EUNIS97, Grenoble (France) 9-11 September 1997
Ref: 022804
Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE) is one of the largest universities in Hungary with about 12 thousand students. It has four faculties: Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Law and Political Sciemces, Faculty of Sciences, Teachers Training College and a postgraduate Institute of Sociology. The evolution as well as the present state of the information infrastructure is described in this paper. It has evolved gradually with much vigour since 1989 till it reached the present state. The university, like any old one is dispersed in the capital of Hungary, with many distant campuses, even some of them placed in other villages. This was a serious drawback in building a coherent infrastructure.
Although there existed in Hungary an X.25 packet switched network since 1987, the political changes have brought dramatic developments in networking, too. The large universities and research institutes have built their Ethernet based LANs in a very short time.
The data communication network of the University was started in 1989. At that time it consisted of two tiny local area Ethernet networks, the LAN of the Institute for Physics placed in the City (Trefort kert/garden) and the LAN of the Institute for Chemistry. These two institutes are separated by a considerable distance and located on two different sides of the Danube. When the planning was started in 1990, the dispersed structure of the university campuses was a serious problem. Due to this fact, about 8 km of optical cable had to be laid down by the University during the fall of 1991 and by the spring of 1992 the optical backbone was operational. Since then only minor extensions to it were necessary. Now it is connecting 23 buildings at 11 distant campuses. Still in 1992 the main campuses of three universities in Budapest (Eotvos Lorand University, University of Economy and the Semmelweis Medical University) were connected by fiber optics with Ethernet speed.
In 1994 the Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE) and the Semmelweis Medical University (SOTE) have built a common FDDI backbone, connecting the Trefort campus of ELTE (Sciences), the clinics and the Block for Theoretical Studies of SOTE (Nagyvárad tér). This backbone is prolonged by a microwave link in order to connect some Institutes of the Faculty of Arts (Humanities) of ELTE. The ELTE-SOTE network contains 13 CISCO routers, one of them is a CISCO 7000 router.
In the course of the following years the number of nodes connected to the network of the university was increased gradually. By now about 2000 nodes are connected to the network, the majority of them are PC-s, but about 200 workstations are connected, too. Later the optical Ethernet backbone had to be replaced by an FDDI backbone, with microwave extensions to the far distant campuses.
In parallel to the internal network of the University external network connections were also installed. As a first step to a high speed global connectivity at a national level an inter- university optical backbone was laid down in Budapest connecting the University with two other ones: the Technical University and the University for Economy. Using this optical infrastructure an FDDI backbone was operational in February 1993. A CISCO 7000 router is connecting the ELTE-SOTE network and the so called Interuniversity FDDI backbone, as well as the distant campuses of ELTE. E.g. the Institute for Chemistry of ELTE was connected to the central campuses by this Interuniversity FDDI backbone until 1997.
The international internet connections were also started in 1993, since then with ever growing capacity. By 1994 a national internet backbone was also founded, the external connections at national as well as at international level are provided now by the Hungarian IP Backbone (HBONE), operated by the HUNGARNET Society. ELTE provides connections to the national IP backbone also to a lot of other high schools, grammar schools as well as public libraries and other institutes.
The public central service is provided by a VAX cluster, consisting of a VAX 6125 with 128 MByte memory and 8 GByte disk capacity and of a VAX 9000 with 256 MByte memory and 32 GByte disk capacity. Due to a cluster coupler the disks can be used by both computers. There is an IBM Risk cluster, too, consisting of an SP1 parallel computer with 8 processors and of four RS6000 model 580 computers. These computers offer services for the whole community of the University.
In addition to the central facilities all of the Faculties and Institutes have their more or less powerful servers, too. There is also a further IBM SP2 (with 7 processors) at the institute for Chemistry, but this is used only by this institute.
The central facilities offer not only number crunching service this is mostly done with the departmental computers and workstations but also different other new services like World Wide Web, Gopher, Eletronic Phone Directory, etc..
The distributed library services are based on two IBM RS/6000-370 computers, using the library software from DYNIX Corp. (USA). The system management of these computers is provided by the Center of Information Technologies, while the management of library data is done by the librarians.
The voice communication of the University was also gradually modernised in parallel to the data communications. In 1993 the university started a phone development project in order to exchange the obsolete PBX-s to up-to-date digital exchanges. In the course of this project as a first phase two satellite exchanges were replaced by digital PBX systems. In the second phase in 1995 a second major and several smaller exchanges were installed, and in the third phase, in 1995-96 two further major digital exchanges were installed. (This is a homogenous system as Exchanges of AT&T are installed on each place, Definity G3i systems used as major systems.)
In order to economise the phone expenses the University wanted to connect these exchanges by internal lines, thus avoiding the calls passing through the public phone network. In some cases it could be carried out with the help of the spare fibres of the optical cables laid down for data communication, but just in the direction of the ELTE-SOTE FDDI backbone there were no such facility. This was the time when the idea of using a common infrastructure for voice and data communication emerged.
According to this conception a large section of the ELTE-SOTE fast data communication FDDI backbone was replaced by an ATM connection by installing two mainstream 36150 Type ATM switches maid by New Bridge both in the Trefort Campus and in the SOTE Institute for Theoretical Studies. A similar switch was placed in the Institute for Chemistry. This was connected to the Trefort Campus by the optical fibres of the interuniversity optical connection. All of the ATM switches have E1, FDDI and ATM interfaces.
At one end of the ATM backbone (the node of Nagyvárad tér) a bandwidth manager was also installed, in order to split the phone backbone connections to three different directions. With the help of this facility a remote biological experimental station of ELTE, situated in the countryside could also be connected to the urban network of the University.
This integrated communication system works without any serious problem
since March 1996.
The technical developments were followed by organisational changes, too. The role of the former Computer Centre was gradually transformed, and by 1995 it gave services for the economic management of the University, only. This changing role was acknowledged by regrouping it from the Center of Information Technologies to the Chancellery of the University, and in contrast the phone services were formally integrated with the Data Communications Services.
A serious management problem for the informatics services at the Universities is the notorious lack of expert peoples who can operate their information infrastructure. Although the Universities are well equipped with up-to-date infrastructure, they can not compete with the much higher salaries offered by the fast growing profit sphere.
The case of the Eötvos Lorand University shows an information infrastructure which is comparable to that of many other Universities in Europe, probably struggling with similar problems, too.
Copyright EUNIS 1997 Y.E.