CENIC News

I shared in the July 2 issue of CENIC Today findings of the GAO Broadband Report. I mentioned that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) directed the FCC to develop a national broadband plan by February 17, 2010.

To this end, a task force is currently developing draft broadband proposals for FCC consideration. As part of their work, members of the task force have identified critical gaps in the nation's policies, programs, and practices that must be filled for the country to take advantage of universal adoption and deployment of broadband. A news release on the work of the task force describes these gaps in some detail, but several among them have special implications for the CENIC community:

The Universal Service Fund (USF), which among other things funds the federal E-Rate discount program available to schools, does not support broadband deployment and adoption.

The task force notes that the majority of funding supports phone service, not broadband. Certainly the CENIC K-12 community needs to follow carefully any potential changes to the USF that could affect their use of the E-Rate program.

There is a deployment gap because high costs can limit broadband deployment.

This is well understood by the CENIC community, particularly those in rural, remote, and underserved areas. The broadband stimulus programs of the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture are designed, in part, to help address this.

The news release goes on to say that achieving the broadband goals identified by the task force requires training and support in digital skills, and ready access to computers. Certainly schools, community colleges, and libraries are crucial vehicles for addressing these issues, should funding be provided to expand their roles in these areas.

Furthermore, the FCC has also published several requests for comment to solicit input as part of the development of their national broadband plan. The full set of issues on which the FCC is currently accepting comments is available at the FCC website, and those related to this topic and which are of particular interest to the CENIC community are linked below:

• Broadband Adoption
• Health Care Delivery Elements
• The Role of the Universal Service Fund and Intercarrier Compensation
• Moving Toward a Digital Democracy
• Data Portability and its Relationship to Broadband
• Research Necessary for Broadband Leadership

The fact that the FCC is studying broadband deployment is encouraging. We have to hope that the FCC understands the important roles that networks such as CalREN and the efforts of our members play in addressing broadband challenges. CENIC is examining the various FCC broadband notices to identify those where it is likely to be productive for us to make comments. Readers of CENIC Today may wish to do the same.

The month of November has seen a tremendous amount of activity on behalf of California's Community Colleges, with Gigabit connections deployed to the following community colleges:

Contra Costa, Berkeley City, Chabot, and Napa Valley Colleges as well as College of Marin's Indian Valley Campus all received Gigabit connectivity to the CalREN backbone node at Sunnyvale. Rio Hondo and Los Angeles Mission Colleges received Gigabit connectivity to the Los Angeles backbone node. Cañada College received Gigabit connectivity to the Oakland backbone node, and Merced College received Gigabit connectivity to the Merced backbone node.

In addition, Miramar College was provided with a DS-3 connection to the CalREN Los Angeles backbone node, providing the campus with diversity thanks to its existing Gigabit connection to UC San Diego.

From November 16-19, the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR hosted some of the world's most cutting-edge network-based experiments and demonstrations as part of this year's Supercomputing conference, SC09. The conference has built a reputation for revolutionary demonstrations and challenges as well as a top-flight technical program, bringing together the best and brightest researchers and exhibitors in the world of high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis.

Facilitating some of the most groundbreaking research is the distributed international network peering facility Pacific Wave. At Booth 451 on the SC09 show floor, researchers in the arenas of ocean study, advanced networking, and virtualization showcased their innovations, made possible by global advanced networking provided by Pacific Wave and other advanced networks. The presentations that took place spotlighted the high-performance research being carried out thanks to Pacific Wave in disciplines of vital importance to our changing planet.

Among the researchers was ocean studies luminary John Delaney of the University of Washington, who spoke on Monday evening during the conference's opening gala on Next-Generation Ocean Science.

In his visually stunning and well-attended presentation, Delaney discussed the advances that could be expected from cabled ocean observatories now under construction in the U.S. and Canada, such as the Regional Scale Nodes component of the National Science Foundation Ocean Observatories Initiative and NEPTUNE Canada, both in the northeast Pacific Ocean. Through such networked observatories made possible by Pacific Wave, ocean scientists can quantify powerful episodic events such as giant storms and erupting volcanoes within the context of longer-term decadal changes, and thus begin to approach dependable predictive models of ocean behavior.

Tuesday and Wednesday saw an emphasis on trans-Pacific advanced networking as well as innovations at UC San Diego which could enable the carbon-costly arena of advanced computing to take its place as a vital solution to the problem of climate change. USC's Celeste Anderson presented on the basics of Pacific Wave, its functioning, funding, and infrastructure. The transmission of extremely high-quality, live video over flexible, self-healing network architectures was a key topic treated by presenters from NTT Laboratories, with emphasis on the crystal-clear, high-def live link shown in the NTT booth between the SC09 showfloor and Osaka, Japan. On Tuesday, viewers of this link at the NTT booth were also treated to a surprise when the remote cameras placed high over the Osaka skyline revealed the long, black limousines of the Imperial motorcade passing along an elevated freeway as the Emperor of Japan made his way to visit an Osaka school! Presenters from KISTI and the National Center for High-Performance Computing also highlighted their international collaborative projects made possible by Pacific Wave.

