* University of Illinois about to launch center with ‘smart’ technologies
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is about to cut the ribbon on an ambitious “smart building” project, jam-packed with advanced technologies.
Scheduled to open in late April, the Siebel Center will use a whole lot of network equipment from Foundry Networks to support, as the center’s Web site says, “the latest technology for mobile computing, distributed collaboration and intelligent interaction.”
The center is taking networking to an extreme. Computers will be embedded in offices and labs, of course – but also in doors, wearable devices, streaming multimedia systems and microelectromechanical systems. And it’s all to be hooked into the network.
There will be thousands of multimedia appliances on the network, and hundreds of desktop PCs will have Gigabit Ethernet connections. All of the classrooms in the center will have capabilities for wireless networking and for digitally capturing audio and video. There are also expected to be HDTV displays and “intelligent whiteboards” in the classrooms as well.
The Siebel Center’s network is supposed to be aware of your movements as well. Says the site: “Imagine entering your office and having your cell phone conversation shift automatically to your wall-sized video display.”
Rather than focus on specific applications ahead of time, however, there is a sense that the ubiquitous network capabilities are there largely as a catalyst for new uses for networking.
The 225,000-square-foot building will be used by as many as 2,000 undergraduate and graduate computer science students, plus 100 faculty and researchers.
The building network will use Foundry’s FastIron 1500 Layer 2/3 switches and ServerIron Layer 4-7 switches to give folks access to information at any time. The FastIrons will be used in wiring closets, and the ServerIrons will perform load balancing and security.
The manager of systems services for computer science, Chuck Thompson, is quoted on the center’s Web site as saying flexibility, scalability, reliability and price were among the criteria for choosing the equipment.
