr. Rodney Fox, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kansas State University. Development and implementation of efficient in-situ and reduced chemistry algorithms for detailed chemical process flow simulation.
  
• Visualization of Complex Flows. Dr. Hui Meng, Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, Kansas State University. Development of measurement capability for 3-D turbulent flow fields using Doppler interferometry techniques involving large computational efforts and real-time collaboration with colleagues at remote laboratories.
  
• New Models and Computational Methods for Fluid Transport. Dr. Qisu Zou, Department of Mathematics, Kansas State University. Development of model equations for complicated flows, especially multiphase flows which include phase transitions. Most computations are performed on massively parallel machines at Los Alamos.
  
• Visualization of Genetic Information. Dr. C. Michael Smith, Department of Entomology, College of Agriculture, Kansas State University. Visualization and comparison of genetic sequencing data transferred from dispersed data banks to determine common genes in important cereal crops that are involved in insect resistance.
  
• Electron-Ion Differential Scattering Cross Sections. Dr. Chander P. Bhalla and Dr. Pat Richard, Department of Physics, Kansas State University. National Energy Research Supercomputer Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is used to study the interaction of electrons with highly charged ions that have only one or a few tightly-bound inner-shell electrons.
  
• Transport of Discrete Particles. [GUI97] Dr. J. Kenneth Shultis, Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, Kansas State University. Parallel processing is used to perform complex calculations that apply to atmospheric-canopy light reflection, medical dosimetry, and radiation shielding analysis.
  
• Spatial Analysis of Vegetation and Biophysical Surface Properties. Dr. Doug Good and Dr. John A Harrington, Department of Geography, Kansas State University; Dr. Geoffrey Henebry, Rutgers University. Exchange of large spatial-temporal satellite data sets between project collaborators, access to remote computational sites, and rapid procurement of large data sets from government and private distribution sites.
  
• Employing Computer-Based Image Analysis to Study Fine-Scale Fabric of rocks. Dr. Allen Archer, Department of Geology, Kansas State University; Bruce Bills, NASA/GSFC; Erik P. Kvale, Indiana Geological Survey, Indiana University; Stephen F. Greb, Kentucky Geological Survey, University of Kentucky. Exchange of large data and image visualization files among collaborators.
  
• National Gas Machinery Laboratory. Dr. Kirby S. Chapman and Dr. Bruce Riechert, Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, Kansas State University. Distance education offerings to include multimedia course materials and video conferencing.
  
• Distance Learning Courses in Power Systems. Dr. Anil Pahwa and Dr. Shelli Starrett, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kansas State University. Use of live video and collaboration tools in courses shared with the University of Missouri-Rolla and the University of Arkansas as part of a Combined Research and Curriculum Development grant from NSF.
  
• Collaborative Educational Research. Dr. Robert F. Hower, Department of Art, Kansas State University. Development of a Virtual Community for instruction and research using virtual reality environments and multimedia instruction. Large amounts of visualization data is transferred among the collaborators of this project.
  

The core of Kansas State University's current network is a switched full duplex 100 Mbps collapsed ethernet backbone connecting Cisco Systems, Inc. routers (see figure 1).

The network is distributed to each campus building via three fiber stars with multiple single and multi-mode fiber cables running to each building. Each star is serviced by one or more routers connected to the backbone switch at 10 or 100 Mbps. Buildings with historically lower bandwidth requirements are connected to core routers at 10 Mbps which are in turn connected to the backbone switch at 10 Mbps. Buildings with key campus servers and higher bandwidth needs are connected to high performance core routers at full duplex 100 Mbps which are in turn connected to the core switch at full duplex 100 Mbps. Network connections to each building are continually monitored to prioritize and anticipate the need for greater connectivity.

Over the past two years, upgrades to the core and distribution network infrastructures have been made in response to and in anticipation of high speed connectivity needs on campus. Some upgrades were also initiated when K-State became a charter member of the Internet2 project. Upgrades included installation of the backbone switch, the addition of Cisco 7000 and 7513 routers in the core, and the replacement of building entry point shared hubs with ethernet switches capable of supporting multiple high speed technologies (Fast Ethernet, 100VG, FDDI, and ATM in use, Gigabit ethernet planned). Most of these devices are Cisco Catalyst series switches.

Fiber optic cables connect several outlying campus centers and leased T1 lines connect other remote sites, including the K-State campus in Salina, Kansas.

