CENIC News

The December 2009 issue of CENIC Today included a President's Message focused on the broadband plan the FCC was scheduled to have completed by February 17, 2010. Since that time, the schedule has been extended a month and the research and education community was requested to provide comments via the two national networking organizations Internet 2 and NLR. I will highlight for readers the general direction of the comments provided in response to the FCC request for input and also comment on the other major Federal broadband initiative, the Round 2 Federal broadband stimulus funding Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA). Perhaps not surprisingly, there seems to be a reasonable degree of coordination between these two initiatives.

I was not a direct party to the request from the FCC to provide comments on the emerging plan and so learned of the request from Internet 2 and NLR. Unsurprisingly (and good for our community) the two national networks were aligned on the basics of a filing, and CENIC signed on to the filing as well. Twenty-two other State and regional networks and various other networking organizations also joined in the filing, including the Quilt and StateNets in both of which CENIC is an active member.

The filing recommends that the plan build on the extensive investment the research and education community has already made in national network infrastructure, leveraging the human expertise and collaborations they have already developed, in order to bring advanced broadband connectivity to the nation's "community anchor institutions." The joint comments specifically address how the FCC plan could spur economic growth through strategic investments in high capacity networks that currently connect community anchor institutions like universities, community colleges, hospitals, libraries, K-12 schools, and public safety entities. The filing goes on to state, "Investing in these connections will ensure that these institutions have the capacity they need to fulfill their missions to serve their communities; help stimulate the demand for broadband; and most importantly promote jobs and boost the economy." The full filing is available on the CENIC website.

The CENIC Executive Committee and I decided to join in the filing, although we were not supportive of every aspect of the comments. We supported the filing knowing that the specifics will be subject to considerable modification before they would be included in any plan that is ultimately adopted. It is impossible to determine how many of the research and education community's comments will make it into the FCC plan, much less how the comments would be modified as Congress addresses the plan. However, the filing seems directionally aligned with CENIC's interests.

The other major Federal development which occurred since the last newsletter was published was the issuance of the Round 2 stimulus NOFA. The broadband networking component of the NOFA is heavily oriented to the addition of "middle-mile" broadband infrastructure and the focus on connecting anchor institutions. (Anchor institutions refer to schools, colleges, Universities, libraries, public safety organizations, and health care providers.) It should be noted that community colleges are separately highlighted in the NOFA. The focus of the NOFA is on a "comprehensive community" approach, meaning that funding requests to connect only one type of organization -- for example, schools/colleges, libraries, or health care organizations -- would not rate well. An additional specific priority is public/private partnerships.

CENIC is currently reviewing the NOFA to identify opportunities for participation and potential private sector partners. In parallel, we have received requests from a number of potential applicants requesting that we partner with them in an application. It is likely CENIC will participate in one or more applications, most likely as a partner with a commercial networking firm. As plans emerge, the will be reported on in future editions of CENIC Today.

For those who are interested, the NTIA NOFA can be found online.

UC Santa Cruz's Gigabit Ethernet connections to the CalREN backbone node at Sunnyvale have been replaced with fiber-optic based connections, providing greatly increased performance and bandwidth and adding a direct, dedicated connection to the campus's Silicon Valley Center located at NASA's Ames Research Center. Previously, the campus's connectivity to CalREN was via two connections, one connecting the campus to the CalREN Sunnyvale node and the other to the node at Palo Alto, providing diversity. With the completion of this project, the connections to the Sunnyvale backbone node have been replaced with CENIC-managed "dark fiber" connections, providing for increased robustness and performance, as well as increasing the campus's connection to the high-performance research tier of the CalREN network from 1 Gb/s to 10 Gb/s.

California's Community Colleges have also closed out 2009 and begun 2010 with many new Gigabit connections, including those to the College of Alameda, Citrus College, Shasta College, Antelope Valley College, Merced College, and Diablo Valley College. Additionally, Mt. San Antonio College now enjoys two Gigabit connections to separate CalREN backbone node sites, providing diversity to the campus, and the California Community College Chancellor's Office Sacramento datacenter now enjoys a Gigabit connection to CalREN as well. This new connection will provide the Chancellor's Office with full redundancy in their mail, database, storage, and backup infrastructure and allows the Chancellor's Office to better serve faculty, staff, and students throughout California's community college system.

