Tech2000 Home Page

Next-Generation Computing and Communications: Changing the Face of University Education and Research

Welcome to the home page for Intel's Technology for Education 2000 project at Cornell University. This web describes a collaboration between Cornell and Intel whose goal is to exploit new computing and communications technologies to develop a new learning environment at Cornell. This environment makes it easier for people to work together as effective teams, expose students to more problems with "real world complexity," and support multiple styles of learning. The environment uses high-speed communications networks and substantial desktop and server computing power to deliver information in ways that are more visual, more customizable and more interactive.

On October 7, 1999, the Technology for Education 2000 collaboration entered it's third year. During this time, the project has had a major impact on computing research and education at Cornell. Some specific successes include the following:

A major focus of the original proposal was the development of a Scalable, Distributed Computation Resource based on Intel Architecture systems. After two years of research and development, this effort resulted in a major new world-class computational resource, the AC³ Velocity, a 256-node cluster of Intel Pentium® III Xeon 500 Mhz processors. Funded by members of the Advanced Cluster Computing Consortium (AC³), including Intel, Dell, Microsoft Corp., and Giganet, the AC³ Velocity provides a production computation resource capable of up to 122 billion operations per second.

The Technology for Education proposal also had dramatic and unexpected benefits for computing and information sciences at Cornell. By creating a broad, university wide computational collaboration, involving groups from the traditional sciences, engineering, libraries, digital arts, and agriculture and life sciences, the gift dramatically raised the awareness of the possibilities and potential benefits of computing-based collaborations across the entire university. Spurred by the vision of a truly broad-based focus for computing research and education, the Provost of Cornell University formed a task force on Computing and Information Science, which released its initial report in June 1999. The university community has expressed strong support for the vision expressed in this task force report, and discussions are currently underway on the best structures and processes to implement this vision.

For a description of the overall project, its goals, and its educational vision, check out the Overview. Information about the Principal Investigators of the project, overall project management, and project schedules are on the Management page. The individual projects that comprise the overall effort can be found through the Projects page. The latest information and status reports on the overall project can be found on the What's New page. Descriptions of the donated hardware and software received by Cornell from Intel and Microsoft can be found at Donations. Finally, a listing of the faculty and research staff associated with the project can be found under Participants.

The project was funded by a $6.0 million grant from Intel. You can read the original Cornell announcement in the Cornell Chronicle article of August 28, 1997, and Intel's announcement in it's August 18, 1997 press release.

Last modified on: 10/07/99