The University of Oregon’s Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) has produced a video showing how it has partnered with the Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) to improve the network infrastructure for the center at Makerere University in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. The center focuses on providing resources and training on prevention and treatment of diseases, including HIV/AIDS, producing up to 10,000 reports a month.
The previous network couldn’t support that kind of growth and the NSRC worked with the center to upgrade the infrastructure, sending donated switches, routers and wireless networking hardware.
“You realize that a network that was performing so badly, with the replacement equipment and a few tweaks here and there, the network is now performing so well,” IDI network engineer Brian Masiga says in the video. “They (the local staff) actually like the idea that someone is out there looking at their problems and they’re able to work together to solve that problem, not working as an individual, but working as a group.”
Partially funded by the National Science Foundation, Google and other organizations, the NSRC works directly with the indigenous network engineers and operators who develop and maintain the Internet infrastructure in their respective countries and regions by providing technical information, engineering assistance, training, donations of networking books, equipment and other resources. The end goal in this work is to make it easier for local scientists, engineers and educators to collaborate via the Internet with their international colleagues by helping to connect communities.
To help build and advance networking around the world, ESnet and NSRC have collaborated on two video training series designed to help network staff implement both the Science DMZ network architecture to speed the flow of data and the perfSONAR network measurement software.