of the Interior (DOI) Federal Financial System (FFS) and of other large personnel and administrative systems serving the USGS and other Federal and DOI agencies nationwide. The mainframe continues to serve the distributed system of minicomputers through batch processing and archival services for the USGS National Water Information System and serves as postprocessor and data base archiver for the USGS National Digital Cartographic Data Base.

The mainframe also supports very large data base activities of the DOI Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement and Bureau of Mines and provides various processing services for the Minerals Management Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the DOI Office of the Secretary. Communication facilities connect the mainframe and Bureau of Reclamation and Bureau of Indian Affairs computers in Denver, Colo., and Albuquerque, N. Mex., and support data transfer and interactive processing sessions.

Among the large application systems residing on the mainframe is the DOI standard automated accounting and payment system, the FFS, managed by the Washington Administrative Service Center in Reston (see p. 101). Five client agencies, the USGS, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Courts, and Patent and Trademark Office, use the mainframe. Continuing DOI progress toward departmentwide financial systems standardization, FFS processing on both the USGS and the Bureau of Reclamation Administrative Service Center computers represented approximately 70 percent of the Department's total accounting transactions during fiscal year 1991.

Another large system supported by the mainframe is the automated Standard Form 52 (SF 52) system. The SF 52 system is a paperless system that encompasses the automation of all phases of processing personnel actions, including creating and approving requests for personnel action by management, processing actions by the Personnel Office, and transmitting information to update master personnel files. Actions can be electronically routed to all appropriate individuals in management and personnel offices nationwide. Courtesy copies, concurrence routing, browsing, deleting, or canceling actions are also supported.

The Automated Vacancy Announcement System (AVADS) also runs on the mainframe and is another large system that supports USGS personnel activities. AVADS is an interactive system designed to create, edit, distribute, and print the full text of all vacancy announcements of the USGS. As requests to fill positions are received for advertisement,

USGS personnel offices enter vacancy announcement information into the AVADS data base. AVADS transmits all pertinent information that is unique to a specific vacancy to USGS distribution points nationwide. At each distribution point, vacancy announcements are printed and posted where employees have access to and can obtain printed copies.

The public can also browse microcomputer AVADS information when visiting USGS personnel offices. AVADS is currently being expanded to become the DOI vacancy announcement system. All bureaus will enter their announcement information, which will then be electronically distributed departmentwide. A microcomputer-based bulletin board of all vacancy information will also be available to the public for nationwide access.

The USGS National Digital Cartographic Data Base (NDCDB) has been resident on the mainframe since the late 1970's and is still very actively used. NDCDB is being redesigned to take advantage of a large, more powerful relational data base management system associated with the mainframe. The NDCDB is an automated, interactive index providing up-to-date information about digital cartographic data available for distribution and sale throughout the USGS. The index is used by USGS Earth Science Information Centers, NDCDB data base managers, and others desiring access to digital cartographic information. The index can be queried to answer questions about the data held in the digital archive. The bulk of the digital data archive is now contained on magnetic cartridge tape. Because the archive will be transferred to an automated robot tape cartridge device, accessing this data will soon take less time.

The USGS mainframe supports several large data base applications for other Bureaus within DOI. One of the principal functions of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) is to administer the Surface Mining and Reclamation Act of 1977 (Public Law 95-87). The basic functions of enforcing this act are inspecting mines and assessing and collecting penalties. The Collection Management Information System (CMIS), located on the mainframe, was developed to manage and support these functions. CMIS stores, tracks, and reports information on citations for mining violations reported by field inspectors. This interactive system provides online data entry and retrieval for OSMRE headquarters and regional office staff nationwide. The retrieval function provides online query and batch reporting, which summarize and categorize OSMRE activities.

The Applicant Violator System (AVS) is another highly visible system maintained by the OSMRE on the mainframe. AVS contains information on all surface coal mining operations and companies in the Nation. The primary function of the AVS is to check whether an applicant for a surface mining permit is in any way related to, or is itself, a violator of mining regulations. For violators, AVS blocks issuance of new mining permits. The system is used by State regulatory authorities, Federal permitting units, OSMRE headquarters, field and area offices, technical centers, and other parties designated by the courts.

During fiscal year 1992, the USGS will start new mainframe services that will enhance the ability of the data center to provide unique services within the USGS computing network:

• A mass storage system for USGS earth science data, using a UNIX-like gateway into the mainframe, includes simple, straightforward mechanisms for storing and retrieving very large files and is accessible to any local area subnetwork via GEONET or Internet. A large, automated tape cartridge device for storing 1.2 trillion bytes (expandable to 20 trillion bytes) of data will be one of the components of data storage supporting this new service. This mass storage system will also be available to users of the MVS/XA operating system.

The Soft*Switch electronic mail (Email) software will use the mainframe to connect all of the diverse and disparate USGS Email systems into a unified USGS system. This service will allow the existing Email systems of the USGS, as well as other mail systems within the scientific community, to exchange messages easily.

• Network access to the mainframe will be improved by upgrading the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) network connection. TCP/IP network access to the MVS/XA operating system will be available. New software allowing direct access to transaction processing, time sharing, text editing, Model 204 data base management system, and batch subsystems will permit local area network access to production mainframe services from personal computers (PC's) and workstations nationwide. Using this TCP/IP network link to the mainframe, remote computer environments, such as PC's and workstations, can route and submit batch jobs to the mainframe and have output from these jobs automatically returned to the point of submittal.

