CENIC News

On September 21, The Federal Communications Commissioner (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski presented an important talk about net neutrality. His talk was widely disseminated and widely commented on, but I have not been one to comment on this important policy issue. My reluctance to comment is not a reflection of lack of appreciation for the importance of this issue, but rather is a reflection of what forces I think affect CENIC most directly in the near term and the interest in advocating for or facilitating adoption of policies in those areas rather than on net neutrality itself.

So, what are those issues of more immediate interest to CENIC and our community and what can we do to move those forward?

In his net neutrality speech, Chairman Genachowski referred to four million college students taking at least one online course in 2007 and to the Internet potentially connecting kids anywhere to the best information and teachers everywhere. What he didn't refer to in his speech was a report on online learning, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning, issued in May 2009 by the US Department of Education. This very important report documents what many have felt for years -- that what I call technology-mediated instruction (others refer to it as hybrid instruction) is more effective than instructor-only teaching and learning. Assuming this report will withstand scrutiny, its publication makes it all the more important for CENIC to continue to concentrate on assuring uncongested and robust networking to all schools and colleges in California in order to support improved learning outcomes.

We aren't there yet; not all schools are connected to our services, and in some cases our member institutions do not have diverse network connectivity, leaving network-enabled technology-mediated learning at the risk of the proverbial rogue backhoe. As a result, to me it is more important and more valuable to our mission and our services to push for connectivity for all California schools and an improvement in connectivity for those who already enjoy it than to advocate for or against net neutrality, as important as that issue is. That isn't to say that home access to learning materials might not be affected by the outcome of the net neutrality discussion, but even more importantly we first need to make sure that all schools and colleges have access to robust networking. Currently, this is not the case, and with the budget problems in the State I don't see this problem being solved easily, but it is one the CENIC community should continue to work towards addressing.

Similarly, in some ways I'm more in tune with the discussions regarding healthcare than net neutrality. Now, as one can guess from my being wary of jumping into the net neutrality fray, I'm not going to jump into the debate about a public payer system, but rather to note a few observations and solutions in the health care arena. First, health care costs have been rising, and at a higher rate than inflation, for some time. Second, while unemployment is temporarily quite high, generally we know that there will be a shortage of workers in the coming decade, and unemployment in healthcare is today among the lowest in the country. Third, health care “demand” is going to increase, as baby boomers age and require greater amounts of care.

Taken together these facts don't present a pretty picture for the future unless the health care system can be changed dramatically. The only way this is going to happen is with dramatic changes in the administration and delivery of health care, with reliance on greater amounts of networked technology. Again, not to diminish the importance of the net neutrality debate nor the national healthcare debate, I'd like to see a lot more focus on the importance of improved networking in California for helping solve our looming shortage of health care capability, through the more effective use of human resources in the delivery of health care. The FCC last year announced a program intended to stimulate uses of networking in provision of healthcare and California was awarded over $20 million. I am interested in seeing that initiative flourish and I'd like to see the funding for that two-year experimental program extended. A proposal to do so would get my support, permitting me to keep my views of a public payer system under wraps, at least for now.

In the April 1 issue of CENIC Today, we announced that the K12 node site at Truckee-Donner Public Utilities District had been moved to Truckee High School, altering the configuration of the "ring" which provided connectivity to the CalREN backbone via the Corning and Sacramento backbone node sites for that school and several others. This month, we're happy to announce that this new ring was completed with the installation of a new DS3 circuit between Loyalton High School and Truckee High School.

Circuit orders were also placed this past month for three 10-Gigabit Ethernet circuits to serve the Los Angeles USD, Orange County Department of Education, and San Diego County Office of Education node sites. We will keep our readership informed as to the progress of these circuits.

For California's Community Colleges, new Gigabit connections were completed this month for Hartnell College, Los Medanos College, Laney College, Ohlone College, and Solano College, giving these five colleges redundant connections to the CalREN backbone.