The Ventura County Office of Education now enjoys a second Gigabit connection to the CalREN backbone, providing the Office with diversity, and a new 10 Gb/s connection has been put into place between Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Harvey Mudd College.

Four groundbreaking projects that focus on the innovative use and expansion of high-performance networking were honored by CENIC as recipients of the 2010 Innovations in Networking Awards.

Four awards are presented annually in the categories of Educational, Gigabit/Broadband, High-Performance Research, and Experimental/Developmental Applications. The awards are given annually by CENIC to highlight exemplary innovations that leverage ultra high-bandwidth optical networking, particularly where those innovations have the potential to revolutionize the ways in which instruction and research are conducted, or in the case of the Gigabit award, where they further the deployment of broadband in underserved areas. The award presentation ceremony will take place at the CENIC Annual Conference, "Full Speed Ahead," in Monterey on March 8-10, 2010.

This year's winners include:

eTranscript California -- Educational Applications:

One of the most significant advantages to a dedicated, owned advanced network designed specifically for research & education is the freedom it affords the community to develop complex applications secure in the knowledge that the infrastructure will support them. One such application is eTranscript California, which provides secure, streamlined electronic transcript exchange for 53 post-secondary institutions in the State (community colleges, California State University campuses, and many private and independent colleges). With a statewide transcript system in place, many other things are made possible such as translating large numbers of transcripts into national standards, tracking, combining transcripts into a single Composite Transcript, interfacing with high schools, and longitudinal studies on student success. Also, the CA Community College Chancellor's Office estimates that the transcript-related costs for eTranscript California member colleges will drop from an average of seven dollars to less than fifty cents per transcript.

Rachelle Chong -- Gigabit/Broadband Applications:

Closing the "digital divide" is a matter of great concern for California, where our rural population is larger than that of at least twenty entire states. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) allocated $100 million over two years to the CASF. The CASF provides incentives to companies to bring broadband service to unserved and underserved areas of California, many of which are rural, remote, or socio-economically disadvantaged communities. As a CPUC Commissioner, and the commissioner assigned to the CASF proceeding, Rachelle Chong was instrumental in the creation of the CASF and defining workable processes for implementation.

Thanks to her leadership, current Special Counsel of Advanced Information and Communications Technologies for the Office of the State Chief Information Officer Chong has brought California closer to its ultimate goal of ubiquitous broadband services for unserved and underserved communities. "Without a broadband pipe to provide access to the Internet, these unserved communities will become `digital have-nots'," said Chong. "Policymakers and corporate leaders across the nation have been talking about the importance of deploying broadband infrastructure for years, yet this critical infrastructure is not available throughout the state. It is time to stop talking and finish the job."

Enhancing Student Exchange Experiences with High Definition Videoconference -- High-Performance Research Applications:

Monash University in Australia and the University of California, San Diego have added high-definition videoconferencing to their respective exchange programs, enabling transformative experiences for students and faculty that would not otherwise have been possible. HD video allows mentors at UCSD to attend final student seminars that are presented both to audiences at Monash and their mentors at UCSD concurrently. Thus, they receive feedback from both Monash and UCSD mentors, significantly enhancing the outcomes of their internship. Likewise, Monash students at UCSD present final seminars back to their mentors in Australia whilst presenting to a local audience at UCSD. Monash University’s program goes a step further by adding an advanced seminar scheme, in which students attend seminars given by world leading experts before they depart Australia. The seminar scheme is novel, because it makes it feasible to attract some of the world's best researchers "virtually" to Monash.
Monash's Chancellor, Dr Alan Finkel, wrote recently of his experience attending one of these seminars, "I've participated in numerous video conferences to date but nothing like this. The quality was so high that the experience was almost as if we were all in the same room."

Scalable Energy-Efficient Datacenters -- Experimental/Developmental Applications:

One of the most interesting and potentially revolutionary outcomes of the development of the Internet is the ability gained by every person on Earth to generate enormous amounts of data, a large portion of which must be stored in datacenters. With major drivers such as Google and others entering this arena, the proliferation of datacenters promises to challenge researchers developing models for interconnectivity, robustness, and sustainability. In response to this, a UC San Diego-led team of computer scientists and optical interconnection systems technologists in the Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN) is developing Scalable Energy Efficient Data Centers, or SEED. SEED consists of novel optical interconnection technologies for a multi-stage network topology. The goal is to build SEED as an integrated solution encompassing physical layer hardware, protocols, and topologies — while offering tomorrow's data centers greater scalability, bisectional bandwidth, fault tolerance, and energy efficiency.

