CENIC News

First awards have just been made by the Department of Commerce (NTIA) and the USDA (RUS) for second round broadband funding. Included in the awards is one to provide funding for the construction of the United States Unified Community Anchor Network (U.S. UCAN), an advanced 100 Gigabit per second network backbone that will link regional networks such as CENIC across the nation. According to a news release about this award, it is intended that "UCAN's coast-to-coast advanced infrastructure will, in partnership with regional and state research and education networks, connect America's community anchor institutions -- ­schools, libraries, community colleges, health centers and public safety organizations -- ­to enable advanced applications not possible with today's typical Internet service."

The network is intended to offer its services to community anchors nationwide through a new not-for-profit organization (also called U.S. UCAN), which will be directed and governed by a partnership of the research and education networking community and representatives of community anchor institutions. In essence, the network will be owned and directed by its stakeholders. As a first priority, U.S. UCAN will make sure that it meets the needs established by its governing body of community anchors.

CENIC was aware of the application for this UCAN grant from the time it was submitted. Many questions remain to be answered with respect to how it will be implemented. For example, we do not understand how this initiative will affect CENIC's existing members, particularly the K-12 and Community colleges, who are well served today. Will there be new fees assessed to these "anchor institutions" and if so for what services? What is the relationship between UCAN's service to health centers to the FCC's Rural Telemedicine program, a $22M award of which was made to the University of California to create a California Telemedicine network.

While many questions exist, with over $60M in funding from Federal broadband funds, we know that UCAN will be launched. The California education community must become aware of and engaged in setting the direction of UCAN so it is not disadvantaged as compared to the services now received and the costs paid for those services. As CENIC better understands how California education can be engaged, we'll communicate engage our Board to assure that benefits to California are realized.

In last month's issue of CENIC Today, we mentioned a ring redesign used to provide connectivity to CalREN for the Fresno and Madera County Offices of Education. As part of that effort, a new Gigabit connection between these two county offices was completed during June. In addition, the 10 Gigabit connection to the San Diego County Office of Education that was announced as tested and readied in the May 3 issue of CENIC Today has been completed and is now in production.

California's Community Colleges have also seen activity this month, starting with a new Gigabit connection to CalREN for the North Orange County Community College District. In addition, a new Gigabit connection for West Hills Community College District has been put into production after the completion of the district's final exam schedule. Marin Community College District's Indian Valley Campus now enjoys a new Gigabit connection to CalREN, and a Gigabit connection for Imperial Valley College has been tested and accepted, and is expected to be put into production this summer.

Lastly, a 1 Gigabit connection has also been completed for the Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Asymmetric Warfare.

CENIC has been a supporter of the Canada-California Strategic Innovation Partnership since its 2006 launch, with the creation of an ultra-high-speed link between CENIC's California Research & Education Network and CAnet4, the Canadian advanced research and education network managed by CANARIE, in June of that year. With that high-speed link in place between CalREN and CAnet4 -- two of the most advanced such networks in the world -- collaboration between research institutions on both networks was given an enormous boost.

And CCSIP has been making the most of the collaborative opportunities that this network connection has enabled, selecting fifteen projects for support in response to a Call for Proposals. Nine of the Projects selected are collaborative events such as workshops and symposia while six consist of the development of Canada-California R&D business plans -- all of which can rely on the high-speed link between CalREN and CAnet4.

One business plan of particular interest to the advanced networking community is a collaboration between the San Diego Supercomputing Center and McGill University's CLUMEQ Supercomputing Center that aims to develop an ultra-energy-efficient datacenter for use in high-performance computing contexts. Datacenters that are born from the resulting design could serve as models for "green" HPC facilities around the world, which would become infinitely more valuable when coupled with the advanced networking required to make them truly accessible for the worldwide research community.

A second business plan of special interest is that between McGill University, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and university-industry collaborative booster Prompt to examine the broader topic of green ICT technology. As previously mentioned in CENIC Today and many places elsewhere, information and communications technology or ICT is estimated to have a carbon footprint equal to that of the airline industry. However, the benefits of pursuing green ICT are twofold, with both the industry itself reducing its carbon footprint, and the wise and efficient application of ICT innovations to other industries reducing theirs. Overall, these two approaches taken together show potential to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 30%. To this end, these three partners will bring together ten Canadian research universities, two UC campuses, and the organization behind CAnet4 -- CANARIE to develop an R&D consortium for green ICT. Not only climate health but economic health is the final aim of the consortium, with a $600 billion estimated global market for green ICT by 2013 as well as millions of new jobs.

