CENIC News

Among the issues that I addressed in last month's CENIC Today was the annual CENIC Board Retreat, during which Board members come together to discuss the directions they would like CENIC to take in the coming fiscal year. These annual discussions culminate in a setting of priorities for new initiatives.

Driven by trends faced by all CENIC Associates, the initiatives for the upcoming fiscal year have a great deal in common and may be satisfied by similar solutions. The initiatives are influenced by the following:

1. Technology is consuming increasing amounts of electricity for both processing and cooling at a time when interest in reducing carbon footprints is also increasing;
2. Several Associates require investments in new data centers and may not have available space which they can or are willing to set aside for a new facility;
3. Several Associates are also interested in space that can be used for back-up operations and to meet other business continuity/disaster recovery challenges in case of unplanned events.

To address these issues, the CENIC Board determined that its top priorities for the coming year were to consider how CENIC could be a provider of cost-effective, tiered datacenter/colocation facilities -- and both terms contain some complexity. "Cost-effective" refers not only to the cost of space but to the equally important cost of power. And of course, a tiered facility is required to meet the diverse needs of the equally diverse communities that CENIC serves, from providing high-performance computing facilities with large power needs per square foot but no need for redundant power, to facilities with lower power requirements that also require reliable back-up power.

CENIC has begun to address these priorities through several initiatives. First, we have created a survey of datacenter needs that has been distributed to Charter Associates. Second, we have begun the process of hiring a consultant to advise us on optimizing our various objectives in this area, so that we can provide the best possible solutions for everyone. Last, we are familiarizing ourselves with various solutions, from the construction or purchase of a new datacenter or datacenters, to leasing space in existing facilities, to the use of container solutions.

If high-performance, shared datacenters are to achieve the level of effectiveness that California's research & education community demands, they will of course depend on advanced networks to connect them with this community seamlessly and reliably. Hence, CENIC's possible entry into the provision of datacenter services is a logical extension of the success we've enjoyed collaborating across the state and beyond on high-performance networking.  As the Board adopts a direction on these new initiatives, we will of course keep our entire community informed.

During the past month, CENIC has completed a connection between the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the district's preferred disaster recovery provider, Abtech. The Gigabit connection was achieved through CalREN backbone node site UC San Diego.

CENIC has also ordered the first group of a larger set of 10 Gigabit circuits for the California K-12 System as well and will keep our readership updated as to the progress of this latest batch of K-12 connectivity enhancements. Lastly, UC Santa Cruz Extension is currently enjoying a new Gigabit connection to the CalREN backbone node located in Sunnyvale.

In July 2009, the Exploratorium signed an exciting five-year partnership agreement with NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to bring ocean, atmospheric, and climate sciences to the public.

The first of the joint projects will focus on the Okeanos Explorer, a high-tech research vessel, and will bring live ocean exploration to the public beginning in 2010. Ninety-five percent of the oceans remain unexplored—but not for long. The Okeanos Explorer will use cutting-edge, 3D mapping technology and a camera-equipped Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) to unravel some of the oceans' mysteries.

The plan is to stream high-definition video from the ship and the ROV to the Exploratorium, allowing visitors to share in exciting scientific discoveries. The Exploratorium also plans to develop interactive experiences, present live Webcasts and rich media, and offer in-depth articles about the Okeanos Explorer, ocean science, and discoveries on the high seas. These activities are supported by the statewide California Research & Education Network (CalREN), which connects to the national Internet2 network (both high-performance networks are used by scientists and educators), and the museum's access to these networks is provided by CENIC.

The Okeanos Explorer will visit the underwater volcanoes and rich ecosystems of the Hawaiian islands this fall and winter before traveling on to the Marianas Monument near Guam. Watch our Web site for more details.

Some of the most pressing concerns for many research and education institutions nowdays include sustainability and disaster recovery, as well as operating within an ever-shrinking budget. Many of these concerns can be addressed by the appropriate use of data centers, whether they be focused on utilizing climate-friendly technology to meet the skyrocketing power and cooling demands of modern storage and processing, ensuring data-dependent business continuity during unforeseen events such as fires, earthquakes, or pandemics, or taking advantage of economies of scale with other members of the research and education community to gain more storage and processing power than any one institution could afford alone.

