CENIC News

Like most of our Associates, CENIC is on a July 1 through June 30 fiscal year, and with the end of one year and the beginning of a new one, three major events occur concerning the CENIC Board of Directors.

First, we welcome new Board members appointed by Associates to fill open positions. Second, we elect officers, and lastly, we engage the Board in a two-day retreat during which the direction that CENIC will take in the upcoming fiscal year is discussed and planned.

CENIC is in the unique position of being governed by the community we were created to serve, and as a result, the feedback and direction given by our Board of Directors is particularly valuable to us. This fiscal year, we're looking forward to the participation of the following new Board members as representatives of the K-20 research and education community:

• Ilee Rhimes, CIO and Vice Provost of Information Technology Services at the University of Southern California;
• Pete Siegel, CIO and Vice Provost for Information and Educational Technology at the University of California, Davis;
• Don McNelis, Superintendent of Schools at the Butte County Office of Education, returning Board member after a hiatus of a year; and
• Robert Owen, Associate Vice President of Information Technology at Cabrillo College

The welcoming of new Board members comes of course on the heels of the departure of other members. CENIC would like to extend its gratitude to the following departing members of the Board of Directors for their tireless work in support of our mission and goals:

• John Anderson, Superintendent of Imperial County Office of Education, who began serving on the CENIC Board in the 2005-06 fiscal year;
• Chuck Rowley, Associate Vice Chancellor of Computing and Communications at UC Riverside, who also began serving on the CENIC Board in 2005-06; and
• Fred Sherman, CTO and Vice Chancellor for Technology at the Foothill-DeAnza Community College District, who began serving on the CENIC Board during the 2007-08 fiscal year.

Our gratitude is extended both on our behalf and on behalf of the California K-20 research and education community, which has benefited in countless ways from their dedication and expertise.

The Board also elected the following corporate officers:

• David Ernst, Associate Vice President and CIO at the UC Office of the President, as Chair;
• Patrick Perry, Vice Chancellor of California's Community Colleges, as Vice Chair;
• Todd Finnell, CEO of the K12 High Speed Network, as Secretary; and
• John Charles, CIO at CSU East Bay, as Treasurer.

Lastly, the CENIC Board retreat was held on July 12 and 13. Among the major areas of discussion were ways in which CENIC and the CalREN network can enable our members to become more efficient in delivery of IT resources in these times of budgetary constraint.

More specifics on CENIC activities in these areas will be shared in future editions of CENIC today. There are a lot of great things on the horizon for California research and education in the coming fiscal year, and CENIC looks forward to enabling you all to explore those frontiers, and to exploring them with you as well.

As part of the series of circuit upgrades for California's K-12 and Community College Systems, CENIC is delighted to start off with the new fiscal year with upgrades for Glendale Community College, which now enjoys a Gigabit connection to CalREN at the Tustin backbone node as well as a DS-3 connection to the Los Angeles backbone node.

Two more circuits were also upgraded for the Tulare and Madera County Offices of Education, with Tulare's OC-3 and Madera's DS-3 circuits to the CalREN backbone node site at Fresno both replaced with Gigabit connections.

Lastly, the Layer 3 Refresh of the High-Performance Research tier of the CalREN network continues, and the RFP for the Layer 2 Refresh has closed. A third RFP for the Layer 1 Refresh of this network tier will be forthcoming. Check out the RSS feeds on the CENIC website to stay up-to-date on all RFPs issued by CENIC, as well as receive notification of the release of new issues of CENIC Today and other news flashes.

The SuperComputing 2009 conference is scheduled for November 14th through 20th at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon.

The Network for Education and Research in Oregon (NERO), the Oregon GigaPOP (OGIG), and its partners in Oregon are partnering with SCinet to provide WAN services support. In order to plan the WAN and metro resources required to support conference participants, we are asking exhibitors and network entities to identify their WAN circuit requirements into the Oregon Convention Center.

If your organization will require additional WAN circuits (i.e. CalREN, NLR WaveNet, Internet2 WaveCo, another provider, etc), please respond to Chris Costa at CENIC with the details of your particular requirements. Please provide CENIC with the following information:

• Circuit type and bandwidth
• Circuit origination point
• Circuit termination point on the SC09 showfloor

Even if you are unable to provide all the details above, please contact CENIC as soon as possible.

The SC09 WAN team is planning to support the extension of WAN circuits from the following locations into the Oregon Convention Center:

• Level(3) Portland Gateway (Internet2, NLR)
  1335 Northrup
  Portland, Oregon


• Portland NAP, Pittock Block
  921 SW Washington Ave
  Portland, Oregon

Please send your circuit requirements, questions or concerns to Chris Costa at ccosta@cenic.org.

