The University of California, Berkeley oversees The Interactive University Project, a campus and community collaboration to identify how the University can use the Internet to provide community service. The EECS Department actively participates as an Interactive University Partner. Community Partners include the Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and West Contra Costa Unified School Districts, and community based organizations and public libraries in Oakland. The campus is also a Charter Member University of the Internet2 Consortium, and has received government funding to establish a local Internet2 point-of-presence in the East Bay. The EECS Department is working with the campus Information Systems and Technologies office to deploy advanced classroom applications and curriculum materials on the Internet2 infrastructure.
The EECS Department has a long history of innovative development of research infrastructure, spanning both hardware and software, and leveraging extensive support from major industrial collaborators. The Department houses the best academic microelectronics fabrication facility in the nation. This class 100 cleanroom laboratory was first estab-lished in the early 1960s. The laboratory supports, among other activities, the pioneering Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC), a leading Government- and Industry-funded cooperative research center founded in 1986. BSAC is devoted to research on sensors and miniature moving mechanical elements (Co-Principal Investigator Kristopher Pister is an Associate Director of BSAC).
As a leading department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Berkeley has traditionally been in the vanguard of using advanced computing and networking for its research and teaching. It currently manages a network with over 2000 IP addresses, inter-connected to shared servers via a variety of 10BaseT and 100BaseT subnetworks span-ning the Department's two buildings (Soda and Cory Halls). Led by Co-Principal Investigator David Culler, the Department is deploying a next generation research computing and communications infrastructure called Millennium. Millennium extends the network of workstations (NOW) cluster concept to a geographic distribution across the Berkeley campus, placing this technology in the hands of computational scientists and engineers. When completed, over 1000 Intel-donated Merced-class PCs and Symmetric Multiprocessors (Clusters of Multiprocessors, or CLUMPS), as well as attached interaction and visualization workstations and devices, will be linked by campus-area gigabit Ethernet donated by NorTel Networks. The ma-chines will run a mixture of Microsoft Windows/NT and PC-based UNIX software. The infrastructure provides an unprecedented testbed for research in large-scale systems design, networking, programming languages, numerical methods, visualization, user interfaces, and computational economies, driven by the simulation and modeling applications of real users.
Supporting this unique, distributed and scalable computational resource available to the project team, are comparably large and scalable storage facilities. Co-Principal Investi-gator David Patterson leads the DARPA-funded Tertiary Disk and Intelligent Storage (iStore) Projects. The Tertiary Disk prototype, currently hosting the complete web image collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , consists of twenty Intel-donated clustered PCs on a 100 Mbps Ethernet switch, hosting 370 IBM-donated 8GB disks. Supporting Co-Principal Investigator Robert Wilensky's Digital Library Project is a large-scale multi-terabyte tape-based storage server donated by IBM.
Under the direction of Principal Investigator Randy Katz and Co-Principal Investigator Anthony Joseph, the Department maintains an extensive wireless network testbed con-sisting of a GSM Base Transceiver System (BTS) donated by Ericsson Radio Systems, a Motorola-donated REFLEX two-way paging basestation, and a Lucent WaveLAN wire-less network covering Soda Hall. Discussions are in progress with AT&T and Motorola to extend this testbed with additional wireless and wired access technology, such as MMDS and cable modems, to provide broadband access to faculty and student homes.
Several members of the expedition team (Brewer, Culler, Joseph, Katz,
Landay) are working with IBM Corporation to deploy a "Post-PC"
infrastructure in Soda Hall, con-sisting of donated IBM WorkPad PalmPilots,
serial docking stations throughout the building, wireless access via the
Metricom Packet Radio Network in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a software
infrastructure for secure and distributed hot synchronization, community
applications like shared calendaring and note-taking, and new user interfaces
for palm-sized devices.
Every classroom in Cory and Soda Halls is equipped with network connectivity
and computer projection. Several rooms in Soda Hall have been configured
as first generation "smart spaces," with complete computer-based
and network-connected control of light-ing, audio/video equipment, large-scale
displays and liveboards, and tracking cameras.
A key element of this comprehensive infrastructure is the development of a common, compatible set of NT and Unix software utilities. This effort is based on our previous work on the software warehouse (SWW). It establishes a software baseline for the community, reduces the complexity of system administration, and simplifies the environment.
Randy H. Katz, 17 July 1999, randy@cs.Berkeley.edu