Building Infrastructure to the Servers and Desktops

Networks within buildings are a mixture of shared 10 Mbps, switched 10 Mbps, switched 100 Mbps ethernet, 100VG, FDDI, and ATM. A gigabit ethernet network will soon be installed in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences. The campus cable plant is a mixture of Category 3 and 5 twisted pair, coax, and fiber. All new installations are either Category 5 copper or, when distance is an issue, fiber optic cable.

Concurrent with the enhancements in the core and distribution segments of the campus network, infrastructure within the buildings is being upgraded. Shared hubs are being replaced with ethernet switches where performance problems have been identified. All new installations use switches instead of hubs. As for the cable plant, a long-term project is underway to re-wire old buildings that have obsolete and problematic network wiring. Fiber infrastructure is being installed to reach new state-of-the-art terminal rooms to distribute data throughout the building at speeds of at least 100 Mbps. Construction on the first building is under way with two more planned for this fiscal year. This design allows for flexible growth by distributing appropriate network technologies in the terminal rooms throughout the buildings in response to either localized or wide area requirements.

Internet Connectivity

Wide area networking to the commodity Internet and other Kansas education institutions, including the University of Kansas, is provided by the Kansas Research and Education Network, a consortium of higher education institutions, K-12 school districts, and other non-profit organizations in the state of Kansas. KANREN's T1 backbone connects K-State to other KANREN members and provides redundancy for Internet connectivity. KANREN also maintains three T1 circuits to connect K-State to the commodity Internet.

C.3.2 Planned High-Speed Campus Infrastructure

The short-term plan for the core is to retain the switched ethernet backbone and connect additional buildings at full duplex 100 Mbps ethernet to the core routers. All buildings involved in the primary research projects described above in section C.2 will be connected to the core at full duplex 100 Mbps within the next year and equipped with a high performance switch to serve the needs of the researchers in those buildings. Installing high-performance modular switches such as the Cisco Catalyst models 3200 and 5000 provide the flexibility to connect buildings to the core with different high-speed technologies as the needs change.

Long-term plans call for adding an ATM core initially at OC-3 speeds to connect the high performance core routers and selected buildings. The current switched ethernet backbone will be retained to provide redundant paths in the core.

Plans are also underway to run fiber to K-State's Manufacturing Learning Center in an industrial park located several miles from the main campus. This will replace the leased T1 currently connecting the Center and extend high-speed access to that site. Related to this project is the replacement of the T1 serving the K-State campus in Salina, Kansas, with a T3 circuit. Both projects are expected to be completed within the next year.

Within buildings, shared hubs will continue to be replaced by switching devices and Category 3 cable replaced by Category 5 and fiber optic cabling. K-State will initially provide at least a switched 10 Mbps connections to the desktop of each researcher with a meritorious vBNS application. In cases where 10 Mbps is inadequate, switched 100 Mbps ethernet connections will be provided. Concurrent with this will be switched 100 Mbps connections to servers and 100 Mbps backbones within buildings. After ATM is deployed in the core, ATM may be used as the backbone technology within the buildings and even to the desktop and/or selected servers.

While these improvements are at least partially motivated by the need to provide high-speed access to the vBNS and Internet2 sites for specified researchers, all users in their respective buildings will benefit from the increased bandwidth to their building and in the core. No restrictions will be placed initially on these connections that will limit the commodity use by every faculty, staff, and student user at Kansas State University. In essence, Quality of Service (QoS, see section C.3.4) guarantees will be provided by over-provisioning the network. However, QoS developments of Internet2 and the research community will be monitored closely and deployed in our core and distribution in order to provide end-to-end guarantees to the researchers.

C.3.3 High-Speed WAN/vBNS Connectivity

C.3.3.1 KANREN

The Kansas Research and Education Network (KANREN, http://www.kanren.net) is a consortium of institutions of higher education, K-12 school districts, and other non-profit organizations within the state of Kansas. KANREN provides three T1's each into both Kansas State University and the University of Kansas for connectivity to the commodity Internet. KANREN currently has a T1 backbone that traverses the state and provides redundancy for these Internet connections.

The KANREN backbone consists of T1 circuits between the campuses at Manhattan (Kansas State University), Lawrence (University of Kansas), Kansas City (University of Kansas Medical Center), and Wichita (Wichita State University) (see figure 2). This backbone is currently in the process of being upgraded to prepare for connectivity to the Great Plains Network at DS-3 speeds through an ATM connection. Connectivity to the commodity Internet will likewise be upgraded during this project.

