Sun SITE Digital Collections

Computing and Network Services

On 3 December 1998, Sun Microsystems and the University of Alberta announced the designation of the University as a SunSITE (Sun Software, Information and Technology Exchange). Sun Microsystems sponsors SunSITEs at leading educational and research institutions around the world. The SunSITE program is designed to:

• Provide easy, global access to free software and tools
• Promote development and research of new Internet tools
• Archive information of general and regional interest

Sun Microsystems is a major supplier of computer equipment to the University of Alberta. As part of the new SunSITE agreement, Sun Microsystems Canada has donated a $65,000 Sun server computer complex to the University, and the company will be providing another hardware donation of equivalent value. The SunSITE technology infrastructure will grow as need requires. Day-to-day operations of the infrastructure and systems management services will be undertaken by Computing and Network Services, which will also provide a global access point for users to obtain free software and tools and a repository for Sun, regional and government information.

The University of Alberta will host one of three SunSITEs in Canada (the other two are at Queen's University and the University of British Columbia). The SunSITE at the University of Alberta will initially entail the four campus projects featured in this section of HyperDispatch, which are:

• The University of Alberta Virtual Museum (Museums and Collections Services)
• The Alberta Relais Project (University Libraries)
• Canadian Census Data Project (Data Library, University Libraries)
• Digital Teaching Resources Laboratory (Department of Biological Sciences)

As a result of these projects and those that will follow, users on campus will be able to perform tasks they were hitherto unable to attempt. For example, researchers will be able, via the web, to obtain publication-quality 2D or 3D renderings of the items that they are researching; instructors will have high-quality input for the development of traditional and computer-based courses; and the general public will have their first look at some of the University's collections, many of which are not publicly accessible due to their age and fragility.

Sun SITE Hardware/Software Configuration

SunSITE at the University of Alberta is running on a Sun Enterprise 450 server with:

• four 300 Mhz UltraSPARC II CPUs
• 1 GB of RAM
• mirrored system disks
• an 8mm tape backup unit
• two MultiPacks holding the digital collections and the web and ftp trees
• a connection to the campus backbone network via 100 Mb per second fast Ethernet

The Enterprise 450 is running Solaris 2.6 HW5/98, with Solstice Disksuite 4.1 being used to provide mirrored system disks, and striped data disks for heavy I/O data. The site's services are being managed with Apache-1.3.3, wu-ftpd, mirror-2.9, pwebstats, and various and sundry perl scripts.

The Enterprise 450 server was donated by Sun Microsystems Canada, and the additional equipment was purchased by the participating groups at the University of Alberta.

More Sun SITE Information

If your department would like to make a proposal for a SunSITE project at the University of Alberta, or if you need more information, contact Stephen Thornton of CNS (stephen.thornton@ualberta.ca, 492-9344).

The campus SunSITE also has a web page where the latest developments will be announced. The website features a number of freely available documentation and software collections. More of each will be added as time and disk space permit, and depending on interest.

The University of Alberta SunSITE home page is located at:

http://sunsite.ualberta.ca