Several new software subsystems will automate data center operations, data processing help-desk services, and computer console monitoring. These systems will improve the efficiency, reliability, and ease of use of data

1985

center services and should help in reducing costs associated with operating the center.

By improving the ease of access to the mainframe and adding mainframe data center services that supplement and enhance applications resident in other USGS nonmainframe computing environments, the mainframe is moving into a new era of service to the USGS computing community. In the future, the mainframe will continue to provide unique data processing facilities and services that effectively respond to ever-changing USGS and DOI computing needs nationwide.

Emerging

Telecommunications Technologies

By Elaine Stout

rom the early days of using Arpanet

Fr
Fa Department of Defense Computer

a Department of Defense computer network-to the present use of the USGS GEONET and the massive Internet networks, USGS scientists have implemented and used wide-area telecommunications technology. In the past, especially with networks such as GEONET, extensive and expensive error checking and correcting were relegated to the network. The USGS end user devices, often inexpensive terminals, could not correct errors or perform the most rudimentary error checking. In essence, the network did all the time-consuming work.

The networking and computing environment is evolving from slow terminal-based systems to high-speed distributed systems. Newly developed communications networking technologies reflect this evolution. Three reasons driving the move to new telecommunication technology are (1) end users, such as

USGS scientists, require far higher transmission rates for transport of images and visualization, (2) end-user devices have significantly improved intelligence and processing power, and (3) extremely high-quality transmission circuits are available and affordable.

In the USGS, higher transmission speed is found in the new Distributed Information System (DIS-II) workstations and powerful graphics devices that generate extensive local area network (LAN) to LAN traffic. These workstations and devices use new computing interfaces (for example, X Windows) such that a remote computer actually appears to be local. Even the personal computer can now support error detection and retransmission. The USGS move to higher speed computing applications has paralleled the telecommunications industry distribution of very high speed, all-digital circuitry throughout the country.

Optical fiber now is pervasive; all major telecommunications carriers have fiber running east and west, north and south. To date, the continental United States has more than 2 million miles of optical fiber. Historically, data networks such as GEONET were designed to cope with errors resulting from analog communications circuits and equipment. The new fiber and new computing devices have substantially increased the reliability of the network.

Telecommunications networking of the 1990's will include words and acronyms such as frame relay, cell relay, BISDN (Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network), SMDS (Switched Multimegabit Data Service), ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), and SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork). Some of these new technologies (including frame relay, cell relay, BISDN, and ATM) are streamlined by fast packet switching. Fast packet combines the advantages of the older circuit switching approach-high throughput and low delaywith the advantages of statistical multiplexing techniques that allow for efficient use of the transmission circuitry by shared bandwidth. Frame relay is the only commercially available network technology now being distributed; the other technologies will be introduced in the mid- and late 1990's. However, the direction of telecommunications technology is defined: high-speed fast packets and, when appropriate, shared bandwidth for voice and video services.

The USGS is currently testing and distributing one of these newer technologies. Since February 1991, frame relay technology has been tested between Reston, Va., and Menlo Park, Calif.; Lakewood, Colo., was added in July 1991. Performance gains, as measured by bits per second transferred, have been significant. More than 2,000 individual tests were run between Reston and Menlo

Park, and frame relay throughput performance was 19 times greater than that of the USGS GEONET network. When compared to Internet, frame relay performance gains were about sixfold. Two types of tests were run: one test was machine oriented; the other, user oriented. For the machine test, computers transmitted large files back and forth all day by using the Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol-the predominant protocol in the USGS. For the user test, individual X Windows sessions were established for transmission of a graphics image from Menlo Park to Reston; this test was performed randomly throughout the day.

Results from the throughput testing and the random X Windows tests were compared and were within 2 percent of one another. In other words, the performance predicted for the user actually happened. Frame relay performance to date has been impressive and could make the usual bottleneck-the slow wide-area network-more tolerable. Frame relay technology has immediate benefits for the USGS. Also, a frame relay network supporting high transmission rates can be installed with relatively small capital investment.

The USGS was the first Federal agency to test frame relay and continues to assess new fast packet technologies. Also, the USGS is using a newly developed backbone network for more than just frame relay. On the same transmission circuit, several simultaneous voice calls are routinely transmitted with video conferences. While frame relay is an interface standard from LAN to a wide-area network, the wide-area networking switching approach, called cell relay, increases the performance and lowers the ultimate cost of the network by integrating voice, data, and video. Consequently, via the same optical fiber telecommunications circuitry, all the above services are available at the Reston, Menlo Park, and Lakewood sites.

Another advance at the USGS is compressed video conferencing. Compressed video is dramatically different from full broadcast video. For instance, to broadcast 1 second of the evening network news requires about 90 million bits; using the USGS compressed video conferencing, that same video second requires as few as 56,000 bits, a tiny portion of the full broadcast mode. Amazingly, even though substantial compression occurs, the overall picture and audio quality is good and, more importantly, affordable. Compressed video conferencing services have dropped in price significantly during the last few years. Also, as recently as 3 years ago, a full T1 circuit (capacity of 1.544 megabits) was needed for this type of video presentation. Now, due to enhanced video algorithms

The expansion and evolution from the 1990 networking architecture to the 1996 networking architecture. A, 1990, host computer, LAN (local area network), and PABX (Private Automatic Branch eXchange) connected to X.25 (international packet switching standard) and SNA (Systems Network Architecture) and a slow-speed circuit network. B, 1996, this environment will evolve to host computer, LAN, and PABX connections to high-speed services, X.25 and SNA, frame relay, and BISDN over optical networks, such as SONET.