Introduction

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all new staff and students to the campus and to introduce our Computer Centre's facilities and services.  To our old users, I would also like to highlight some new development on hardware and software and new services introduced in the last few months.

The Computer Centre provides a wide range of computer and network facilities to meet the different information technology (IT) needs of teaching, learning, research and administration in the University.  All our new staff and students are entitled to register for an email account on one of our servers and be given access to our campus network and access to Internet from the campus as well as from home.  It is important during your association with the University that you should acquaint yourself with the numerous IT services available to you.

To our old users, I am sure you will appreciate that it was a particularly busy year for the Computer Centre last year.  There were quite a few significant new developments and our staff were very busy with many activities.  With the University embarking on the vision of a "Digital University", the Computer Centre is doing our best to support this vision.  Our ATM-based campus network is now up and running, our servers for supporting "Access Everywhere" network (ACEnet) are installed, our major administrative applications were re-developed to support the changing environment and our services have been expanding and improving.

The University has also started a notebook initiative, under the auspices of the IT and Teaching Task Force, for freshmen undergraduates in September 1998.  This is the University's strategy to move towards ubiquitous access for our students and to build up our IT leadership in teaching and learning.  The Computer Centre has been building up the necessary infrastructure and applications for this new development of our University.

Location

The Computer Centre is primarily located on the first and second floors of Run Run Shaw Building, with various offices distributed in the Old Library Building, Eliot Hall and the Dental Hospital.  Other than the PCs and Macs installed in the open space areas in the Run Run Shaw Building and in the Old Library Building, we also have PC laboratories set up in the vicinity as well as in the different buildings of the University, including Knowles Building, Main Building, KK Leung Building, Runme Shaw Building, Composite Building, Chong Yuet Ming Building, buildings in the Medical and Dental campuses, and the Student Amenities Centres.

With the building up of the ACEnet for supporting roaming network access by students, the Computer Centre has set up two laboratories for ACEnet access, namely, Room 113 of Run Run Shaw Building and Room 136 of Old Library Building.  These two laboratories are set up for open access by students with their notebook computers, but teachers can also book these laboratories for classroom use.
 

Central IT Services

The Computer Centre offers a comprehensive information technology service to staff and students of the University. Services include access to our various computer servers, including an IBM SP supercomputer with 32 parallel processor nodes (being upgraded to 48 nodes), training courses on the usage of our facilities, provision of numerous popular PC software, electronic mail, access to the Internet, World-Wide-Web and News bulletin, etc.  We also provide services, on a chargeable basis, for PC and system maintenance, development of web pages, web-based course materials and other software development for office automation.

To provide our users with the necessary skills to use our provisions, we offer regular training courses on all of our computer facilities and numerous PC software, email, the Internet, World Wide Web, news bulletin service and multi-media facilities.  Our courses are much in demand and we are often overwhelmed with applications to all these courses.  Users are advised to register early to secure your seats if you do not want to be disappointed.  All our courses can be booked over the Intranet.  Special training can also be arranged for departments at very reasonable cost.

We maintain a library of computer periodicals, reference manuals and books, which are available for short-term loan from our General Office located in Room 223, Run Run Shaw Building.  We also have a Help Desk set up in the Computer Centre (Room RR108) to assist our users in computer and network problems (Tel no: 2859-2480) during office hours.  Alternatively, you can direct your enquiries and requests for support electronically at email address ithelp@hku.hk.  We respond openly to enquiries put up on the news bulletin board, hku.cc.forum, on a weekly basis.

We do receive a lot of feedback from our users and we strive to respond positively.  We have set up performance pledges with an objective to improve our quality of service.
 

Central Computer Servers

The Computer Centre operates a variety of powerful time-sharing servers of different platform ranging from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture, and from serial to parallel processing for supporting the University's teaching, learning, research activities and network communications needs.  The central computer server facilities have been much enhanced this year with system upgrades and installation of new systems.

