Building Cyberlearning Infrastructure Across Large Sparsely Populated Spaces. Ray Ford 1, Jacqueline Brown 2

Transcription

1 Distance Learning and the Internet Conference Building Cyberlearning Infrastructure Across Large Sparsely Populated Spaces Ray Ford 1, Jacqueline Brown 2 1 IT Office, University of Montana, 2 IT Office, University of Washington ray.ford@umontana.edu, jbrown@cac.washington.edu Abstract This paper addresses the challenges of building cyberlearning infrastructure across large, sparsely populated distances in the American northwest. Although its northwest Pacific coast of the US is densely populated, it is bordered to the east by remote, sparsely populated regions. In the populous coastal area Seattle is home to various network interconnections between the US and Pacific Rim countries, and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop serves as a major US hub connecting US with international research and education networks. Immediately east of Seattle and extending for over 1500 kilometers lies a rugged, mountainous terrain with very low population density, representing an area very difficult to serve with any kind of networking. The state of Montana is in the middle of this region -- roughly the same size as California or Japan, but with fewer than one million people vs. California s over 36 million, Japan s over 127 million. The vast area, rough terrain, and sparse population present significant obstacles to the effective local deployment of the modern optical networks that are the key to building and sustaining cyberlearning infrastructure. Educational entities in Montana and the region have combined with the Pacific Northwest Gigapop to develop a core sustainable network to overcome the geographic obstacles and provide the required base into and across the region. Deployment of the network is now underway. When complete it will support the development of cyber technologies that support general education programs, but also help train and support education and health care professionals, sustain educational missions unique to remote regions, and facilitate the development of e-resources unique to the region for e-export to the rest of the world. Keywords Northern Tier network, cyberinfrastructure, cyberlearning, Pacific Northwest Gigapop 1 Population Density Challenge Building network connectivity between the west coast of the United States and the north central region of the US (the so-called US Northern Tier ) highlights the challenges faced in many regions and countries in providing core network infrastructure in sparsely populated regions, across large areas characterized by unfriendly geography such as mountains and desserts. Seattle, in Washington state, is a well known international network hub for connections between the Pacific Rim and the US. The Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) in Seattle provides the connection points between research and education networks in America and comparable networks in countries in the Pacific Rim and around the world. It also serves American research and education entities in US states from Hawaii in the west to Alaska in the north to Montana in the east. Figure 1: PNWGP Network Links Immediately to the east of the coastal area around Seattle begins very challenging geography, with increasingly sparse population. The geography is dominated by one mountain range which includes active volcanoes, such as Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens, plus two other distinct ranges that provide natural barriers to transportation and communication. 241

2 Session 9 Infrastructure for Cyber Learning In between the mountain ranges lie high arid plains and plateaus, including large areas that are capable of supporting agriculture only with extensive irrigation. As the US was settled in the 1800 s with massive immigration from both the east and the west, these geographic barriers left this area as one of the last to be developed. Outside of the sub-artic areas in Alaska, the Northern Tier region remains one of the most remote and sparsely populated areas in the US. As shown in Figure 2, Montana is in the middle of this Northern Tier area, bordered by Canada to the north, the US states Idaho to the west and south, Wyoming to the south, and North and South Dakota to the east. Relatively high population density along the Pacific coast in the Seattle area decreases steadily as one moves eastward, and reaches a low point in the Northern Tier region. Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming rank 44 th, 39 th, 48 th, 46 th, and 50 th among the 50 American states in terms of overall population, and 48 th, 44 th, 47 th, 46 th, and 49 th in terms of density. Collectively these five (out of 50) states contribute over 12% of the US land mass, but just a little over 1% of its people. Figure 2: Montana and the Region Montana ranks fourth in size in US states, behind Alaska, Texas, and California. Its western border is about 560 km east of Seattle, it is nearly 1100 km miles from west to east and 450 km from south to north. It encloses an area of over 381,000 square kilometers, but with relatively few people. To put this into context, Montana is roughly the same size as California or Japan, but Montana contains fewer than one million people, vs. California s 36.6 million or Japan s million. This results in orders of magnitude differences in population density, with Montana at 2.5 people per square kilometer, California at 90.5, and Japan at 337. Though persons per square kilometer is the traditional measure of population density, the inverse, square kilometers per person, is useful in highlighting the challenges faced in building effective cyberinfrastructure and cyberlearning environments. That is, once an appropriate network infrastructure is in place the cost of delivering educational programs over that infrastructure is relatively insensitive to area and distance. Creating and sustaining the base infrastructure, whether through copper, fiber, or wireless technology, is the challenge. This is very capital intensive, with costs largely a function of the area covered. Any business model oriented toward sustaining such a network is largely based on the number of potential users of the network. Whether through consumer activity, taxes, or a combination of the two, the area per person measure provides a good, intuitive measure of the burden, and hence the challenge, that falls on the individual in sparsely populated areas. The square kilometers per person numbers are 3.99 for Montana, for California, and for Japan. The implication of population density stated this way is that each individual in Montana carries the burden to support almost 4 square kilometers of cyberinfrastructure, vs for an individual in California, for an individual Japan. Montana, California, and Japan all share geographic challenges imposed by mountains and other natural obstacles, so the primary differences come from population density. And again note that there are order of magnitude differences, not just linear differences, between densely and sparsely populated areas. The differences stemming from population density are much more telling than artificial labels such as developed countries or developing countries. Technology is ever advancing, and the implementation of new technology always requires capital investment. The larger the area, the more technology required for coverage; the smaller the population, the fewer people available to generate economic activity to pay for that technology. 2 Specific Infrastructure Challenges In the document Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21 st Century Discovery the US National Science Foundation lists the following as the foundational elements of cyberinfrastructure: access to high performance computing; access to data, data analysis, and visualization; support for virtual organizations; and opportunities and support for learning and workforce development. While the emphasis in the NSF report is on scientific discovery in general and the research base for scientific discovery in particular, a broader look at the needs of a cyberlearning environment produces quite similar results. Support for virtual organizations and specific learning technologies remain at the core. Access to data, data analysis, and visualization, along with the computation to support this data manipulation take a more secondary role they are less the 242