Also being recognized with the 2010 Outstanding Individual Contribution award is Tom West, former president of both CENIC and most recently, CEO of National LambdaRail (NLR). West has over four decades of executive management experience in the research and higher education community. He has served as a small college president, a vice chancellor for administration for regional campuses in a public university system, and 26 years as the Chief Information Technology Officer (CITO) for two large public university systems -- Indiana University (1973-1981) and the California State University (1981-1999).

From March 1999 through June 2004 he served as the President and Chief Executive Officer for CENIC. He served as CEO for both CENIC and NLR from September 2003 through June 2004, a time of great expansion for CENIC during which both the company and the communities it serves benefited tremendously from his extraordinary vision and ability to turn that vision into reality.

CENIC has grown accustomed to researchers within the community we serve making discoveries that blur the boundary between day-to-day life and science fiction. Nevertheless, it isn't every day that a team of crack astronomers on multiple continents can lay claim to having discovered a "super-Earth" much less several of them. One such researcher, and a member of a trans-Pacific team that has upped the roster of known planets beyond our solar system by at least six, is UC Santa Cruz/UCO Lick astronomer Steven Vogt.

Last month, Vogt and other researchers from around the US, Australia, and the United Kingdom published several exoplanet-related papers relying on data from both the Keck facility atop Mauna Kea and the Anglo-Australian Telescope in New South Wales, one of which announced the discovery of three or more planets around a Sun-like star named 61 Virginus. All of 61 Virginus's planets feature low-eccentricity orbits (meaning that their orbits are relatively close to perfect circles, a presumed necessity for a stable climate and the development of life) and masses larger than that of the Earth but not as large as the "gas giant" planets in our own solar system such as Jupiter and Saturn -- hence the nickname for such planets, "super-Earths." The planets' trips around their distant sun respectively take less than a week, slightly over a month, and for the furthest away, roughly four months. This is the first known example among planet-hunters of a Sun-like star (sometimes called a yellow dwarf star and powered by the conversion of hydrogen to helium deep in its interior) hosting a "super-Earth" planet. Most other discovered exoplanets revolve around much smaller, cooler stars presumably at the end of their lifetimes; the lighter and smaller the star, the easier it is for Earthbound researchers to detect the tiny wobbles in its movement that hint at the circling planet exerting gravitational "tugs" from one side or the other as the star floats along through space.

The team also discovered a "super-Jupiter" orbiting another Sun-like star 23 Librae, and yet another super-Earth (possibly with company in the form of two larger planets) around HD 1461 in the constellation of Cetus.

Readers curious about the ever-growing roster of planets that have been found outside of our own solar system are invited to visit Exoplanets.org and the California Planets Survey, which lists a catalogue of nearby exoplanets.

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

The Golden State is no stranger to earthquakes, so when other parts of the world are devastated by similar disasters, its research and education community feels particularly motivated to jump into action. And from donation sites and fundraisers to direct mobilization and support efforts, CENIC is proud that the community it was created to serve has responded valiantly to the terrible disaster of the January 13 earthquake in Haiti.

In CENIC's 2006 Annual Conference in Oakland, the Naval Postgraduate School's Brian Steckler presented on Hastily Formed Networks and disaster response; the NPS had put its expertise into action after Hurricane Katrina. A Hastily Formed Networks Team was created in response to the Boxing Day Tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004, spending two to three weeks per month on the ground in the affected areas for five months, making possible the communications networks that all disaster responders rely on but that are so often crippled after such events. The Team, led Steckler, also went into action after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince as well, bringing not only their expertise but $350,000 of emergency communications equipment to enable responders to organize the dizzying array of materials and information needed to help the people of Haiti as quickly as possible. (Among the responders are volunteer medical personnel from UCLA and UCSF, many of whom are experienced at delivering medical aid in developing nations worldwide.)

