Calendar 2001–02

130 Part 4 • Support Facilities, Services, and Staff Organizations support the teaching and instructional needs of the University. • a large pool of PCs and Macintoshes netted in a Novell Local Area Network facilitate PC software application/development and furnish access points to other supercomputers, minicomputers, workstation servers, and campus network applications. These personal computers are located at the User Area on 1/F, Pi Ch’iu Building, and Room 103 of Wong Foo Yuan Building. • several IBM AS/400 machines and UNIX machines that support the development and running of management information systems of the University administration. The ITSC provides a wide variety of services and resources for staff and students to promote the effective use of information technology in teaching and learning. They include resources and support for online teaching and learning; new means for the delivery of instruction; training for teaching staff to acquire new technologies and skills for teaching; consultation and support for designing instructional materials and media production. The ITSC is also equipped with several special-purpose laboratories that are furnished with high-tech facilities for multi-media applications and courseware development, optical mark scanning, colour printing, text/image scanning, and user self-paced learning. Campus Backbone Network The campus backbone network was first set up in 1992. Over the last few years, the backbone technology has been upgraded gradually from FDDI (Fibre Distributed Data Interface) to ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), and from ATM to Gigabit Ethernet. Connections between switches can therefore be made at 155Mbps or up to 1,000Mbps. The network is also a member of the Hong Kong Academic and Research Network (HARNET), a wide area ATM network linking the campus networks of eight tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. All the computer systems for research and academic purposes are connected by this advanced campus backbone network so that they are accessible to users in various departments, colleges, student hostels, libraries, classrooms, public areas, and at home. In recent years, the campus backbone network has been further extended. Through the available connection outlets, staff and students can now log into the campus network using either their notebook computers or the built-in computers. The ITSC also plays an important role in the development of Internet services in Hong Kong as it • operates the Hong Kong Internet eXchange (HKIX), which acts as a neutral interconnection point for the routing of intra-Hong Kong and intra-Asia-Pacific Internet traffic, and this eliminates the need to send local information overseas before being routed back to Hong Kong and provides faster and less expensive paths to local sites; • maintains a list of WWW servers in Hong Kong; and • exchanges thousands of USENET newsgroups with many ISPs.