One of the major system work is an upgrade of the University's IBM SP2 supercomputer.  Work is being carried on by IBM engineers and Computer Centre systems staff to upgrade the existing 32-node system to a 48-node system with new CPUs.  The peak processing speed of the new system is over 30 GFLOPS (30 billions floating-point operations per second), which is about 4 times that of the existing system.  It is one of the fastest supercomputers in this region of the world.  The disk storage available for users will be much increased - the new system is equipped with 200 GB disk storage which is more than 16 times that of the existing system.  The installation of the 48-node IBM RS6000 SP supercomputer should be a very valuable addition to the central computing resource for the University's researchers who are working on computation-intensive
research projects.  The installation and testing of the new system may take 1-2 months' time since we are upgrading in phases so as to minimize disruption to our users.  We expect that the new supercomputer will be put into service by December 1998.

Over the summer, the Computer Centre has also installed another IBM RS6000 SP system which consists of 8 SMP (symmetric multi-processing) nodes with a total of 24 processors for supporting the University much enhanced Campus Network, and the ACEnet (Access Everywhere Network) in particular.  The 8 powerful computer nodes of this IBM SP system have been configured to provide high-availability and high-performance functions of the sophisticated network services supported by the Computer Centre, namely the network firewall and access authentication server, high-capacity WWW proxy, file and printer servers and electronic-course server.

The HKUSUA (SUN SPARCcentre 2000E with 12 CPUs) and HKUSUB (SUN Enterprise 6000 with 8 CPUs) will remain our systems for supporting the general computing and network communication needs of all staff and students.  During the summer, both systems have been upgraded to the latest Solaris 2.6 operating system which is now Year 2000 (Y2K)  compliant and more efficient.  These two systems are now supported by a high-capacity and high-availability NFS server which provides 90 GB of disk storage for our 14,000 users.

The NFS server for HKUSUA and HKUSUB is based on the High-Availability cluster of HKUSUC (SUN SPARCcentre 2000E with 10 CPUs) and HKUSUD (SUN Enterprise 6000 with 8 CPUs).  Both HKUSUC and HKUSUD have also been upgraded to Solaris 2.6 for Y2K compliance and improved performance.  This cluster of servers supports the University's central World-Wide-Web server, proxy server and Usenet News server.

The Intranet and UIS (University Information System) servers have also been upgrade to Solaris 2.6.  In addition, we are working to upgrade them to form a high-availability cluster to provide for resilient services of the important functions of Intranet and UIS.  UIS serves as the prime system for access to management and administrative information.  Through UIS, heads of departments can enquire all the information through the network while individual staff members can enquire their personal and financial information through the user-friendly web-interface.
 
The HKUCC system, which supports the electronic mail service of many staff users, is also getting out-dated.  With the much-increased use of electronic mail, the system is becoming inadequate to cope with the demand.  It will be shortly be replaced by a high-availability system of two DEC Alphaserver 1200/533 computers with 150 GB user disk storage.  They should provide the sufficient capacity for meeting the users' needs in the digital age of the University.  The new system is about 10 times faster and has 10 times more disk storage.  It is our plan to put the new system into service in December.  In migrating from the old system to the new one, our staff will provide the necessary training and assistance to the users so that they can get familiar with the new system environment quickly and convert their applications and data with minimum difficulties.

In addition, a SUN UltraSPARC 10 server and an IBM RS6000 F50 server have been installed for upgrading the performance of the central HKUGIS server (for Geographical Information System applications) and for augmenting the systems in the support of the University's administration respectively.

Lastly, the UNIX Workstations laboratory in Room RR-210 has been upgraded.  It now includes six SUN UltraSPARC 5 and nine UltraSPARC 4 workstations.  All the workstations are configured with 64 MB of memory.  A screen projection system has been newly installed to facilitate teaching in the laboratory.