3 Distance Learning and the Internet Conference 2008 end and more often the means to the end but they are still critically important. The net result is that access to the high speed networking which can make access to all these elements distance insensitive is the key both to the NSF s vision for cyberinfrastructure and any viable cyberlearning environment. The obstacles to be faced in building the base for cyberlearning in low population density areas such as Montana are obvious high startup costs for the construction and support of the networking base across a large area, a relatively low population base to share those costs, resulting in a very high per person initial and on-going investment. In the absence of outside investment or funding from other sources, such as federal government subsidy, sparsely populated regions find it difficult to build the base which can support the distance education technologies. The irony here is that these are also exactly the areas where effective distance delivery of educational programs and general support for cyberlearning are touted as being the answer to effective education. That might well be the case, but coming up with the initial investment to make them possible at all, and sustaining this investment on an on-going basis is a major challenge. 3 Northern Tier Network Consortium The Northern Tier Networking Consortium (www. ntnc.org) was created by research and educational institutions in the US Northern Tier to address this infrastructure challenge. The NTNC has as its primary goal the extension of high speed networking into the Northern Tier, specifically to lower the costs of connecting research and educational entities in the northern tier to national and international research and education networks. In that sense the NTNC effort is similar to dozens of other efforts which seek to bring high speed networking links into an area, to support the hierarchical build out of lower speed connections to reach even the most remote areas. The specific geographic challenge is depicted in Figure 3. The Pacific Northwest Gigapop in Seattle provides a national/international anchor point in the northwest US, but there are essentially no links going into the US Northern Tier region from national networks, from any direction west, south, east, or north. From this map one can envision trying to address the problem by building dead ended spur lines heading into the region from several different connection points, the idea being to serve the area with a collection of such links, each one being as short as possible. But there are key lessons to be learned from the geography and earlier history in the development of and support for transportation and communication systems that have lead the NTNC developers to take a broader view. Figure 3: US Research & Education Network Footprint Montana is an especially interesting part of the US Northern Tier because it is a large area, it contains those points that are more or less equidistance from major research and education network connection points Seattle in the west, Salt Lake City, Denver, or Kansas City to the south, and Minneapolis in the east, and also because its mountain ranges and high plateaus have always limited both east/west and north/ south transportation and communication. Montana s mountain ranges form part of the North American continental divide rivers to the west of this range flow to the Pacific Ocean, rivers to the east flow to the Atlantic Ocean. When networks of waterways formed the primary means of transportation, Montana s rivers starting in the mountains and flowing to more populated areas represented the dead end trunks analogous to what one might design in the simplest networks. The primary lesson learned from experience with prior transportation and communication systems is this: areas that connect multiple links prosper the most, areas that have at least pass through links prosper enough to be viable long term, but areas served only by dead ends always have to struggle to survive. What was true with earlier transportation and communication networks remains equally true today with data networks. Dead ended network links are difficult to maintain, whereas pass-through networks can be built as parts of rings and loops, with all the inherent advantages those bring. From the beginning the goal of the NTNC was not just to bring high speed networking into the Northern Tier, but to connect networking through the Northern Tier to the greatest extent possible. Just as canal builders sought to overcome the dead-end points of natural waterway networks, the data network builders in the Northern Tier have sought to build out their networks not just to reach sparsely populated areas, but to connect through them. In terms of US geography, the goal has been not to build dead ended spurs, but instead to build the Northern Tier plan all the way west/east from Seattle to Chicago, complemented by 243