In support of SC09, CENIC's NLR L1 Engineering group is implementing 18 10-Gigabit Ethernet WAN circuits from various points on the National LambdaRail network into the Portland Convention Center as part of SCinet, the ultra-high performance network built from the ground up each year to provide the most advanced networking possible to conference attendees and researchers on the show floor.

CENIC and Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) will be exhibiting at SC09 this year under their shared banner of Pacific Wave, the distributed international peering facility currently in use by twenty-five national and international participants, including CENIC. If you'll be attending SC09 as well, be sure to stop by Booth 451 for information about Pacific Wave and presentations by some of the most prestigious researchers currently making use of the international networking that it provides.

Pacific Wave is a joint project between the CENIC and PNWGP, and is operated in collaboration with the University of Washington. Designed to enhance efficiency of IP traffic, Pacific Wave peering services offer excellent opportunities to pass IP traffic directly with other major national and international networks; reduce costs associated with IP traffic that would otherwise transit multiple circuits; and increase efficiency by directing traffic as quickly as possible to the target network/organization, reducing the number of 'hops' required to complete for the data to get to its destination.

UC San Diego has a reputation for being one of the most sustainability-conscious campuses in California with their Sustainability 2.0 Initiative and a faculty, staff, administration, and student body that enjoy a profound awareness of climate change and other environmental issues.

Among those issues is the climate impact of the ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) industry, with a carbon footprint and energy consumption equal to the famously problematic airline industry. Not only do the processing, switching, and routing technologies consume vast amounts of power, but the cooling required to keep such equipment running consumes even more, and these demands are slated to increase as the technology performs at higher and higher levels.

Addressing these concerns is Calit2's Project GreenLight, funded by the National Science Foundation under the supervision of Principal Investigator Tom DeFanti. Project GreenLight was initiated to discover creative ways to ensure that the next generation of data centers support a sustainable lifestyle and that the research sectors that use them are aware of the issues surrounding carbon-thrifty computing. Not only is the hardware and software itself studied to determine how best they can be optimized, but the equally crucial factors of cooling and structural engineering are also studied in depth along with applications from a myriad of data-intensive disciplines.

Of course, the ways in which such technology depends on and leverages advanced networks like CalREN are numerous. Researchers in fields like metagenomics, ocean observing, microscopy, bioinformatics, astronomy, digital media, and others that depend on massive data storage and processing require the unfettered global access to such resources that networks like CalREN provide. Without the ease of access made possible by these networks, the positive impact of carbon-thrifty or carbon-neutral computing can only reach as far as a campus VLAN. And the insights gained from Project GreenLight can reach around the world and have an enormous impact on the health of our shared environment, provided that the world's researchers can access them and put them to use themselves by creating more thrifty data centers and computing technologies.

Everyone at CENIC is aware of the vital role that networks like CalREN can play addressing the problem of climate change currently facing us all. However, it's the innovations that come from Project GreenLight and similar research projects around the world that make it possible for advanced networks to fulfill their role as part of the solution.

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

CENIC is keenly aware of the importance of what we provide to our community: cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support the needs of faculty, researchers, staff, and students. This requires not only expertise and commitment, but a constant desire to improve -- and to do that, we need your help.

We would like you to complete a survey to help us continue to improve. In our CENIC 2009-10 Survey, you'll find questions covering the technical performance both of our people and the CalREN networks, CENIC project management, CalREN Video Services, and how much your participation in CalREN benefits you and your institution. The entire survey will take between 5 and 10 minutes to complete.

The CENIC 2009-10 Survey will be open until June 30, 2010.

CENIC is delighted to announce the website for its 2010 Annual Conference, FULL SPEED AHEAD, to take place from March 8-10, 2010 in beautiful Monterey, CA. At cenic2010.cenic.org, you can currently find the Call for Presentations for our 2010 conference program as well as the Call for Award Nominations for the 2010 Innovations in Networking Awards.

