At a BOF session at the Joint Techs Conference held on July 21st at the University of Nebraska, Alan Whinery of UH-ITS pointed out how difficult a problem it is to understand TCP/IP high performance networks over long distances. He also pointed out how inadequate our current testing infrastructure is. Toward this end -- through ours and Alan's efforts -- we now have measurement servers on the Summit, at the IfA Hilo building, the IfA Manoa facilities, the CFHT Waimea facility, and the Mauna Lani network equipment room.
It was decided that we will start with putting warning signs at HP to alert visitors to UH's policy on copyright infringement. Also each observatory will inform their observers of the policy.
In order to proceed, Pui Hin asked each observatory to send her information on what they want from the vendor, including the type of fibers, number of strands, connectors at their end of the fiber; and anything else they might need from the vendor such as fiber panel, inner-duct etc. Facilities can elect to make changes to their specifications during the vendors' site visits, but they will need to be careful to communcate the same requests to all the vendors in order to obtain three comparable quotes as required by UH procurement procedures.
Following are points that were brought up during our discussions of the budgetary quotes:
Do we want the fiber to be able to support 10 gigabit bandwidth and beyond?
Standard 50um MMF will support 10Gig up to 300M -- with the exception of Gemini, all the facilities are within the limit.
Premium 50um MMF (aka: LOMMF) will support up to 550M -- cost is a little higher than SMF.