Other business plans focus on the study of energy-efficient carbon capture and storage (CCS), environmental monitoring, improving the detection and treatment of disease, and the development of novel biofuels. Information about these Projects and the nine collaborative events that comprise the 15 Projects selected in response to the CCSIP's Call for Proposals can be found online at www.ccsip.org. In total, 23 Canadian universities, 8 campuses of the University of California, and 49 companies, government labs, and agencies were behind the impressive list of events and R&D business plans. CENIC looks forward to their collaborations, empowered in part by the collaboration between the Canadian and California advanced R&E networks.

Remote access to the W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea has been greatly facilitated via advanced networking, as outlined in the May 3 issue of CENIC Today. In the future however, another stargazer will join those already atop the summit, the Thirty Meter Telescope or TMT (artist's rendering shown at right), which upon its completion will be the world's largest. CENIC Associates the University of California and Caltech have joined with the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy in the TMT project, and June 24, 2010 saw the announcement by the Minister of Science and Technology for the Indian government Prithviraj Chavan that India would also take part in the project.

Four days later on June 28, the TMT project was given yet another boost as the Regents of the University of Hawaii, which owns the lease for the land on which the telescope would be built, approved the construction of the telescope on Mauna Kea's summit. When the telescope begins scientific operations, scheduled for 2018, the advanced networking that has already made it possible for researchers to access the telescope and its data from the mainland will enable astronomers worldwide to contribute to and share the advances in the understand of the universe that the telescope promises to reveal.

The University of Hawaii's David Lassner has been a tireless advocate for many years for Hawaii's research and education community and devoted to making sure that the state enjoys all the benefits of global advanced networking. Thanks to his efforts, the islands and the research and education facilities there are connected to one another and the rest of the world at ultra-high speeds, and given that the Hawaiian islands are home to some of the most important astronomical facilities on Earth, not only Hawaii but the entire planet has benefited enormously from Lassner's efforts. Not only are big science researchers the beneficiaries of Lassner's work, but schools, colleges, and universities in Hawaii as well, all of whom can take advantage of national and global advanced networking.

Given Hawaii's location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at roughly the center point of the Pacific Rim, the islands also play an enormous part in advanced networking in general, including the connections between CalREN and various other nations via the Pacific Wave distributed international peering facility. As a result, many researchers located elsewhere also have reason to thank Lassner for his efforts. Astronomers in China, Japan, and Australia who took part in the effective creation of the world's largest and nearly planet-sized radio telescope are an excellent example of this.

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

California has established itself as a global leader in innovation, and the ways in which its research community meets these challenges can serve as models nation- and worldwide, as well as examples of global collaboration with colleagues on every continent on the topics of sustainability and climate change.

The University of California is regarded as the premiere research university in the world, boasting more Nobel prize winners on its faculty that any other single institution. As one might expect, not only do the individual campuses and UC system as a whole all have sustainability-oriented operations, but sustainability-oriented research is also a hot topic on the various UC campuses statewide.

As a major nexus for agriculture-related research, UC Davis has made sustainable agriculture a major research priority. Agriculture changed vastly in the mid-20th century, with new high-yield techniques allowing farms to produce much larger and more uniform products than ever. However, this boom has not come without cost such as topsoil depletion, groundwater contamination, the decline of family farms, increasing costs, and economic and social challenges in rural communities. UC Davis has made it a priority to examine ways in which farms can continue to meet the needs of a growing global population for food, fiber, and other products while ensuring a healthy planet and continued ability to meet the needs of future generations. Areas of research include organic fertilizers and anti-pest compounds, techniques for ensuring healthy livestock, what are known as "biologically integrated" farms where each process employed reinforces another necessary process naturally, and healthy ways to move products to market.

Berkeley is a name that people recognize the world over as a hotbed for innovation of all kinds, technological as well as social. UC Berkeley is one of the icons of innovation, and this campus is also carrying out a significant amount of sustainability-oriented research, including sustainable transportation studies, one of the most novel network-dependent arenas for investigation be it logistics, networked infrastructure development and management, "smart" transportation possibilities, or roadways interfaced with first responder networks.

UC San Diego has been spotlighted before thanks to its partnership with UC Irvine in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, home of the GreenLight and Scalable Energy-Efficient Datacenter (SEED) projects for the development of green ICT technology. They are far from the only initiatives underway at the campus though, and a thorough list reads like a recipe book for meeting the challenges of progress without cost to ourselves in the future. UC Irvine's sustainability activity highlights some specifically climate-based research that is much like ocean-based observing in that it is highly dependent on advanced networking to realize its full potential thanks to globally dispersed instruments, researchers, and vast amounts of data and a need for experiments that can react in real time to their environments.

UCLA is another instantly recognizable name worldwide for top research in all fields, and sustainability is no different. UCLA currently has over 160 faculty engaged in climate and sustainability-related research. This research covers a wide range of topics critical to mitigating the causes of climate change, including the advanced-network-dependent topics of climate research, ocean research, and carbon capture and sequestration, among others.