Also available at the website is information about reserving your hotel room at the Hyatt Monterey. The deadline to reserve your room at the special discounted rate for single or double occupancy is a long way away at February 5, 2010, but reservations can nevertheless be made online now.

Registration for FULL SPEED AHEAD will open on November 2, 2009. Attendees will enjoy the same flexibility in payment and processing as in previous years, with the ability to register online and pay via check or major credit card. If using a major credit card, you will have the option to pay online at your leisure or at the conference.

If you'd like to stay up-to-date on all news related to FULL SPEED AHEAD, please subscribe to the RSS Feed for conference updates, and keep an eye on future issues of CENIC Today.

The Program Committee for the Secure IT 20010 conference on Information Technology and Network Security invites information security professionals to submit conference session proposals for the 9th Annual Secure IT conference, which will take place March 3-5, 2010 at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel Los Angeles.

Secure IT 2010 is presented by the University of California, the California State University and the California Community Colleges, and is hosted by California State University, San Bernardino.

Proposals are due before 5pm PT October 9, 2009. Details can be found at http://www.secureitconf.com.

Is water ice present or absent in a crater near the moon's south pole? NASA's Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission is seeking a definitive answer.

You can join Exploratorium staff for Shoot the Moon!, a special Webcast featuring live coverage of LCROSS crashing into the moon! Their team will be broadcasting live from the 36" Refractor Telescope at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton, where they'll watch the impact and investigate how this intentional crash could reveal the existence of water ice.

Facilitation of the video stream will occur thanks to CalREN, which will be used for transport of the real-time telescopic images taken at the Lick Observatory back to the streaming video servers at the Exploratorium.

The live webcast will take place early on the morning of October 9, 2009 at 4:00AM. If you're unable to make the live Webcast, you can watch the archive at www.explo.tv. As well as streaming the event live on their website, the Exploratorium will also be streaming the event into their island in Second Life.

US & World Networking News:

The first university-corporate Cisco TelePresence session through interconnection of a research and education telepresence exchange (National LambdaRail) and a commercial telepresence exchange has taken place. This significantly expands the collaboration potential of the telepresence platform for the academic and research communities.

National LambdaRail (NLR), AT&T and Cisco successfully tested and demonstrated the interconnection of the NLR Telepresence Exchange with the AT&T Telepresence Solution via the AT&T Business Exchange.

On its face, the proposed settlement of a lawsuit over Google Book Search — the internet titan's effort to digitize vast numbers of books, academic and otherwise, for all the world to consult online — is about resolving copyright and fair-use issues.

But the settlement, which goes before a federal judge in New York for approval next month, is about much more than that, according to experts assembled for the Berkeley School of Information's recent day-long conference on the implications raised by Google Books.

UCLA and the Los Angeles Unified School District open UCLA Community School, an innovative pilot school partnership committed to providing high-quality education in one of the city's most underserved neighborhoods. Pilot schools have charter-like autonomy over curriculum, budget and staffing but participate as full members of the school district.

Smart grid pioneers from around the world convening this month at University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), including San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), UC San Diego and CleanTECH San Diego to announce the formation of a coalition of 25 local, national and global organizations to transform the San Diego region's electrical grid into a digital smart grid.

Not even the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression could slow the ongoing explosion of traffic over international Internet connections, and service providers are still building to accommodate it.

The world economy slid into crisis about a year ago, crippled by key events such as the bankruptcy filing by investment bank Lehman Brothers, which occurred one year ago Tuesday. But between mid-2008 and mid-2009, the volume of Internet traffic between countries has actually grown faster than the prior year, according to research company Telegeography.

Zipcar, the world's largest car sharing service, and California State University Chico announce the launch of Zipcar's car-sharing program on the CSU Chico campus.

CSU Chico is the second CSU campus to partner with Zipcar (San Francisco State was the first) and the only location for Zipcar vehicles from San Francisco to Portland.

The program will help the University reduce demand for parking and support the University's commitment to sustainability while offering campus and community members a convenient, economical and environmentally friendly alternative to owning a car.

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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