History of the BCRL

The Historical Development of the BCRL


The BCRL was devised as an umbrella for several grants and contracts obtained by Dennis Guster in 2001. In particular a grant from MNSCU and Sun Micro Systems brought about a quarter million dollars worth of workstations and enterprise level servers to the BCRL. This equipment was destined to support research and instructional activities in the areas of distributed computing and computer security. Finding a home for all this equipment with adequate 110 volt power and air conditioning was problematic, but eventually space in Centennial Hall was found and the production equipment was housed in ch34A and the development activities were housed next door in ch34.

The first network/system administrator in the BCRL was Charles(Chuck) Hall who was instrumental in designing/implementing the global authentication/file system logic that would provide single sign-on and dynamic links to home directories. This foundation made accessing multiple computers quick and easy and has made activities such as grid, cluster and cloud computing possible.

Over the years numerous other grants/contracts have been secured and the current network/computing infrastructure has an original retail value of approximately $2 million. Charles has moved on to Cedar Rapids, Iowa where he is a
system/network administrator for Aegon Insurance and helps manages a computer enterprise of over 1,000 server nodes. Corey Hemminger, who gained data center experience in the Air Force took over for Chuck in 2007 and has done an excellent job of maintaining systems and has spearheaded the BCRLs initiative to use virtualization to reduce complexity and promote ”green computing”

Especially beneficial in the development of the BCRL’s networking infrastructure is a partnership with Force 10 networks which provided 2 enterprise level switch/routers with 1.5Tbs backplanes that revolutionized the performance of the BCRL’s internal network and provided sophisticated packet filtering capabilities which enhanced its security capabilities as well.

The BCRL has expanded in the last two years to include a server setup and configuration lab (ch14A) and a Cyber warfare center (ch353), which is widely used by graduate students. Also over the years the number of servers has continued to increase and currently the largest computer cluster boasts 96 processors.

While the basic mission of the BCRL, research and instruction in distributed processing and computer security has remained constant, the addition of Dr. Renat Sultanov in 2005 has greatly enhanced our capabilities in the subfield of distributed processing, high performance computing. Dr. Sultanov’s work in molecular modeling and fluid dynamics presented the BCRL with complex, real life, world class problems and pushed the envelope of the BCRL’s capabilities. Fortunately, the BCRL was up to the task and was able to help him solve problems that may have taken years on a single computer. This was accomplished by configuring multiple distributed computers to solve the same problem often reducing the time to solve by a factor of from 12 to 32. This research has been well received by the academic and industrial community and several grant applications and industrial partnerships have resulted.

The BCRL’s long term plan are based on supporting its historical activities related to its mission and expanding to support other initiatives related to this mission. For example, a new Master’s degree in Information Assurance has been proposed and is in the final stages in development and may even come online for Fall 2009. To support this new offering SCSU has had its computer security courses successfully mapped to National Security Administration (NSA) standards and has applied to become a NSA Center of Excellence in Information Assurance. The BCRL is looking forward to supporting research and instruction activities related to these new computer security related programs.

There are also plans to expand research in fluid dynamics and hydrogen modeling research as well. The BCRL is currently working to upgrade its capabilities so that complex problems in these areas can be solved and the result used in projects such as simulating human blood flow to aid in stent design and simulating the collisions of hydrogen molecules so that the design of hydrogen fuel cells can be improved.

Last, but perhaps most important the number of students working on research projects has increased in recent years. Typically, there are about 12 students working on various project that often get published in scholarly Journals. It is also impressive that about half of this number are merely undergraduates.