All our servers and network operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  They are, however, running unattended on Sundays and public holidays.  With the constant demand for support outside of office hours, we are now gearing up to extend our hours of service.  I shall inform users accordingly when the plan can be finalized.
 

Upgrade of PC facilities

Starting from the beginning of the 1998 academic year, all PCs in Room RR-103 of Run Run Shaw Building (46 sets) and those in Rooms OLB-134 and OLB-135 in the Old Library Building (102 sets) have been upgraded from 486 PCs to the new Pentium-II 333 MHz model which are configured with 64 MB RAM.  Other PC facilities of the Centre include 21 Pentium-Pro 200 MHz PCs in Room RR-101 and 25 Pentium 120 MHz PCs in Room RR-201.

Flexible PC starting procedures have been implemented so that users can select to use a wide variety of English and Chinese versions of software under the Window 95 environment.  Those PCs set up in Room OLB-135, Old Library Building can also be chosen to operate in the latest Windows 98 environment.

The provision of laser-printing service in the Computer Center laboratories has totally been re-engineered.  The previous manual scheme is now replaced by an automatic printing budget deduction scheme which is much more convenient and flexible than before.  Users can now acquire laser-printing units which are kept with their central
computer (HKUSUA) accounts and students can print in any of the above-mentioned Computer Centre laboratories any time.  The printing service hours is in effect extended from the previous 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. to 24-hours operation.

The Computer Centre also arranges site-licensing of many popular software as well as bulk-purchasing agreement on PC hardware and software from vendors, many of which are operated through the auspices of JUCC (Joint Universities Computer Centre).  Users are welcome to enquire on these low-cost hardware/software arrangements from our webpage at http://www.itservices.hku.hk or from our General Office at Room RR-223, Run Run Shaw Building.
 

Upgrade of Campus Network

In the past 14 months, my colleagues in the Computer Center have been working extremely hard in the implementation of the major upgrade of the University's Campus Network.  The project is now close to completion and many of the facilities have been put into service.

The University's Campus Network backbone has been upgraded in the summer to increase the capacity and bandwidth for supporting the vision of a "Digital University".  The HKU ATM backbone network is now the most sophisticated in Hong Kong with over 30 high-capacity backbone switches/routers, 50 fibre OC-3 (155 Mbps) ATM links, 100 Gbps switching speed, hundreds of edge network devices and 10,000 FastEthernet (100 Mbps) network ports.

All the halls of student residence have been networked.  Each hall resident is now provided with a network connection point in his/her room for them to gain access to the information resources and facilities available on the University Intranet and international Internet.  An Access Everywhere (ACEnet) environment with a total of 4000 network access points is being implemented throughout the University's Main Campus, Medical Campus and Prince Philip Dental Hospital premises.  The ACEnet is very flexible and fully supports students to use their notebook computers at various locations in the campus and and have roaming access to the University network easily and conveniently.

A thousand ACEnet points in the Libraries, Computer Centre and the different Student Amenities Centres have been put into operation since the start of the academic year.  The installation of ACEnet points at other locations are also coming into place on schedule.  All the work except those in the Queen Mary Hospital (QMH) Complex will be completed by the end of October.  For the QMH area, we are working closely with the hospital administration with an aim to complete that part of work by early 1999.

All the old coaxial network points installed years ago are also being replaced by 100 Mbps FastEthernet connections.  Nearly all parts of the network cabling and device installation have been completed.  There has been some delay for part of the QMH complex due to seeking work approval from the hospital administration.  We shall soon work with departments in migrating the PC computers from the old coaxial network to the upgraded network.
 

Dial-up Access to Network

The dial-up facilities of the Computer Centre has been substantially improved this year.  The number of dial-up lines now available is more than 4 times than that of last year.  These include 574 high-speed V.90/x2 56-Kbps lines and 108 V.34 28.8-Kbps lines.  Our monitoring shows that demand of dial-up access is so high that recently the utilization has reached 100% during the peak hours from 9:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m.  To improve the situation further, additional lines will be installed.  We are also considering making arrangements with commercial ISPs for providing low-cost PPP access.
 

