From March 11-13, 2013, members of the CENIC community and colleagues came together for three days of presentations, demonstrations, and human networking at the San Diego home of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2@UCSD). In the Calit2 Auditorium and Theater in Atkinson Hall, attendees learned of the latest advances in network-enabled teaching and learning, as well as the innovations in network research and technology supporting some of the most demanding big-science applications.

Below you'll find conference highlights in Teaching & Learning and Research & Technology, information on the latest CENIC network updates, and an introduction to the current Star Researcher, San Diego State University's Christopher Paolini.

Thanks to the team at Calit2, the entire CENIC 2013 conference was webcast and is available on the Calit2 YouTube channel, where you'll find the highlighted video below and much more.

A full conference program and links to all available presentation slides can be found online at cenic2013.cenic.org.

Dr. Smarr's Monday March 11 Keynote Address revolved around the ways in which a research university would need to plan, design, and implement its own networking in order to take advantage of ultra-high-performance connectivity at 100G or more. The Keynote Address was given in Calit2's Atkinson Auditorium, a room capable of delivering a Gigabit to each individual seat, meaning, as Smarr informed the audience, that the entire Auditorium was capable of 200 Gb/s in full use. After describing the next incarnation of the UCSD campus cyberinfrastructure, known as PRISM, Smarr then discussed the categories of research activities that any such cyberinfrastructure must support and gave compelling examples of each.

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With two Keynote Addresses focusing on the technical aspects of advanced networks, University of San Diego Professor of Law David McGowan provided a fresh and fascinating perspective on networks from a legal, policy, and cultural point of view, all of which have become increasingly important now that, as he stated to conference attendees, "the world decided to run itself on your back." McGowan treated three topics: net neutrality, security and privacy, and the traditional cultural influence exerted by universities over the network itself and where this culture is headed.

Professor McGowan led into his treatment of net neutrality with the statement that law is a "zero-sum game," where one party must walk away the loser. However, while lawyers all hope for a net positive effect from the lawmaking process, they recognize that any net positives will not become evident for some time since in McGowan's words, "the only real law is the law of unintended consequences." The example that he used to illustrate this was the US Department of Justice's statement in 1956 that AT&T was a monopoly.

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The Wednesday March 13 Keynote Address was delivered by Greg Bell, Division Director of the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), the advanced network serving more than 40 Department of Energy research sites, including all national laboratories. Bell gave attendees a meaty overview of ESnet itself, a new way to view advanced networks as instruments for discovery, and the relevance of these new outlooks to California.

Before moving into his main topics, Bell took time to address the critically important relationship between ESnet and CENIC, and that he looks forward to an increasing collaborative relationship.

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Carlos Casasús, Director of the Corporación Universitaria para el Desarollo de Internet (CUDI) in Mexico, gave attendees an excellent status report on CUDI, taking care to state that Mexico's position was almost such that they needed to create a digital divide in order to ensure that some of the population could be on the correct side of it. However, recent activities, including government action, gave him great reason for optimism.

Mike Hrybyk of the Canadian network BCNET then provided an overview of that network and CANARIE that included current concerns for both, each network and the value it adds for their communities, and current issues. Hrybyk pointed out that BCNET has undergone a large shift in its conception of itself, going so far as to remove the word "network" from its mission statement and instead conceptualizing itself as "shared IT services for higher education."

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In his introduction to the session, moderator Tad Reynales of UCSD informed attendees that out of the 36 awards from the most recent round of awards for the NSF's Campus Cyberinfrastructure Network Infrastructure and Engineering (CC-NIE) program, California received six. This is a significant fraction of total awards, and Reynales made a point of stating that CENIC's California Research & Education Network (CalREN) was a major factor in the overall success of the Golden State's research and education community in obtaining CC-NIE funds, particularly access to the High-Performance Research network tier. Reynales thanked CENIC President and CEO Louis Fox for his letters of support on behalf of these institutions and pointed out the value of the CC-NIE program in promoting campus cyberinfrastructure that can take full advantage of 100G networking as illustrated by the 100G and Beyond: Ultra High Performance Networking in California workshop held on February 26, 2013 at Calit2 and sponsored by CENIC, Calit2, and ESnet.

Campuses whose cyberinfrastructure improvements were presented include UC Davis, UCSD, San Diego State University, and Stanford University.

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This highly illuminating session was kicked off by Calit2's Larry Smarr, who observed that he had worked for 8 years to establish the 10G connection with CICESE that received the 2012 Innovations in Networking Award for High-Performance Research Applications. During this time, Smarr worked together with fellow presenter Carlos Casasús of CUDI as well as two Directors General for CICESE and two for CONACYT, the Mexican equivalent of the National Science Foundation.

A large part of the motivation for this connection was to work around the obstacle to the natural collaboration that would otherwise take place between both UCSD and CICESE created by the national border, where a researcher could spend between three and four hours during a simple day trip just crossing the border itself. Since that time is unlikely to grow shorter in the future, optical networks were the ideal way to enable scientific collaboration. Smarr also reminded the panel audience of the extraordinary Calit2-CICESE demo which took place the following day and featured a live linkup between both institutions' OptIPortals, by which large seismic datasets were shared absolutely seamlessly in real-time. Smarr then introduced Antonio Rallo from Televisa, stating that Televisa's work with 4k video made them excellent potential research partners.

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Attendees were introduced by the Ames Research Center's Mike Toillion to the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI), created in 1998 to develop the field of astrobiology and provide a scientific framework for flight missions. The NAI is a virtual institute that integrates astrobiology research and training programs in concert with the national and international science communities, and includes organizations spread throughout the US -- both NASA and other research centers and institutes and research universities.

