BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff

There’s serious stuff going on in the Technology Sandbox, a gathering of technologists from across the campus who have been digging in to do a lot more than play.

The Sandbox, which will soon have a physical location in the Math Sciences Building, is revolutionizing the way innovations in information technology are being explored on campus.

For the past two years, technologists from academic and central units have been working together — identifying vexing IT problems that cross departmental and school boundaries, testing and evaluating solutions and sharing information and resources.

“We’re a community of peers who come together to brainstorm,” said Maroon Tabbal, director of advanced research computing for the David Geffen School of Medicine. “No one person is in charge. It’s a very useful paradigm.”

Membership is fluid, with technologists entering and leaving the Sandbox depending on their interests, priorities and needs.

Their first challenge came two years ago with the UCLA/Kyoto Distance Learning project, a pioneering effort to establish high-quality audio, video and interactive data transmission over high-speed communication links so that two physics classes could be taught jointly and in real time by UCLA and Kyoto University in Japan.

“There were real problems that needed to be solved that no one department was responsible for,” said Marsha Smith, director of Academic Technology Services, a participating unit that serves as the Sandbox’s host in Math Sciences and its point of coordination.

The Sandbox has since taken on other mega-problems with implications for the entire campus. Technologists from north and south campus together have explored the issues and advantages of an IP-based gigabit backbone test network, work that is helping Communications Technology Services plan the next-generation campus backbone network.

The Sandbox is also the test area for equipment that may end up being used by the California NanoSystems Institute. Technologists and Design | Media Arts faculty have, for example, created a window on the Web through which visitors can see lab activities in real time, including a scientist’s-eye view through a tunnel microscope.

“Now that we have centers and institutes that are interdisciplinary, we have to have mechanisms that support this,” Smith said. “And the Sandbox is becoming one of those mechanisms.”

The collaboration across campus has also spawned a new way and the motivation for technologists to exchange information.

Previously, said Sandbox coordinator Pete Nielsen, “When someone in a department solved a problem, there was no real payback to get the word out to other departments facing the same dilemma. With the Sandbox, there’s incentive to document and publish this work so that others don’t have to make that same discovery on their own.”

For example, Max Kopelevich, a program analyst from the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, found a nifty way to access extremely large storage capacity for about one-tenth the cost of comparable systems. Now others on campus can share in his discovery through www.sandbox.ucla.edu.

Vendors anxious to see how their innovations can be used on campus are also finding the Sandbox appealing as a single gateway to campus IT users, although Smith emphasized that the group itself offers no services or products to the campus. Currently, Cisco, Hewlett Packard and Apple have loaned the Sandbox products for test use.