4 Session 9 Infrastructure for Cyber Learning north/south connections between research and education connection points in Canada and those in the US, such as Salt Lake City, Denver, and Kansas City. The result is the network sketched in Figure 4, with multiple links to fill in the Northern Tier void shown earlier. Figure 4: Northern Tier Network Plan The good news is that after several years of work various parts of the network shown in Figure 4 are now reaching completion. The east/west route is partially complete, with the rest in construction. Several of the north/south links are now in the construction or planning stages. Working west from Seattle, the span across the state of Washington is now operational. Working east from Chicago, a ring is now operational through Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minneapolis. To complete the east/west path the links across Idaho and Montana, and across North Dakota are now being built. Two southern links to Kansas City are now operational, with additional links in planning. Multiple international links to Canada are now being planned. In general these are fiber-based DWDM build outs, which offer the potential to support multiple 10Gbps or higher speed collections of connections. Most significantly, this build out has resulted not from the infusion of a massive amount of US federal funding, but rather from the collective contributions of the research and education entities across the region. The specific reason that institutions have made these investments is to bootstrap the development of the network infrastructure, to support follow on investment in cyberinfrastructure and cyberlearning environments. 4 Cyberlearning Subnetworks Once the primary pass through trunks are established and viable, the emphasis shifts to delivering connectivity and building cyberlearning environments between individual educational sites, at bandwidth levels appropriate to the mission of those sites. The target sites obviously include all university campuses, but in sparsely populated areas other types of sites are also critically important. First, primary and secondary school sites are obvious focus points for education beyond the children they are designed to serve, i.e., for on-going teacher training and adult education programs. Second, because many people who seek initial and on-going education live too far from cities to make commuting a viable option, education delivery to the home is important. Third, because of the special on-going training their staff require, health care facilities in sparsely populated areas often become a de facto educational sites. Finally, the rural, agricultural and historical context of western US states adds other very important types of sites to the mix. Thus, bandwidth needs vary from multiple 10Gbps connection at the primary research universities, all the way down to consumer broadband in the Mbps range. Figure 5: Montana Education and Health Care Subnetwork Using Montana as an example, Figure 5 shows many of the subnetworks of interest in a typical Northern Tier state. It starts with the eight campuses of the Montana University System. As shown earlier, research campuses in Missoula and Bozeman are on the primary Northern Tier network, connected to the outside world via one or more 10Gbps links. Missoula and Bozeman act as aggregation points for the other MUS campuses, with connections currently being upgraded to wide area managed Ethernet capability at the 100Mbps or 1Gbps level. Also included are in Figure 5 are links common in US states with extensive agriculture, those to agricultural experiment and service stations which are an extension of the university campus in Bozeman. These agricultural stations represent important agricultural education access points for those individuals involved in ranching and farming throughout the state. The final collection of links shown are new high speed (1Gbps-10Gbps) connections now in development to link a portion of Montana s rural health care providers together, to the university campus in Missoula, and to the Northern 244