Toillion described the NAI's reliance on tolls to enable distributed collaboration by multiple means; the natural question prompted by these tools become smaller and more mobile, personal, and portable, as Toillion stated was, "Where couldn't you participate from?" A proposal was submitted for a pilot program to address this very question -- can these NAI team interactions include field sites via satellite?

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Preparing workers for the 21st century information and communications technology (ICT) economy is at the heart of the Mid-Pacific ICT Center's mission. Executive Director of the center James Jones introduced conference attendees to the Center, based at the City College of San Francisco, as well as to some of the pressing workforce-related issues that the Center was designed to address.

The 20th century, says Jones, was the century of energy, manufacturing, and transportation. Today, the economy revolves around information and innovation, both driven and enabled by ICT. 80% of California firms have said that ICT is strategically important to their organizational productivity, and most companies manage their own operations and interact with customers via ICT whatever their core competency may be. ICT also provides the means for obtaining education and training even for non-technical jobs, with the network in particular providing the very foundation. However, while much of this has been widely recognized in the new economy, many of the assumptions underlying workforce preparation are still rooted in the past, making it difficult to understand workforce needs much less how to prepare our population to fulfill those needs, and even how to judge the effectiveness of these measures.

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Brad Krey, Program Coordinator for the Parks Online Resources for Teachers and Students (PORTS), came to the program seven years ago when it was noticed that fewer classes were being brought on field trips to California's state parks. PORTS was initiated to engage K-12 audiences through the use of technology in order to ensure that kids continued to have positive experiences with the astonishing natural beauty of the Golden State, "50,000 students a year, one classroom at a time," as Krey put it. He was also quick to tell audience members that the program is completely free: "We charge nothing, and we don't plan to." The program is enhanced with fixed and mobile cameras, and not only does it enable schools to engage in virtual field trips without travel expenses, but it also allows the parks to use their rangers more effectively.

Multiple online study units are offered at www.ports.parks.ca.gov in various locations throughout California. And while it is challenging to take equipment out to the parks for live events, they have developed wireless mesh networks to deliver live onsite video -- a highlight of Krey's presentation.

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The 100G and Beyond Workshop, sponsored by the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), was held in Calit2's Atkinson Hall on the campus of UC San Diego on February 26 to examine 100-Gigabit networking and the ways in which it will impact areas as diverse as data-intensive science, health care, media arts applications, smart manufacturing, and more.

The one-day workshop was held in conjunction with the 12th Annual ON*VECTOR International Photonics Workshop.

Workshop panels and presentations focused on a myriad of ways in which 100-Gigabit networks promise great innovation in the decades to come. Also treated were the campus and lab strategies that could enable researchers and the facilities in which they operate to take full advantage of the next standard for research and education networking, innovation on the network itself, and regional, national, and international testbeds.

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The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) today announced a record-breaking year for the California Research and Education Network (CalREN), the advanced network serving California's K-20 research and education communities and thus providing high-performance connectivity to over 10 million Californians every day. Traffic flowing through CalREN to external networks topped out at 18 Petabytes in February 2013, with a 99.1% growth rate over February 2012. The growth rate from January 2012 to January 2013 was similarly impressive at 93%.

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The first quarter of the 2013 calendar year has been a busy one for all segments. A new Gigabit connection has been put into production for the UC Hastings College of the Law, and CENIC has also completed the second phase of a metropolitan area network for UC San Francisco consisting of three new fiber segments. Two of the three fiber segments are in production status while the third is in the final test & turn-up stage.

For the California State University, CENIC has completed the first of two new 10-Gigabit connections for Humboldt State University and deployed the first of two Gigabit connections to increase fiber path diversity for CSU Dominguez Hills.

California's Community Colleges have received two Gigabit connections as well, for Copper Mountain College and Mt. San Jacinto College, the latter to replace a saturated DS-3 circuit.

California's K-12 System received several new 10-Gigabit connections this quarter as well, including to the Alameda, San Mateo, and Santa Clara County Offices of Education node sites, as well as to the Chaffey Joint Union High School District.

CENIC engineers also completed the installation of needed equipment in aggregation hub sites throughout the Central Valley in preparation for the optical equipment deployment in support of the Central Valley Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure Project. Finally, CENIC engineers worked with NLR to complete a new 10-Gigabit connection to the John Wayne Cancer Institute.

Christopher Paolini is a post-doctoral researcher and adjunct faculty member in the departments of Computer Science and Computational Science at San Diego State University. Christopher received a PhD in computational science in 2007 and his master's and baccalaureate degrees in Computer Science in 1998 and 1991, respectively, all from San Diego State University. Funded by NSF, DOE, and NASA, Christopher's research focuses primarily on the numerical simulation of heat and mass transport in chemically reacting systems.

Christopher teaches courses in distributed computing, computer networking, and geologic carbon sequestration and is currently involved in an NSF funded grant to design and implement a Science DMZ network for the computational science community at San Diego State University to facilitate large scientific dataset exchange. Slides from his 100G and Beyond workshop presentation are online, and he invites those interested in implementing their own campus Science DMZ via CENIC's CalREN infrastructure to contact him for guidance.

To learn more about the other Star Performers that CENIC has featured, please visit our website at www.cenic.org.

About CENIC and How to Change Your Subscription:

California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state's K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC's Associate researchers and educators are engaged.

CENIC is governed by its member institutions. Representatives from these institutions also donate expertise through their participation in various committees designed to ensure that CENIC is managed effectively and efficiently, and to support the continued evolution of the network as technology advances.

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