A Contemporary Research Computing Environment: Evolution Transformed to Revolution

The computing resources available within a university have become determining forces in the academic and research lives of the faculty, students, and researchers. The infrastructure that organizes those resources and presents them to users at the Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, has evolved over the past 30+ years through interaction with a variety of forces and constraints such as: the instructional and research needs of users; the potential of technology; the capabilities of support staff; the foresight of planners; the limitations of budgets; and the generosity of grantors. The transition from central mainframe to distributed computing that is now underway at the University of Michigan will have revolutionary consequences for research and instruction at the University. We are moving to an environment that will feature: multi-gigabyte, central, online data storage on the University Institutional File System; massive RAM cache buffers on mainframe-power workstations to provide extremely high speed access to data in current use; fiber-optic connections among local machines and to external networks; integrated software for the manipulation, graphical analysis, and conventional analysis of data; powerful, graphical, desktop workstations with multitasking operating systems and high resolution displays; and competent staff to provide the required hardware and software support services. We describe how this transition is occurring at the Population Studies Center, a demographic research and graduate training unit at the University, and the anticipated impact on the work of the Center.