The aims of this supplement are to provide fast, reliable intranet and Internet services to link the science faculty and students across campus, and to provide faculty and students with essential training and support in use of these services. A fault-tolerant, scaleable, load balanced, and configurable system has been designed to provide the necessary infrastructure. These characteristics will be assured through multiple DSL lines, and a wide-area network (WAN) for the science community via a gigabit-over-copper backbone (to be furnished by the university) plus wireless (802.11 b) connections to more remote buildings on campus. A two-level help desk system will be implemented to train and support students and faculty, while at the same time providing work experience for computer science students. In addition to providing all science faculty and students with basic Internet and file sharing capabilities, the system will enable use of live Internet in class, computer-mediated instruction and testing, and access to campus resources such as the RISE servers and the library (e.g., online journals). Internet capabilities at U. Guam are limited by bandwidth (11/2 Tl lines total, or ~2250K bps) and unreliable connections through the Computer Center proxy servers. The network connecting the various college LAN's to allow them to access the leased-line Internet connection from the Computer Center is a mixture of fiber loops and point-to-point connections between the computer center and some colleges. The capacity of the current infrastructure is insufficient to provide the bandwidth-intensive services being developed including those in the RISE program IT classroom. Security concerns with the present mixed administrative/academic computing prevent file sharing between buildings. The present system is very prone to failure, and email and Internet services are frequently unavailable; most students and faculty do not have effective access to the Internet from campus; this is a serious impediment to the training goals of the RISE program and the research (including SCORE) projects at UOG. Project objectives, specified in measurable terms and evaluation questions, will be tracked through to allow evidence-based decision-making on the future development of the campus network. The infrastructure and the support service will serve as a model for further development of a proposed campus-wide Academic Computing Services, and the network can be reconfigured to integrate fully with the university system beyond the end of the grant period. The system is a novel solution to our unusual circumstances, and has been reviewed by Cisco-trained engineers.
