Round 4
Dec 2000
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Office of the Provost
Compact Plan
Part Two: Initiatives
A. Initiatives Supporting University Goals
University Goal: Advancing Areas of Academic Thrust: IT and Networking
4. Advance Open Source Academic Computing Environment
What will be achieved, how, and why it is important to the university
ITD and the Provost's IT Advisory Committee has proposed that NC State adopt open source as a strategic direction for academic computing. As part of this initiative, which is already in progress, NC State will
· Promote, integrate, and develop open source solutions. Early in 2000, we will make media announcements that embrace the compelling global significance of the open source philosophy. We have begun refocusing a portion of the Eos/Unity (NC State Engineering and ITD) resources to develop open source applications.
· Add Linux (an open-source operating system) as a supported desktop choice at NC State. Although two years from being a reasonable prime-time choice, we will launch self-selected pilots to position ourselves for the expected emergence of Linux as a competitive desktop operating system
· Pursue industry partnerships, thereby spreading risks, bringing in additional resources, and expanding the influence and collaborations of the university.
Open source is both a business model and a philosophy. Open source applications provide software binaries plus source code and a license agreement which allows user modification and redistribution. As a business model, open source
· Empowers understanding-users may fix, modify, and adapt the software code
· Overcomes intellectual property barriers, accelerating the creation and propagation of innovation, promoting convergence around superior technology solutions, and lowering development cost
· Creates unifying pressure toward "open" standards
· Fosters better security, reliability, and responsiveness.
Open source is not a product. It is a philosophy, a way of thinking and acting that is consistent with our traditional land grant and higher education values. The open source philosophy advocates
· Collaboration and community, the free flow of ideas, peer reviews, customer participation
· Ubiquitous access and opportunity, which helps mitigate the have/have not dilemma
· Openness, which increases value. (We should rethink some of our internal development strategies in light of this fact).
We see open source as an inevitability. It is part of a significant paradigm shift underway in information technology-from the legacy proprietary model, which is monolithic and vertically integrated, to an emerging open model, which is dispersed and horizontally integrated.
Many forces operating nationally and globally drive this change:
· Ubiquity of the Internet, which enables collaboration across borders
· Maturation of the idea of open source and open standards
· Capitalization and investments in open source-based endeavors
· Push of technology
· Pull of market demand
· Movements to corral Microsoft.
The initiative will be implemented in several phases. The first phase has begun with the College of Engineering's pilot Realm/Linux project, with Linux running as the operating system (OS) on Intel-based computers in a COE student computer lab. Members of the ITD systems group are participating in this pilot project as advisors and programmers. The Linux OS will have applications native to it-plus a Virtual Machine Environment which can host another OS, such as NT, and applications that will not (as yet) run on Linux.
Another aspect of the open source initiative in its first phase is NC State participation in IBM's international System/390 Linux Research project. UNC-General Administration (UNC-GA), North Carolina's state Information Technology Services (ITS) are also contributing to this project. ITD and IBM expect to announce the finalized partnership agreement in October, 2000.
The NC State Linux S/390 is configured with 2.1 terabytes (over 2 trillion bytes) of disk storage and 5 gigabytes (over 5 billion bytes) of main memory. Maintenance, all S/390 software, and the hardware allowing for the interface with existing ITS and/or NC State's Administrative Computing Services' existing S/390 machines are included in the agreement. This advanced technology project opens up the possibility of combining the computing power and stability of a mainframe with the availability and ease of application development of the Linux platform.
The NC State S/390 Linux Project includes six areas of concurrent development, any one of which, if successful, would quickly pay for the investment many times over.
(1) Integrating the Linux S/390 as an enterprise file server into the university's AFS distributed computing system.
(2) Using Linux S/390, a single user-friendly GUI interface and very fast network connections to deliver applications to "thin desktops' in labs and offices.
(3) Consolidating server machines by using the Linux S/390 to run some services currently provided on individual servers. This would reduce the number of servers (over 200 machines now) and improve performance, manageability and operational efficiency.
(4) Maintaining an OS390 MVS partition in parallel with the dominant Linux use so that existing administrative computing applications could be run in an environment where they could be migrated to Linux over time.
(5) Forming partnerships with vendors to convert key applications to run on the Linux S/390. These efforts would include Remedy (campus-wide problem tracking system), Resonate (Web distribution technology) and essential discipline-specific applications used in teaching and learning.
(6) Using Linux S/390 as a delivery platform for mission critical services such as distance education.
NC State faculty, staff, and students will be participating in this project.
Impact or outcomes for students, faculty, staff, external clients or others
The open source initiative will
· Position NC State as a technology leader without crippling basic productivity
· Create transforming opportunities for technology users without requiring them to become experts
· Raise the bar of technology excellence without disenfranchising constituents or compromising academic freedom
· Embrace diverse objectives without imposing undue financial and support burdens.
As we interpret technology trends, it is not a question of whether or not NC State will move to open source technologies, but rather when we will make this decision. There are those who argue that it would be prudent for NC State to be a follower of mainstream technology trends. Our position is that it is more prudent to be proactive. By adopting open source as a strategic direction for our university, we can differentiate ourselves in the educational marketplace and enhance our reputation among peer institutions. Instead of a mindset of managing scarcity, this initiative can create more opportunities for all our colleges-in student and faculty recruitment, in partnerships and grants, and in expertise in emerging technology developments.
The open source strategy can also be a source of additional resources for NC State. We anticipate additional funds and expertise as we negotiate partnerships with corporate technology leaders in the open source movement who are seeking an educational arena for software development and integration and the development of a competitive desktop environment. NC State can offer these partners a highly visible showcase site which can provide promotion by example-an innovative and exemplary higher education model, ambitious for excellence.
This is not a "technology for technology's sake" initiative. If NC State is to remain a premier science and technology institution, this banner must apply to all disciplines. Technology has become pervasive and critical to the success of students in all disciplines-from Agriculture to Veterinary Medicine. However, our business as an institution is not in student training, but in helping students learn higher order conceptual understanding, critical thinking and problem solving. We believe that the open source model, which promotes collaboration and innovation, is better than the proprietary model for empowering our students to be adaptive in a rapidly changing environment. This is the sort of technology education that can be truly transformative to North Carolina, whether our students choose to work in a high-tech urban center or rural regions of our state.
Resources needed
No newly appropriated funds are being requested to support this initiative. This initiative is first and foremost a statement of direction and is intended to serve as a guideline for making strategic IT decisions. ITD is charged with planning, implementing, and supporting the university's academic IT interests and environment. This will continue both in terms of the more pragmatic commodity strategies and the development and positioning of future strategies. Beyond this, external funding will be sought to support several major new initiatives. Their execution will be dependent on obtaining these funds.
Deliverables
· Implement Phase One of open-source initiative (in progress)
· Further develop new goals and programs that advance the stated principles in adopting the open source strategy (Spring 2001)