February 2004
For Seneca, ORION can't come too soon
Like all 12 members of GTAnet, Seneca College can't wait to get connected. Seneca currently has a maximum bandwidth connection to CA*net 4 of only 35Mb, which is shared among many users.
"We have projects that we have been doing over the past few years that have been constrained by the lack of bandwidth," said Terry Verity, Seneca's Chief Information Officer. "We also have other research projects that have been proposed which are even better proposals when we factor in broadband connectivity."
Seneca has been very active in putting forward proposals to access grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Ontario Innovation Trust (OIT).
"We have very active proposals in place around grid computing and object repositories," said Verity. "We have two projects underway with CANARIE: one is the Bell project which involves an infrastructure across Canada to build standards for object repositories, which fits nicely with another current proposal which focuses more on developing local object repositories using both proprietary and open source software."
"We also began a collaboration with the Hospital for Sick Children in bioinformatics and molecular level research using distributed processing," said Hassan Assiri, Manager of Academic Computing Systems at Seneca. "This collaboration was expanded to include York University. The collaboration started off as pure research and has become part of the courses that we offer to bio-chemistry students at Seneca and York."
The data being created at the Hospital for sick Children involves tens of gigabits of information that has to be transferred back and forth between the hospital and students, often taking as much as 12 hours to move the data back and forth and another day to analyse the information. With gigabit connectivity, the transfer will be almost instantaneous.
The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto runs a supercomputing resource called the Ontario Centre for Genomic Computing (OCGC), Canada's largest genomics supercomputer. Chip Campbell, Technical Director of the Centre for Computational Biology at The Hospital for Sick Children explains that limited bandwidth access to the hospital's genomics supercomputer meant that students and researchers could only perform relatively simple tasks and retrieve simple results.
"It's because of the ORION initiative that we are able to get GTAnet built and take advantage of connections to institutions such as York University and Sick Children's Hospital" added Verity.
"We also have a very good school of communication and media arts at Seneca," said Verity. "One of the very interesting things that we have done is partner with the University of Calgary to actually build and move through the network "sets" for television production."
Seneca students in Toronto digitally create a three dimensional virtual environment, explained Assiri. "Live video of an actor performing in front of a blue screen is sent to us from Calgary. Our students superimpose the actor into the 3-D environment they created and transmit the composite video back to an audience in Calgary, theoretically in real time so that the audio and video remain relatively in sync to sell the illusion of an actor performing in our 3-D digital environment.
"With current bandwidth limitations we were experiencing anywhere from five-second to five-minute delays where only a split second delay was acceptable" added Assiri. "Without GTAnet we would continue to be limited as to how far we can push the envelope."
Seneca is also looking to ORION to provide strong international connections to Europe and Asia.
"We are intent and have been working on building campuses in China," said Verity. "To connect academic content from those campuses back to our home campuses will be an important part of management and of moving curriculum to those locations. Our vice-president international is in China as we speak working on final contracts for a campus in Beijing. Once that campus is open, we know we will need high-speed connectivity between that campus in Beijing and here in Toronto."
"High speed networks take us into global markets, added Assiri."
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