HARNET and Internet Upgrade

The Computer Centre has been working closely with JUCC (Joint University Computer Centre) during the summer to upgrade our Internet connection to provide better access to Internet.  Users may be interested in knowing that the upgrade has been completed since the beginning of October.  The speed of the HARNET-Internet connection has been doubled and now runs at 12 Mbps.  In addition to this dedicated link to the U.S., international WWW access is also provided by another connection to the NetPlus of the Hong Kong Telecom through two JUCC proxy servers.

The local HARNET backbone has also been upgraded.  The speed of the inter-institutional network connection has been doubled, from 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps, through public ATM service.  The resilience of the public ATM network configuration is also improved.
 

New Administrative Applications

In the past year, the Computer Centre has been working closely with the University administration to develop a few major administrative systems.  The Oracle Financial system was the first one implemented early in 1998.  It replaces our legacy ledger and purchasing systems, providing departments with an online ordering system with immediate fund checking.  The student system, named Student Connect, is another major system that we have developed with the Registry, providing online admission and course registartion through web-interface.  Individual time-tables for students are automatically drawn up.  Other modules including examination time-tabling, transcripts etc are now being developed.  Still another system is the University Smart Card system which the University has worked with the Bank of East Asia in providing an electronic-cash function and the University staff and student card for access control and other functions.
 

Web-based Courses

To assist teachers in the University to develop web-based courseware, we have installed a software, WebCT, developed by the University of British Columbia in Canada on our IBM SP computer.  Intensive training courses have been offered to our teachers.  We also offer free advice to teachers and provide assistance to get student helpers to assist in their development on a chargeable basis.  A number of interesting courses have been developed and we are seeing more and more teachers getting interested.  Automatic student account creation has also been developed to facilitate the management of the courses.

WebCT has also been used as the software platform to develop the course "Foundation to Information Technology", which the Computer Centre has worked with the Department of Computer Science and the Library to deliver the course in electronic form.

 
Year 2000 Compliance

As we get closer to the turn of the century, the Year 2000 compliance (Y2K) issue is looming over us.  The Computer Centre has taken up the coordinating role in driving the University toward compliance by end of June 1999.  The Y2K problem could be potentially dangerous.  We are systematically working with the departments in the University to ensure that they are aware of the problem, that they will take inventory of their systems which could be affected and that steps will be taken to test the systems and replace or convert them as appropriate.  If you are unsure of the issues and do not know what to do, you are advised to contact the Computer Centre as soon as possible.
 

User Services Handbooks

To assist users in using our services and facilities, we have been continuously updating our User Guides and Computing Services Handbooks.  These publications provide the basic information enabling our users to start using our facilities.  They also indicate where additional details can be found.  A new Computing Services Handbook has just been published in September 1998 which provides details of our facilities and services we provide.  Other publications are constantly updated to reflect the latest information. These publications can be purchased at nominal cost from our General Office.  They are also placed online in our Centre's web pages for electronic access.
 

Computer News

This newsletter, Computer News, is one of our means of  communication with our users.  The Computer News is published electronically and only the content page and the training courses are published in paper form.  You can access Computer News from our Centre's webpage.
 

Concluding Remarks

Here, I have summarized the numerous facilities and services supported by the Computer Centre and to introduce the new developments that we have achieved in the last few months.  It is by no means a complete account of what we have done.  Please read other articles in this newsletter and other Centre publications to get all the details.

I hope you will enjoy reading the Computer News and find the information useful.  Your feedback and comments are always welcome.  It will certainly help us improve on our services and guide us to develop those services that are important to you.

N Ng
Director, Computer Centre
Tel.: 2859 2491
E-mail: nng@cc.hku.hk