Flower power
Rice helps science museum with webcam for corpse flower

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

The thousands of people who have been monitoring the corpse flower at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) via webcam this week in hope of seeing it bloom have actually been getting the image from one of Rice University’s live media servers.

	A horticulturist measures the corpse flower at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

On Monday the museum’s Internet bandwidth maxed out when 600 viewers logged on to the HMNS site. The museum asked Rice for technical support via Patricia Reiff, professor of physics and astronomy, who has collaborated with HMNS on a number of exhibits. By Tuesday, Information Technology’s Digital Media Service was providing the webcam delivery service for followers of the flower.

“The museum has a video camera focused on the flower, and I get a feed from the camera to a computer server at Rice that can support this type of video streaming,” said Hubert Daugherty, manager of Digital Media Service. “Our server replicates, or copies, the video stream from the museum for the thousands of simultaneous watchers on the museum’s website. The computer tasked with this duty is a hefty brute of a server, and it’s been operating at about 55 percent of its processing capacity. At one point we were using a whopping 250 megabits per second of our Internet connection to support the demand.”

“We rarely have an event of this magnitude where we are exporting such a large amount of data over a sustained period of time,” said William Deigaard, IT’s director of networking, telecommunications and data center operations. “Typically, Rice’s connections to outside networks are used to bring content and information to the campus more than to distribute it to the rest of the world.”

Different types of Internet connections are set up to accommodate various user groups. For example, commodity Internet connections are typically used for cable modems and phone company DSL modems. Research Internet connections are geared toward large groups of university scholars and scientists.

“Rice has multiple Internet connections to support the university’s very active research and academic activities,” Deigaard explained. For commodity Internet connectivity, Rice has a combined bandwidth of 500 megabits per second. Rice’s research Internet connection currently carries 1,000 megabits per second. Over the next several months, upgrades will bring this total to more than 10,000 megabits per second. By contrast, the normal load for the museum’s bandwidth is 10 megabits per second.

Explore
Find out how Rice University is reaching out to the Houston community

On Thursday afternoon the number of concurrent viewers on the HMNS site peaked at 3,601. And the interest has not been limited to residents of the Houston area and Texas.

“I got a call from a lady in Maine,” said Mark Belcher, director of information technology for the museum. “There was a guy standing in front of the camera and she asked me to have him move.”

Daugherty was also contacted from outside Houston. “I got a call from a woman who was gushingly thankful for what we are doing,” he said. “She had heard about this flower since she was a child, but she never had a chance to see one. She said when it opens she may fly to Houston to see the flower.” Daugherty said that unfortunately, the call got interrupted before he had a chance to ask the woman where she was calling from.

Curiosity about the extremely rare flower, officially known as Amorphophallus titanum, stems from its size — about 5