Advanced networks allow researchers and educators in all fields to connect to extended datasets, remotely placed observatories, widely dispersed students, and complex instrumentation of all kinds, but they also permit these luminaries to connect with one another. Readers of CENIC Today, and attendees at the 2009 CENIC Annual Conference are likely familiar with one of California's best facilitators of these kinds of human connections, Ed Johanson, well-known power user for high-quality videoconferencing like that offered by CalREN Video Services.

Johanson's interest in high-tech began early, with Bachelor's and Master's degrees in solid-state electronics from UCLA, but his taste for the ways in which technology influences society followed as he then received his Juris Doctor. As a patent attorney, Johanson began to specialize on the application of high technology to fields as diverse as medicine and surgery, entertainment, and communications. His endeavors in these fields have enabled him to function as an excellent social networker, as a vital part of using advanced technology to bring people together is, after all, bringing the right people together. Johanson organized his first Internet2 videoconference program with UC San Diego on October 4, 2001, and since that time he has organized forty videoconferences to over forty venues on five continents including five live telecasts of orthopaedic surgery.

Currently, Johanson's efforts are focused in three areas: nanontechnology, orthopedics, and archaeology as well. In the third of these fields, attendees to RIDING THE WAVES OF INNOVATION witnessed firsthand how high-quality videoconferencing can facilitate advances among internationally dispersed experts with the inauguration of GLiMERNet, the Global Library and Museum Education and Research Network. The centerpiece of the event was a live international videoconference which included participants from the Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerche (National Research Council) in Rome, UNESCO, Indiana University, and North Dakota State University. The session was moderated by Sofia Pescarin from the CNR with her colleagues Francesco Antinucci, Lucrezia Ungaro (Director of the Roman Forums and Museum of Roman Civilization), and Eva Pietroni. Alonzo Addison participated from UNESCO, along with Anna Arici at Indiana University and Jeffery Clark from North Dakota State University. Members of GLiMERNet are currently working on programs on the cultures of the Mediterranean region and cultures of Native Americans.

However, readers of CENIC Today also recall articles on the similar videoconferenced global forums on nanotechnology and orthopedics that Johanson has facilitated. More are certain to follow, including at the upcoming Internet2 member meeting in San Antonio, TX, as Johanson continues on his worldwide trek, assembling team of experts to empower innovation for all segments of society.

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

If you've been waiting for online video of the Keynote Addresses at the 2009 CENIC Annual Conference that took place this past March in Long Beach, CA, you need wait no longer! Video of the addresses Telepoly Consulting's John Windhausen and Stanford University's Guru Parulkar are now available at the CENIC 2009 conference website, so be sure to take a look and see the sorts of great presentations attendees enjoyed at this year's conference.

Viewers will need to use Windows Media Player to view the linked video streams. Apple users can download a viewer here.

Be sure to keep an eye out for updates regarding the coming 2010 conference to be held in Monterey, CA as well. Luminaries like Windhausen and Parulkar in 2009 and others make the CENIC annual conference the premiere event on advanced networking in California and a cost-effective way to network with your colleagues state-, nation-, and even worldwide.

And thanks to Phil Cerda and his team from 3C Media Solutions for doing the recording and editing.

US & World Networking News:

Northern California's premier "Pathways to the Future" Teacher Institute will take place this Aug 10-11 at the beautiful campus of Consumnes River College. Join your colleagues at this unique Green Teaching event, and get the standards-based resources you need to make sure that your students are prepared to help create, and live in, a sustainable world.

When you look at the Real Time Monitor, you see incoming and completed jobs shuttling in rapid fire between computer centers scattered all over the globe -- including Antarctica.

What you do not see are any jobs traveling to and from southern Africa.

To remedy this will be the South Africa Grid, or SAGrid.

The economic news in California has been pretty bleak lately. Yet in the midst of all that, there is a promise for the future in the collaboration by California's university research centers, small companies and venture finance firms in an emerging area called nanotechnology, The New York Times's James Flanigan writes.

NLR and Calit2 have agreed to form a collaboration, the goal of which is to help researchers and institutions around the country construct end-to-end research cyberinfrastructure platforms. These platforms, operating at 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps), will connect their on-campus labs with remote resources using NLR's high-speed, optical backbone national infrastructure.

The realities of the current economy have placed increasing demands on public managers at the state and local governmental level, including universities and public schools, to deploy new solutions to make government more cost effective, accountable, and productive.

The University of California, Berkeley, plans to set up an open source software project for widespread distribution of automatically made video and audio recordings of lectures and other events on campus.

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.

For more information, visit www.cenic.org.

Subscription Information: You can subscribe and unsubscribe to CENIC Today at http://lists.cenic.org/mailman/listinfo/cenic-today.