Use of MANs Initiative

Background to UMI

Scotland has four Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) based on 155 Mbps ATM, and the MANs are connected together, effectively creating a nation-wide MAN. All of the 21 Universities and Higher Education Colleges in Scotland are connected to one of the MANs, and the ATM backbone extends throughout the campuses. Where necessary there are ATM links direct to individual servers or workstations, although most users access the network by ethernet LANs. In 1995 the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) started the Use of MANs Initiative (UMI) to experiment with ways of using this very high connectivity.

The Co-ordinators Report was printed in August 2000, and a PDF version is available from this link.

Things only MANs can do

The Scottish MANs make it possible for teaching materials to be made available via the World Wide Web - one set of materials can reside on a single server and from there be accessed by students throughout Scotland. Multimedia materials featuring film clips, audio material, animations and Java applets are made available in this way. Whereas CD ROM based materials need to be kept up to date, server based materials ensure that the latest version is always available online.

The high bandwidth network offers an excellent quality of service (QoS), so that users find the network to be reliable. This is an important factor during teaching sessions.

Videoconference sessions can be used as part of MAN based courses, with no thought of phone charges. Courses can be given by collaboration between different Universities and Colleges, with students at one centre taking courses provided by a different centre. Distance Learning and self-paced learning are made easier by the reliable network and the ease with which teaching materials can be made available.

Some research opportunities are unique to MANs - for example workstation clusters connected to a MAN can use Load Sharing Software to carry out parallel computations and provide complementary facilities to those provided by national Supercomputing Centres. Visualisation packages can run on powerful computers but be accessed across the network, allowing users to analyse large and complex data sets. Any graphics can be viewed on their own workstations.

UMI projects

UMI funded 40 projects to explore ways of using the Scottish MANs. Several projects have produced high quality teaching materials, one investigated parallel processing using workstation clusters; 3 projects focused on staff development and training in the use of MANs. UMI also funded ATM based videoconferencing studios at Universities and Colleges throughout Scotland. Desktop videoconferencing is also used. A further 33 projects carried out infrastructure improvements, and installed hardware such as high performance servers at sites throughout Scotland.