Further aiding the thousands of disaster responders was San Diego State University's Visualization Center, led by co-directors Eric Frost (another previous CENIC conference presenter on advanced networks and disaster response) and John Graham. SDSU's partnership with the US Navy has created a collaboration whereby the Viz Lab is the chief resource for processing geo-based image data for the Navy. Such data can help emergency teams sharpen their response, thus enabling them to save more lives more effectively and efficiently. The data can be found at www.inrelief.org and the Haiti Crisis Map. Like the Naval Postgraduate School, the Viz Lab also functioned as a valuable resource during Hurricane Katrina and the Boxing Day Tsunami as well, but the earthquake in Haiti marks the first time that the technology has been able to aid responders as the event itself unfolds.

Mobilizing things like food, water, shelter, and communications is a vital part of disaster response, but people-centered data is perhaps the most important both to survivors and families awaiting news of loved ones. UC San Diego's Center for Research in Computing and the Arts stepped in alongside web giant Google to help organize and make available names, relationships, locations, and other data that would make it possible for people affected by the tragedy to find one another and share information about themselves and others easily and quickly. CRCA researcher Tim Schwartz brought colleagues together, and not long after the quake, he and ten fellow developers had created a database at www.haitianquake.com containing over 6,000 entries. They quickly learned of a similar effort at reunifying survivors and their loved ones underway at Google, merging the two projects at last at haiticrisis.appspot.com where nearly 55,000 entries await anyone searching for news about someone close to them.

As well as responding directly to such events, the research and education community in California is always mindful of lessons learned in the larger scheme of emergency preparedness and disaster response. Calit2 and UCSD are working together to ensure the necessary data is gathered that will help responders in future events deliver medical care quickly and efficiently, and thanks to CalREN's national connectivity, the Exploratorium Teacher Institute's Eric Muller will participate in the Mid-Atlantic Gigapop in Philadelphia for Internet2 (MAGPI)'s international videoconference on The Crisis in Haiti, taking place on February 19, 2010.

Readers interested in contributing to the relief effort are encouraged to visit the American Red Cross.

In addition to the announcement of the 2010 Innovations in Networking Award Winners above, CENIC is pleased to announce that our 2010 Conference Program is now available online for attendees who wish to learn more about the presentations, demos, and social events awaiting them this year at the Hyatt Monterey in beautiful Monterey, CA. Registration times are shown, along with General Sessions presentations, Keynote Addresses, Breakout Sessions on Teaching & Learning and Research & Technology, and the program of talks, Evening Reception, and poster session that will take place as part of the visit to the campus of the Naval Postgraduate School. Visit the program and learn more!

And while you're at the conference website, you can make your hotel reservations at the discounted rate of $174/night until the end of this week, February 5, 2010.

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:

In a position paper for community input at NSF's Future of High Performance Computing Workshop in early December, Calit2 Director Larry Smarr reviewed the successes, failures and continuing challenges of the NSF supercomputing program that he helped create. In 1983, Smarr (then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) was the first to propose what would later become known as the NSF Supercomputer Centers program, followed shortly by a proposal from UCSD's Sid Karin.

The Connecting California's Children: California's Efforts to Leverage Technology in K-12 Education addresses the general question "how does K-12 education in California use and benefit from the investment being made in technology?"

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ran into a potential setback Jan. 8 in its push to draft rules that would require internet providers to give equal treatment to all data flowing over their networks.

Internet2 announced on December 9, 2009 that after twelve years of service, president and CEO Douglas Van Houweling has asked the Board of Trustees to begin the process of identifying a successor. Van Houweling has agreed to continue to lead the organization as president and CEO until his successor is transitioned into the role.

UC Davis physicians, nurses and administrative leaders gathered on Friday morning, Jan. 15, to mark the official groundbreaking for the new California Telehealth Resource Center on the grounds of the university's Sacramento campus. The four-story, $36 million building is designed to enhance and complement UC Davis' long history and wide range of expertise in the field of telehealth, which is the use of high-speed telecommunications for medical consultations, distance education, critical care and emergency services, as well as health-care training.

For the first time scientists have seen molten lava flowing from a deep-ocean seafloor volcano, exploding into 35-foot-long streams of red and gold and rising as bubbles as much as 3 feet across.

"Volcanic rocks, especially pillow basalts, are one of the most common rock forms on Earth, and yet no one has ever seen them forming in the deep ocean before," said University of Washington oceanographer Joe Resing, chief scientist of an expedition earlier this year when scientists witnessed the sight at a volcano 4,000 feet below the surface.

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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