Design and Implementation of an Ubiquitous High Speed Communication Utility for
John C. Y. Leong · 1986
CMU is a small private university with roughly 5,500 students and 1,500 faculty and staff. Computing has played a significant role for all departments - from the traditional multidiscipline academic and research computing to administrative support functions. Within the past 5 years, the computing environment at CMU has been undergoing major evolution from the central data center model to one of distributed processing. In 1982, CMU's commitment to distributed computing was formalised with the commencement of a joint project with IBM. An important aspect of the project is to provide the campus with a comprehensive and saturating network utility of more than 10,000 high speed communication ports. This paper describes how we are migrating from the existing situation towards the provision of a ubiquitous, high performance network utility which is resilient to technological changes for the campus. It addresses the issues of local area networking technologies, communication protocols, LAN interconnections and cable plant selection.