Michael Grobe: WAN activities at KU

This section describes my activities in Networking and Wide Area Networking at KU over the last 15 years or so.

I got my introduction to networking in general by building (along with another student) a token-passing network in 1985 for use in our ACS Computer Camps, and then by writing an M.S. thesis that applied queuing theory to our campus-wide X.25 network in 1986.

I got my introduction to Wide Area Networking by documenting our statewide X.25 network, and then becoming the ACS liason with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where i received early training in both supercomputing and networking of the TCP/IP variety. NSF set up the national supercomputer centers in 1985 and then NSFnet in 1986 to help scientists get to the centers. The midwest regional network, MidNet, was set up in 1987 with KU as a charter member, and I became the KU Applications Representative.

I began teaching afternoon seminars and developing documentation on the structure and use of NSFnet in 1988 and continued developing and supervising the development of network seminars and documentation, such as:

I presented several seminars at MidNet conferences during 1990/91:

We began work on the Lynx browser during 1992, and developed it as a "distributed hypertext system." I advertised our work through MidNet presentations on:

I helped Jerry Niebaum put together a request for a grant from NSF to build a statewide research and education network in 1992, which resulted in the Kansas Research and Education Network (KANREN), comprised of approximately 35 institutions of higher ed (both public and private) located within the state.

I became the Assistant Director of KANREN in 1992, served in that position through the network buildout, and became Director in 1994. In these positions I

As of July 2004, KANREN remains in operation and is still growing.

During this time I presented a number of informational talks to various communities, including:

and comprehensive 2-day tutorials in networking to I continue to serve as liason between the KU Academic Computing Services and KANREN meeting with KANREN staff weekly.

I have also served as a liason between KU and the Great Plains Network (GPN) since its creation in 1998. I organized the Great Plains Applications Conference in 1999, and serve as chair of the Applications Advisory Committee.

I was a Co-PI for KU's High Performance Computing Connections Grant (NSF Award Number 9810087), which funded initial campus connectivity to GPN and thence Internet2.

I have presented several talks at GPN conferences:

I also became the KU Applications Lead for our involvement with Internet2 in 1997, and have performed several functions within that role. In particular, organized and conducted several demonstrations of advanced networking applications, including:

I currently serve as Applications Lead for KU Internet 2 involvement, including 2 years on the Internet2 Conference Planning Committee (1998-2000).

During 1998 and 1999, I arranged to acquire and encouraged installation of several network-based products to enhance our service offerings to users:

These products were installed by Jeff Long of my group and Guy Jacobs of ACS Technical Services.

I organized the construction of an Access Grid Node here at KU during 2000, in order to host NCSA's Alliance Chautauqua 2000 for which I served as Technical Director. I continued to supervise the KU Computing Services Access Grid node for about 4 years, and explored enhancements such as the addition of some stereo 3D capabilities and integration of H.323 equipment. I wrote a small Java app to display two windows containing views of the same ball bouncing in 3-space for aligning some simple 3D equipment.

In addition to the Chautauqua, we hosted meetings between local faculty and NSF Project Managers, several performing arts events (in collaboration with Arizona University, New York University, Wichita State University, etc.), particularly a distributed dance duet linking dancers in Wichita and Lawrence via Internet2, and the First and Second Virtual Genomics Conferences conducted by North Dakota State University.

To help encourage the deployment of Access Grid nodes I gave several talks including two at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and one to the KU Retirees Club.


I have written a collection of network health monitoring and analysis tools centered around the moment-to-moment status of KU conectivity to various Internet sites, as reported by: The Netometer and Webometer have been running at 15-minute intervals since 1997, and archived data could be examined by using the following scripts which are not currently available: There is a more detailed description of the the motivation for and development of these scripts in Characterizing network performance from the user's point of view , and an attempt at making sense of the data in Searching for patterns in the Netometer and Webometer archives

I have also enhanced some tutorial software (from Java Network Programming by Merlin Hughes, et al.) that implements a simple peer-to-peer chat system in Java2 using network Multicast facilities. The required class files are:

I have given a couple of outreach talks to community organizations on related topics: