Summer Workshop on Network Design and Operations an International Success
The University of Oregon's Network Resource Startup Center in partnership with the CIS Department recently held a weeklong Workshop on Campus Network Design and Operations. This intensive hands-on course was attended by an international group of students that included network engineers and operators from Africa and South Asia, as well as undergraduate computer science majors from China and the University of Oregon.
The summer workshop was taught by staff from the NSRC (www.nsrc.org) and UO Information Services as part of the NSRC's mission to help develop and deploy networking technology throughout Asia/Pacific, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the New Independent States. NSRC Director Steve Huter and Network Services Director Dale Smith saw an opportunity to offer their training workshop series to CIS majors through UO's Summer School program. Invitations to the summer networking workshop were also extended to students from Tsinghua and Peking Universities in China as part of the CIS department's partnership with Pacific Rim universities through the CPATHi18n project (www.cpathi18n.org).
The students met from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. for six days and immersed themselves in lectures and team-based lab exercises that covered both principles and practical skills needed in the deployment of a campus-wide computing network. Topics ranged from physical cabling, switching architectures, routing, and network management to core and border network designs and effective interconnection methodologies. See www.nsrc.org/workshops/2009/summer/ for course materials. The hardware for the workshop was donated to the NSRC from Cisco Systems and Google, and was sent home with some of the attendees or shipped to them after the workshop. All students received a two foot high stack of networking textbooks donated from O'Reilly Media and Cisco Press.
This unique and exciting summer workshop was made possible through grants to the NSRC from the National Science Foundation, INASP, TENET/FRENIA, the Association of African Universities, the Kenya Education Trust, and the Internet Society; and through a CPATH grant from the National Science Foundation, a Program Grant from UO's College of Arts and Sciences, and a donation from CIS alumnus Phil Seeley to the CIS Department. Additional financial and logistical support were provided by UO's Information Services and the CIS Department.
Please see the Network Design and Operations album for more photos from this workshop.
Thanks to the outstanding team of instructors from the NSRC and Information Services. Also, special thanks to Don Harris, UO CIO for his enthusiastic commitment to this joint endeavor.