5 Distance Learning and the Internet Conference 2008 Tier network. Figure 6: Montana Tribal College Subnetwork Figure 6 outlines an additional subnetwork that is a key part of the educational system in Montana and other western US states, as well as in place or emerging in other countries: a system of institutions designed specifically to serve indigenous peoples, i.e., what are referred to in the US as tribal colleges serving Native Americans. In addition to providing general educational programs in what have historically been very remote areas, tribal colleges play an important role in helping to preserve the cultural base and native traditions and languages of indigenous peoples. The roles of Tribal Colleges and other similar institutions in the American west, and the specific challenges to be faced in supporting cyberlearning for such institutions is described in detail in a white paper on the topic, Can You Hear Us Now? Development of this subnetwork in Montana is now in progress based on efforts of the Tribal Colleges, public agencies, and commercial providers. 5 Cyberlearning Focus The primary networking goal in the Northern Tier is to build the base infrastructure to permit the development of the cyberinfrastructure and cyberlearning environment to allow researchers, students, and practicioners to connect to peers and peer institutions in the state, across the US, and throughout the world. The in-state subnetworks connect to the Northern Tier trunks, which are connected through PNWGP in Seattle, from which PNWGP connects to the rest of the US, the Pacific Rim, and elsewhere around the world. Unlike commercial networks this is not a capability built with targeted funds to serve a specific commercial market. And unlike other research and education networks this is not designed to serve only a narrow purpose. Rather the Northern Tier network is designed to serve the full range of research and educational purposes, from local to national to international in scope. That said, beyond this general focus there are several very important cyberlearning areas which are particularly important in the Northern Tier. Already mentioned above are the important agricultural support roles of the agricultural stations and the cultural support role of the tribal colleges. Beyond that are two very important broad missions the preparation, training, and on-going support of teachers and health care professionals. Though it maintains active cooperative programs with other states for teacher education, the Montana University System is well positioned to support the preparation of its own teachers, with teacher education being a part of the curriculum at five of its eight campuses. On-going support of teachers once they are placed in the region, and to a great degree isolated within that region, is another matter. A primary goal in developing the network is to support the cyberlearning environment that helps lessen the isolation that both teachers and students feel in these sparsely populated areas. For health care training, the Montana situation is mixed, typical of many sparsely populated US states, and many countries. The Montana University System supports a variety of nursing, lab tech, and other similar programs. Despite a reasonable production of this level of professionals, demand consistently exceeds supply. Montana has no medical school. In fact, there is only one medical school in the entire region, in Grand Forks, North Dakota on the far eastern edge of the Northern Tier. Because of the distances involved, the closest medical schools are in population centers to the west in Seattle (University of Washington) and south in Salt Lake City (University of Utah). As might be expected, with no local training facility there is a chronic shortage of doctors in the region. And as also might be expected from the sparse population, scarcity of training facilities and health care professionals, limit primary care medical facilities in the region to the major population centers (cities between 10,000 and people) often many located 150 kilometers or more from other such centers. Cooperative programs have long been in place to train and support doctors and other health care professionals in this geographical context. By far the most important such program for training doctors in the region is WWAMI, a cooperative program between Northern Tier states and the University of Washington (the parent of PNWGP). This program guarantees a certain number of places in the University of Washington medical school for Northern Tier region students, and allows them to take the equivalent of their first year of medical school in residence at their home campus in the Northern Tier. It is critical to maximize the amount of training such students can receive in the region, because the longer students are removed from the region for training, the less likely they are to return after they complete their training. 245

6 Session 9 Infrastructure for Cyber Learning A very specific goal of the enhanced cyberlearning environment is to allow the WWAMI program and other similar programs to be expanded to provide more and better initial training of health care professionals, and to expand into on-going training to support these professionals once they are in place. A cyberlearning environment that would allow students to receive the bulk of their medical training at home is a key goal. The PNWGP plays a very important role in helping support the WWAMI program, and more generally helping the University of Washington Medical School push its cyberlearning environment outward to outlying regions. Through advanced networking and unique program offerings such as those provided by its Research Channel, PNWGP has paved the way for the development and support of the facilities required by WWAMI and other training programs. Finally, through recent action the US government has begun to make large amounts of funding available to enhance rural health care. Montana and other Northern Tier states have been the recent recipients of millions of dollars targeted for the development of networking infrastructure. The health care infrastructure will also be enhanced by the availability of the Northern Tier core network. Figure 4 shows the network expansions currently planned to supplement the existing educational network. 6 Cyberinfrastructure Resources Beyond being the base to allow e-expertise to be imported from more populous areas, a goal of the Northern Tier network is to allow e-resources unique to the Northern Tier to be developed and exported to the county and the world. As home to internationally prominent national parks and wilderness areas, notably the US s Yellowstone, Mount Rainer, Mount Saint Helens, and Glacier National Parks, the area offers large areas relatively undisturbed by human development. These areas provide critical baseline data sources for the study of climate change, global warming, volcanic action, high mountain watersheds, the lifecycle and recovery from near extinction of animals such as the wolf and grizzly bear, and many other similar natural phenomena. A number of projects are already underway which involve embedding large sensor grids in these natural systems. With the availability of the Northern Tier network data collected from these sensors can be made available across the network outside the region. 7 Summary Major portions of the US share the same cyberlearning challenges as other countries around the world, the difficulty of building the required network infrastructure in sparsely populated areas, traditionally isolated due to geography. And like in other countries, federal funding is not always available to overcome these limitations. The US Northern Tier has successfully adopted the approach of putting consortium funding together to build the infrastructure, and to build it not just into but through the region to provide what should be a more viable long term network infrastructure. References Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21 st Century Discovery. National Science Foundation [see Can You Hear Us Now? A White Paper on Connecting Minority-Serving Institutions in the West to U.S. Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. Lariat Summit on Minority Institutions and Cyberinfrastructure in the West, Bozeman, Montana. August [see 246