As major users of the KANREN backbone and Internet connectivity, Kansas State University and the University of Kansas will provide much of the funding for the KANREN backbone upgrade. Both institutions have been intimately involved in KANREN since its inception and are instrumental in the planning process for the upgrades. KANREN's network engineers have a long history of designing and building campus and regional networks. They were also
instrumental in engineering MIDnet, one of the first regional NSFNET networks. They are currently network specialists associated with the University of Kansas.

KANREN is committed to developing a network which will support the protocols necessary to sustain connectivity for Kansas State University and the University of Kansas to the vBNS through the Great Plains Network. This includes QoS either at the IP layer or within ATM, IPv6, and whatever future technologies emerge. To accomplish this, KANREN will collaborate extensively with Kansas State University, the University of Kansas, and the staff and membership of KANREN and the Great Plains Network.

C.3.3.2 The Great Plains Network

The Great Plains Network (GPN - http://www.greatplains.net/) is a consortium of mid-west universities, including Kansas State University, in the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Initial funding for the GPN comes from an EPSCoR/NSF grant awarded in August, 1997. This grant supports research in Earth Systems Science between the participating EPSCoR Universities and the Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center in Sioux Falls, SD. In addition, the Internet2 members within the GPN (including Kansas State University), together with the University of Missouri, have committed to expanding the role of the network to that of an Internet2 GigaPoP.

The initial design for the GigaPoP has been created and a request for proposal for connectivity has been submitted. Final design will depend on responses to the RFP. Initial operation of the GPN is expected in August, 1998.

GPN Topology and Facilities

The Great Plains GigaPoP is expected to have two routing nodes - one in Kansas City and the other at the EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, SD (see figure 2). These collection points will house some combination of routers and/or ATM switches along with both monitoring and measurement equipment. Each of the states participating in the consortium (KANREN in the case of Kansas) will have a connection to one of the routing nodes via either an ATM switch or a router.

The locations for the two routing nodes were chosen for a variety of reasons: to minimize the lengths of the circuits, to maximize the potential for connecting to the national infrastructure, and to satisfy the requirements of the EPSCoR/NSF award. The EROS Data Center already houses several agency network connections and increasingly serves as a focal point for connections in this region. A GigaPoP routing node located at EROS enhances the ability to bring agency networks to the campuses via the GigaPoP rather than through direct connections. EROS is also the source of much of the data and other resources relevant to the scientific investigations proposed in the EPSCoR/NSF grant. The choice of Kansas City for the other GigaPoP routing node was made because it is a telecommunications focal point and is central to the states participating in the Great Plains consortium. Having two routing nodes also allows for the possibility of two, and therefore redundant, connections to the vBNS, each of which could connect to a different vBNS connection point.

The underlying network technology of the GPN is expected to be ATM since it will allow separation of commodity Internet traffic from vBNS traffic and has the greatest potential for QoS implementation.

State Demarcation and Management

The Great Plains Network will connect to each of the participating states with at least DS-3 speed at a location determined when the RFP is awarded. In the state of Kansas, the demarcation site is expected to be at a KANREN site in the Kansas City area. It will contain either an ATM switch or router administered by the GPN. This will connect the GPN to the KANREN backbone and therefore Kansas State University (see figure 2).

The appropriate peering relationships will be implemented by the state in collaboration with the GPN. Routing policy will be determined by the GigaPoP staff in accordance with the Internet2 working group on routing. Careful control of routing policy will be maintained at all levels in the operation of the GigaPoP to ensure that the appropriate policies of all connected networks are respected. Local site administrators will not have configuration control of GPN equipment, but strong collaboration is expected between the GPN staff and the participating members.
The GPN will monitor and manage all connections to the GigaPoP and coordinate communications with all connected networks, including KANREN. The membership is expected to participate actively in this process - Kansas State University and the University of Kansas are represented on the GPN management and technical teams. The expertise gained will be vital for implementing both local and state networks, and in providing local understanding of the national infrastructure.

C.3.3.3 Proposed vBNS Connectivity

Kansas State University is requesting funds to purchase a DS-3 connection from the Great Plains Network GigaPoP to the nearest vBNS connection point (see figure 2). This will most likely be from the GPN routing node in Kansas City to the vBNS connection point in Chicago. K-State will collaborate with the University of Kansas and other universities in the GPN consortium in the development of a regional aggregation point for the connection to the national infrastructure. Those institutions receiving a vBNS "Connections to the Internet" grant will therefore cooperate in organizing the vBNS and other agency connections through the GPN. As more institutions in the region require vBNS connectivity, the connection(s) between the GPN GigaPoP and the vBNS will be expanded to one or more OC-3 connections.