Of course, studying the intersection between distributed data centers and the high-performance networks that underlie them is central to leveraging networks like CalREN to help address such concerns. At SIGCOMM 2009, researchers from UC San Diego introduced attendees to what they call PortLand, a fault-tolerant, Layer-2 data center network fabric capable of scaling to 100,000 nodes and beyond. Their research paper itself, presented at SIGCOMM by computer science graduate student and first author Radhika Mysore, can be found online.

PortLand isn't just a theoretical construct, however. A full prototype is currently running on a network in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering under the watchful eye of the Director of the Center for Networked Systems and computer science professor Amin Vadhat, also senior author on the SIGCOMM 2009 paper.

Networks like CalREN comprise an important part of any modern research and education institution's toolkit in meeting modern challenges like achieving business continuity, sustainability, and cost efficiency. Advances like PortLand constitute a vital part of bringing this about and making advanced networks more than a series of wide pipes. Thanks to PortLand and similar innovations, the pipes themselves become an active and indispensable ingredient in meeting the data and processing needs of any users of high-performance networking.

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

Last March, attendees to CENIC's 2009 Annual Conference saw the inauguration of the Global Library and Museum Education and Research Network, or GLiMERNet during a live videoconference including participants in Rome, UNESCO, Indiana University, and North Dakota University, as well as the videoconference facilitator Ed Johanson, located in Long Beach.

GLiMERNet's inaugural videoconference was well-received by attendees who were able to see firsthand the ways in which high-quality videoconferencing can be used to spur innovation and collaboration -- and those same attendees will be pleased to know that August 31 saw a second far-flung GLiMERNet videoconference take place, including participants from the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, TX; the Autry National Center of the American West participating from USC; representatives of the Egyptian Cultural and Education Office in the Egyptian embassy in Washington, DC including Director Maha Kamel; participants from the Mexican research & education network CUDI including CEO Carlos Casasus; and RUTE/RNP's Luiz Messina participating from São Paolo.

Although Labor Day has yet to arrive, preliminary planning for the CENIC 2010 Annual Conference, "Full Speed Ahead," has already been taking place for several months, and we're delighted to give you a bit of advance information.

The Calls for Proposals and Award Nominations for the 2010 Innovations in Networking Awards are currently being prepared and will be announced when they are released. The conference itself will be held at the Hyatt Regency Monterey in beautiful Monterey, CA. The deadline for reservations at the discounted conference rate is a long way away at February 5, 2010, but online reservations can be made. All information will be posted at the CENIC 2010 conference website, which will also be announced in CENIC Today.

US & World Networking News:

UC Schools shine bright in the US News & World Report ranking of top public universities, taking many top spots including #1 for UC Berkeley. Also enjoying top ranking in national universities are CENIC Associates Caltech and Stanford along with UCLA. Best value rankings also pointed to CENIC Associates Stanford, Caltech, and USC. Other categories also spotlighted many California institutions of higher learning.

On August 6th, National University and the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office today announced a joint agreement which makes it easier for students at community colleges to transfer to National University, the state's second-largest, private, nonprofit institution of higher education.

The purpose of the agreement is to provide greater opportunities for students at any of California's 110 community colleges to pursue their goal of earning a bachelor's degree if they have completed their lower-division community college transfer requirements or an associate's degree.

The California State University East Bay campus in the Hayward hills is the site of an unusual experiment in higher education for people with autism. Starting in the fall quarter, college-age autistics will be encouraged to attend and build an educational community; one that draws on the autistics' unusual academic strengths. The experiment will test the possibilities for autistics in a university setting, and more generally the possibilities for a range of students with disabilities.

A new $280 million community at the University of California, Davis -- already innovative for its plan to mix student and employee housing, retail space and a community college center -- is breaking ground in more ways than one, thanks to an almost $2 million grant from the California Energy Commission.

An Internet-routing algorithm that tracks electricity price fluctuations could save data-hungry companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon millions of dollars each year in electricity costs. A study from researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the networking company Akamai suggests that such Internet businesses could reduce their energy use by as much as 40 percent by rerouting data to locations where electricity prices are lowest on a particular day.

Ten of the 16 free digital textbooks submitted for review as part of California's free digital textbook initiative meet at least 90 percent of the state's rigorous academic content standards, according to a report released today by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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.

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