Tuesday also featured UCSD's George Papen presenting on Sustainable Energy-Efficient Datacenters (SEED), a crucial topic of interest in a world where computers have become increasingly power-hungry as the need for remote datacenters is multiplying fast. And Calit2's Tom DeFanti introduced viewers to globally shared visualization and the hardware- and software-related challenges that must be met to achieve it before we can bring telepresence and collaboration to the next level. DeFanti focused on the innovations developed by the University of Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory and Calit2, currently being used at KAUST, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. At the KAUST booth, the collaborative potential of such system made to bring both people and data together was shown with live demonstrations linking the NexCAVE on the SC09 showfloor to the StarCAVE virtual reality environment hundreds of miles away at the UCSD campus.

Established 21 years ago, the annual Supercomputing conference has built a diverse community of participants including researchers, scientists, computing center staff members, IT and data center management, application developers, computer manufacturing personnel, program managers, journalists and congressional staffers. This diversity is one of the conference's main strengths, making it a yearly "must attend" forum for stakeholders throughout the technical computing community.

CENIC has often focused on grid computing-related software to showcase the tools being created by the California research and education community that are helping advanced networks like CalREN reach their full potential as tools of innovation. Past winners of our Innovations in Networking Awards include Caltech's MonALISA and UltraLight software, and at UC Santa Barbara a team of researchers led by Rich Wolski has created Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems or EUCALYPTUS, an open-source software providing much the same time, processing, and storage resource management for cloud computing systems.

The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is interface-compatible with Amazon.com's EC2 (arguably the most commercially successful Cloud computing service), but the infrastructure is designed to be modified and extended so that multiple client-side interfaces can be supported. In addition, EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic web service technology making it easy to install and maintain.

Overall, the goal of the EUCALYPTUS project is to foster community research and development of Elastic/Utility/Cloud service implementation technologies, resource allocation strategies, service level agreement (SLA) mechanisms and policies, and usage models. Although open source, the software has been commercialized as well and features enterprise-level solutions at eucalyptus.com.

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 Keynote Speakers for FULL SPEED AHEAD, its 2010 annual conference to be held in March 2010 in Monterey, CA. In addition to three days of top-notch programming relating to advanced networks for research and education, and a visit to the campus of the Naval Postgraduate School, attendees will enjoy Keynote Addresses by Steve Midgley, Education Director at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.

Steve Midgley is the Education Director at the FCC, heading the education section of the National Broadband Plan. Prior to his work at the FCC, he was the principal of Mixrun, a technology consulting firm. Mixrun projects include working with the California Department of Education on a project called Brokers of Expertise, which uses on-line and real world systems to share and build the expertise of educators. Steve previously served as a Program Manager for the Stupski Foundation designing and implementing grants for data and technology in K-12 education. He was also the founding Vice President of Engineering and Software Architect for LoopNet Inc., now a publicly traded commercial real estate technology company.

Ed Lazowska's research and teaching concern the design, implementation, and analysis of high performance computing and communication systems. Lazowska is a member of the Microsoft Research Technical Advisory Board, and serves as a board member or technical advisor to a number of high-tech companies and venture firms. He co-chaired the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee from 2003-05, and chairs the Computing Community Consortium, an effort sponsored by the National Science Foundation to engage the computing research community in envisioning more audacious research challenges. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.

In addition to these Keynote Speakers, FULL SPEED AHEAD attendees who choose to visit the NPS campus will also enjoy a Plenary Address by the Vice President and Dean of Research in the Department of Physics at NPS, Karl van Bibber. Before joining NPS, Dr. van Bibber worked with many of the most prestigious research institutions, including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stanford University as an Assistant Professor of Physics, and later Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as Chief Scientist.

Further updates are in the works, so be sure to visit the FULL SPEED AHEAD website and subscribe to the conference RSS Feed for more information on the conference program and other activities.

US & World Networking News:

The IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery will jointly present the inaugural Ken Kennedy Award to Dr. Francine Berman for her leadership in building national-scale cyberinfrastructure, the environment that supports rapidly expanding computing and information services over networked resources, including the Internet.

There is water on the Moon, scientists stated unequivocally on November 13. The confirmation of scientists' suspicions is welcome news to explorers who might set up home on the lunar surface and to scientists who hope that the water, in the form of ice accumulated over billions of years, holds a record of the solar system's history.

For the second year in a row, the National and Mid-Pacific ICT Centers are joining forces to offer a Winter ICT Educator Conference, January 7-8, 2010, in San Francisco. The event will feature presentations from industry sources of ICT educational resources and from the NCICT and MPICT educator communities on quality ICT educational practices.

The University of California on Nov. 9 launched a Global Health Institute using almost $4 million in startup funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The institute will begin a one-year master's degree program for enrolling students in fall 2011 and focus the expertise of the university's 10 campuses in creating solutions to the world's global health challenges.

On November 26, the Governor-General of Australia, Ms Quentin Bryce AC, launched a book at Admiralty House, commissioned by AARNet (Australia's Academic and Research Network) to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Internet in Australia. AARNet -- 20 years of the Internet in Australia documents the history of how the Internet network was established in Australia through AARNet.

The San Diego Community College District (SDCCD) is going solar without having to make a capital investment. The district recently approved a 20-year agreement with Borrego Solar, a national solar power contractor based in San Diego suburb El Cajon, CA, to construct and maintain a photovoltaic system that will annually provide about 2.4 megawatts of green energy at six locations in the district, the equivalent of powering 650 homes per year.

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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