C.3.4 Quality of Service (QoS) Guarantees

Initially, QoS guarantees will be provided on the local campus by simple over-provisioning. Connections to vBNS researchers will be at least switched 10 Mbps to the end node with progressively greater bandwidth toward the core in ample amounts to not limit performance. The Network Systems group in Computing and Network Services at Kansas State University will work with the researchers to monitor performance and improve connectivity where necessary to ensure that the requirements of the meritorious applications are met.

For the short-term in the wide area connections, KANREN and the Great Plains Network are committed to providing QoS guarantees to vBNS traffic, most likely in the form of provisioning shared circuits. Again, Kansas State University will work closely with KANREN and the GPN to coordinate QoS efforts.

For the long-term, implementation of QoS is expected to evolve quickly toward dynamic differentiation of service classes over shared circuits at the local, regional, and national levels. Whether this happens over IP with protocols like RSVP, with the inherent QoS properties of ATM, or with a new unforeseen technology, K-State will work with KANREN, the GPN, and the national infrastructure to implement the service guarantees end-to-end and make them widely available.

C.3.5 Planning Process

Management of the campus data network at Kansas State University is the responsibility of the Network Systems group in Computing and Network Services while the cable plant is the responsibility of the Department of Telecommunications. The two units meet regularly to coordinate and plan.

The network engineering plan described in this section was produced by a team representing computing, networking, telecommunications, and multimedia technologies with input from representatives of the major applications areas described in section C.2. The plan was then presented to the high-speed connectivity team working on this proposal for final approval. This team includes technical staff, central administration, and representatives from each of the four major applications areas.

Kansas State University also collaborated extensively with representatives from the University of Kansas, KANREN, and the Great Plains Network consortium to develop the engineering plan and ensure consistency, cooperation, and compatibility among the respective high-speed networking efforts.

C.3.6 Project Management

Administrative and Technical Staff

Implementation of the local infrastructure upgrades are under the administrative management of Dr. Beth Unger, Vice Provost for Academic Services and Technology. Oversight of the technical and operational activities of the project will be carried out by the Network Systems group in Computing and Network Services under the leadership of Harvard Townsend, UNIX and Networking Manager. This staff will work closely with the management and technical staff of both KANREN and the Great Plains Network to implement the high-speed vBNS connection out of the Great Plains GigaPoP routing node in Kansas City. Researchers with meritorious applications requiring high-performance networking will be aided by the Information Technology Assistance Center (TAC) under the leadership of Dr. Jeanette Harold, Director of TAC.

The proposed schedule of implementation is as follows:



July 1, 1998	Starting date for the vBNS project
July, 1998	KANREN backbone upgraded to DS-3 ATM
August, 1998	Great Plains Network operational
August, 1998	Coordinate with other Great Plains vBNS awardees to design vBNS connection at the Kansas City GigaPoP
September, 1998	RFP for vBNS connectivity
November, 1998	Award contract for vBNS connectivity
January, 1999	Test vBNS connection; all buildings on K-State campus with primary meritorious applications connected to backbone at 100 Mbps.
March, 1999	Routing of vBNS traffic for meritorious applications

The success of this project resides more in the support of meritorious research projects rather than in the network infrastructure itself. Consequently, dissemination of results of this project will include the published results of the meritorious applications. Furthermore, the highly collaborative nature of both the research projects and the network connectivity ensures wide dissemination of results, especially among the membership of KANREN, the Great Plains Network, the vBNS community, and Internet2 project members.

The text of this proposal, along with other documentation concerning the development of high-speed connectivity for Kansas State University will be documented on the world wide web at http://www.ksu.edu/Internet2/. Computing and Network Services will on a quarterly basis during the grant period evaluate and report on progress of the project in relation to the proposed schedule. Prior to implementation of vBNS connectivity, benchmarks documenting performance of the current campus and commodity Internet network connections in relation to the meritorious applications will be recorded. Any problems with connectivity will likewise be noted. After vBNS connectivity is operational, the same benchmarks will be performed and the same researchers interviewed to document how connectivity has changed and evaluate the effectiveness of the high speed connectivity in supporting their research. This information will be summarized and distributed to researchers campus-wide, will be made available on the project web site listed above for dissemination to researchers nation-wide, and included in the final project report to NSF.

