TLC2 has established High-Performance networks serving both its investigators and campus at large. TCCIS, the center that preceded TLC2, through its director successfully acquired NSF funding in 1996 for connecting UH to the NSF national high-speed backbone, the vBNS, and established one of the first national gateways to high-performance national and international computer networks, the Texas GigaPoP jointly with Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine. The Texas GigaPoP has since evolved into the South-East Texas GigaPoP (SETG) with additional members.
The second High-Performance network established by TLC2 was the Distributed Storage Network mentioned above.
The third High-Performance network established by TLC2 is the Research and Education Network of Houston, RENoH, based on dark fiber connecting UH, Rice, and the Texas Medical Center with each other, as well as the state network LEARN and the national high-performance backbone networks, the National Lambda Rail (NLR) and Internet2. RENoH currently has about 500 miles of fiber covering about 22 miles.
Plans are underway to extend this network to the UH Clear Lake campus, NASA, UTMB Galveston and Texas A&M Galveston. This expansion of RENoH is expected to be completed by the end of 2007.
TLC2 has acquired its own AS (Autonomous System) number and its own internet protocol (IP) address range acquired from IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) enabling routing and security policies for research depending on computer networks to be established independent of the needs of campus at large. TLC2 computational, storage and visualization resources are connected to the TLC2 network as are center desktop computers, printers and servers.
|
