At 07:24 PM 8/11/99 -0700, tom@cs.washington.edu wrote:
>Last year you graciously agreed to co-author a proposal
>to NSF to construct a platform of PC's at various sites
>for conducting distributed systems and networking experiments.
>To remind yourself what this is all about:
>http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tom/access/
>I haven't updated you since there hadn't been much to say.
>
>I made the (obvious in retrospect) strategic mistake of
>including too many of you on the proposal, excluding almost
>all potential NSF review panel members. That definitely
>slowed everything way down.
>
>Although all the details haven't been completely worked out,
>I'm glad to announce that in all likelihood we will receive a
>small planning grant ($200K for one year) from NSF out of year-end
>funds to build and use a small demonstration system, across six sites.
>(Special thanks to Steve Mahaney, Darlene Fisher and Karen Sollins for
>arranging this.) The goal will be to of produce a plan/proposal to NSF for
>constructing a much larger system. Constructing a small
>scale system first is a good idea and something I should
>have included in the proposal to begin with.
>
>We've developed a module for the prototype (which we've assembled
>here at UW) consisting of four PC's, a console, external disk,
>ethernet switch, and programmable power supply on a small mobile cart.
>If you are interested in hosting one of these in your machine
>room, let me know. Also I need to know your connectivity --
>all things being equal, I'd like to put these at places with
>high bandwidth to the Internet and/or Internet2.
>
>I would also welcome pointers to any software you know of
>which we might use in constructing the prototype; we're definitely
>operating on a shoestring, so we want to reuse whatever is out
>there as much as possible. Although it may be a stretch, I hope to
>get something up and running in time that we can run experiments for
>the Sigcomm/OSDI deadlines next February.
>
>In addition, Allison Mankin and I are planning a workshop
>to discuss how to move Access and CAIRN forward, and to plan
>the next round of proposals. CAIRN is evolving into a virtual network
>on Internet2, and thus will offer complementary benefits to Access
>for the networking research community. Allison will be announcing
>details about this shortly.
>
>See most of you at Sigcomm!
>
>tom