D. References Cited

[ANDRE97]	Andresen, D., T. Yang, and O.Ibarra, "Towards a Scalable Distributed WWW Server on Workstation Clusters," The Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (1997).
[ANDRE98]	Andresen, D., T. Yang, O. Ibarra, and O. Egecioglu, "Adaptive Partitioning and Scheduling for Enhancing WWW Application Performance," to appear in The Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (1998).
[CHEN97]	Chen, H. and A. Chakrabarti, "Surface-directed Spinodal Decomposition: Hydrodynamic Effects," Phys. Rev. E 55, 5680 (1997).
[CLARK86]	Clarke, E.M., E.A. Emerson, and A.P. Sistla, "Automatic Verification of Finite-State Concurrent Systems Using Temporal Logic Specifications," ACM Trans. On Prog. Lang. and Systems, 8(2), pp. 244-263 (1986).
[DIMIT96]	Dimitrov, D.A. and G.M. Wysin, "Lifetime of vortices in 2D easy-plane ferromagnets," Phys. Rev. B 53, 8539(1996).
[DWYER94]	Dwyer, M.B. and L.A. Clarke, "Data Flow Analysis for Verifying Properties of Concurrent Programs," Software Engineering Notes, 19(5), pp. 62-75 (1994).
[DWYER98a]	Dwyer, M.B., G.S. Avrunin, and J.C. Corbett, "Property Specification Patterns for Finite-state Verification," Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Formal Methods in Software Practice (1998).
[DWYER98b]	Dwyer, M.B., J. Hatcliff, and M. Nanda, "Using Partial Evaluation to Enable Verification of Concurrent Software," to appear in ACM Computing Surveys (1998).
[FOX96]	Fox, R.O, "On velocity-conditioned scalar mixing in homogeneous turbulence." Phys. Fluids 8, 2678 (1996).
[GUI97]	Gui, A.A. J.K. Shultis, and R.E. Faw, "Response Functions for Neutron Skyshine Analyses," Nucl. Sci. Engg. 128, 11 (1997).
[JIANG96]	Jiang, S., S. Dasgupta, M. Blanco, R. Frazier, E.S. Yamaguchi, Y. Tang, and W.A. Goddard III, "Structure and Vibrations of Dithiophosphate Wear Inhibitors by Ab Initio Quantum Mechanics and Molecular Mechanics," J. Phys. Chem. 100, 15760 (1996).
[KUER97]	Kuerpick, U., A. Kara, and T.S. Rahman, "The Role of Lattice Vibrations in Atom Diffusion," Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 1086 (1997).
[KARA97]	Kara, A., S. Durukanoglu, and T.S. Rahman, "Vibrational Dynamics and Thermodynamics of Ni(977)," J. Chem. Phys. 106, 2031 (1997).
[KUANG96]	Kuang, J. and C.D. Lin, "Comprehensive convergence tests of two-center AO close-coupling calculations for the excitation and ionization of atomic hydrogen by keV protons," J. Phys. B 29, 5443 (1996).
[KURP96]	Kurpick, P. And U. Thumm, "Basic Matrix Element in Ion Surface-Interactions," Phys. Rev. A 54, 1487 (1996).
[MANN95]	Manna, Z. And A. Pnueli, Temporal Verification of Reactive Systems, Springer-Verlag (1995).
[SMITH94]	Smith, P.E. and B.M. Pettitt, "Modeling solvent in biomolecular systems," J. Phys. Chem. 98, 9700 (1994).
[SMITH96]	Smith, T.R., D. Andresen, L. Carver, R. Dolin, C. Fischer, J. Frew, M. Goodchild, O. Ibarra, R. Kemp, R. Kothuri, M. Larsgaard, B. Manjunath, D. Nebert, J. Simpson, A. Wells, T. Yang, and Q. Zheng, "A Digital Library for Geographically Referenced Materials," IEEE Computer, 29(5), pp. 54-60 (1996). (Note erratum in IEEE Computer, 29(7), p. 14).
[ZAKR96]	Zakrzewski, V.G., O. Dolgounitcheva, and J.V. Ortiz, "Ionization Energies of Anthracene, Phenanthrene, and Naphthacene," J. Chem. Phys. 105, 8748 (1996).

F. Budget Justification

Personnel

Dr. Elizabeth A. Unger, Vice Provost for Academic Services and Technology, will provide administrative oversight for the project at 0.05 FTE basis for 24 calendar months. Harvard Townsend, UNIX and Networking Manager for Computing and Network Services will serve as Co-PI and provide technical and operational management support for the project on a 0.1 FTE basis. Dr. Jeanette Harold, Director of K-State's Information Technology Assistance Center will serve as Co-PI and provide user support to the project on a 0.1 FTE. Total matching funds contribution for salary, wages, and benefits (direct cost) are $46,460. The benefit rate is 27.28%. Matching funds will also pay indirect costs of $21,372 at a rate of 46%.

Equipment

Matching funds in the amount of $25,000 will be used to purchase an ATM switch to support the vBNS connection at the Great Plains Network GigaPoP routing node in Kansas City.

Circuit Costs

Circuit costs for a connection to the vBNS consist of three components: build KANREN's high-speed backbone network and connect K-State to it, connect KANREN's backbone to the Great Plains Network, and connect the Great Plains Network to the vBNS. Kansas State University will pay an estimated $7500 per month in matching funds for the DS-3 circuit in the KANREN backbone necessary to connect the campus to the Great Plains Network and therefore the vBNS. The circuit connecting KANREN to the Great Plains Network is covered for two years by the EPSCoR grant that established the Great Plains Network. Kansas State University will pay for this connectivity after the two-year EPSCoR grant period. This proposal is requesting NSF funds, along with EPSCoR co-funding, to share the costs of the DS-3 circuit to connect the Great Plains Network GigaPoP routing node to the nearest vBNS connection point. The monthly circuit costs from MCI for a DS-3 connection from the Kansas City area to the vBNS connection point in Downer's Grove, IL, are as follows:

Monthly		Installation
Local loop:	$6,367.00	$1,210.00
Backhaul to Chicago:	$19,550.00	$ 0.00
First Year vBNS Circuit Costs:		$312,214
Second Year vBNS Circuit Costs:		$311,004
Total vBNS Circuit Costs:		$623,218

Campus Network Infrastructure Improvements

As part of this project, Kansas State University has committed to upgrade the campus network infrastructure to provide at least switched 10 Mbps ethernet, and in some cases, 100 Mbps ethernet, to the end-users involved in the meritorious research projects. This requires upgrades to our connection to KANREN (100 Mbps full duplex ethernet), upgrades to connections between the core and campus buildings (to at least 100 Mbps full duplex ethernet), and to infrastructures within buildings. Half of the buildings involved in the research projects are already connected at 100 Mbps to the core backbone and therefore require no additional expense. Router interfaces, switches, and modular switch interfaces must be purchased to connect the remaining buildings. Within buildings, a number of locations need new wiring in addition to new network switches. Some locations will require fiber optic cable due to distance limitations. Over the two year grant period, total expected costs of local infrastructure improvements directly associated with the meritorious applications are:

100 Mbps Interface to KANREN router:	$4,000
Connect 3 buildings to backbone @ 100 Mbps:	$27,000
Upgrades within buildings:	$40,000
Total Campus Network Infrastructure Costs:	$71,000

Budget Summary

Cost for which NSF and EPSCoR funds are requested:
vBNS Circuit Costs:	$538,500	(balance of circuit costs in K-State in match)
Indirect Costs:	$11,500	(46% of first $25,000 of circuit sub-contract)
Total Costs:	$550,000

Funding Sources:
NSF Connections to the Internet:	$350,000
EPSCoR Co-Funding request:	$200,000
Total Funding Requested:	$550,000

Matching Expenditures:
Personnel costs:	$46,460
Indirect costs:	$21,372	(46% of salaries and benefits)
Balance of vBNS circuit costs:	$84,718
ATM Switch for vBNS connection at KC:	$25,000
KANREN DS-3 circuit costs:	$180,000	(estimated $7,500 per month for 24 months)
Campus Network Infrastructure upgrades:	$71,000
Total Matching Expenditures:	$428,550

Continuing Commitment Beyond Grant Period

After the two year funding period for the GPN EPSCoR grant and the NSF Connections to the Internet grant, Kansas State University is committed to continuing support and funding for all portions of the project - the local infrastructure, KANREN, the Great Plains Network, and the vBNS connection.

H. Facilities, Equipment and other Resources

Resources available at Kansas State University to perform the proposed project are described in the Network Engineering Plan in section C.3.

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Kansas State University
February 3, 1998