Still another area of interest is under examination at UC Riverside, that of ecologically "friendly" navigation that would allow vehicles of all kinds to save fuel and hence shrink their carbon footprint. With the advantages brought by advanced networks, researchers can build an integrated, dynamic database of regional traffic activity. This enables drivers to select not just the fastest route in time, or the shortest route in distance, but now also the least fuel consumed, or even the least pollution emitted. Optimal paths from source to destination can be chosen by any of a variety of variables, and the model can be extended to other forms of travel as well. Other areas of sustainability research at the campus include atmospheric studies, fuel research, and sustainable energy systems -- again, all of which require high-performance networks like CalREN to realize their full potential.

The newest member of the UC family boasts the UC Merced Energy Research Institute, focused on sustainable energy production -- solar energy in particular, a natural interest on a campus located in the sunny Central Valley of California. Biofuels are also a natural area of interest in a campus located in California's own cornucopia. Other research focus areas include the fascinating science of optoelectronics or the use of photons as a means of data processing. Currently, fiber optics are used as a means of communication between computers, the "pipes" over which data flows. Processing that data still takes place the old-fashioned way, with electron-herding silicon chips made ever smaller and ever faster. However, one of the chief challenges with this form of processing is the heat that it generates, a prime concern when cooling is the single largest power appetite in any computer center, and a large source of down time due to failure of cooling systems. Optical-based processing can allow machines to run at room temperature without generating dangerous amounts of heat, and can allow data processing to take place over fiber-optics as well as communications.

This quick catalogue of the research being done on the above campuses is of course by no means the sum total of the sustainability-focused research taking place in the University of California, and CENIC Today readers are encouraged to visit the UC System Sustainability website for a full view of not only the research being done on each campus but the campus's individual efforts towards sustainable behavior themselves. Keep an eye out for future issues of CENIC Today to learn more about the sustainability-focused research taking place on other CENIC Associate campuses!

The TransLight/Pacific Wave (TL/PW) project builds on close and effective collaborations built over the last decade among the University of Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), and CENIC to create and operate a unified distributed exchange service for Research and Education (R&E) networking in the Asia-Pacific hemisphere. Building on a previous International Research Network Connections (IRNC) Program award from the National Science Foundation, the project has been awarded a further approximately $4 million over the next five years.

TL/PW will present a unified connectivity face toward the West for all US R&E networks including Internet2, National LambdaRail, and Federal agency networks, enabling general and specific peerings with more than 15 international R&E links, including those funded by other NSF IRNC projects, serving scores of countries. Distributed peering services at network Layers 1, 2, and 3 will allow the project to seamlessly support domain-specific projects while remaining committed to equitable shared global R&E network services. TL/PW will work with Internet2, National LambdaRail, the other IRNC awardees and international networks to provide seamless evolutionary production networking services to the international research community.

Says UH Vice President for Information Technology and CIO and recent winner of the Internet2 Richard Rose award (and this month's CENIC Featured Researcher) David Lassner, "The University of Hawaii is honored to be participating with CENIC, PNWGP, AARNet and our other partners to provide advance connectivity for international researchers and key resources such as the Mauna Kea Observatories. Over the next five years we will all work together to build on the successes of the first TL/PW award led by John Silvester, USC, and CENIC."

The value of TL/PW to the nation and the world is demonstrated by the fact that TL/PW is not proposing to buy new international links. Rather, TL/PW funding will be used to provide domestic backhaul, hosting, support and facilitation for those engaged in R&E networking in the region.

US & World Networking News:

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) today awarded more than $62.5 million in federal stimulus funding through its Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) to a group of national research and education networking organizations including Internet2 (also known as University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development), National LambdaRail (NLR), Indiana University, and the Northern Tier Network Consortium.

Sacramento City College and UC Davis officials joined today at a ceremonial groundbreaking for the new Sacramento City College Davis Center at UC Davis West Village. The Davis Center will be the first community college extension built on a University of California campus.

The center will be a permanent home for Sacramento City College, which has offered classes in leased space in the city of Davis for more than a decade. The new center will open its doors to more than 2,000 students in spring 2012.

Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand Ltd (REANNZ) selects TelstraClear to provide the international network for the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN) from November 2010.

The new arrangements will increase KAREN's international capacity to Australia and the USA to 1Gb/s.

Using the World Community Grid, scientists at the Help Conquer Cancer Project have found a way to automate and speed up protein crystallography, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Structural and Functional Genomics.

The world became a slightly safer place on May 13, when the Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) telescope in Hawaii started surveying the sky for killer asteroids. This 1.8 meter (60-inch) diameter telescope on Haleakala is designed to automatically search the skies for objects that either move or change their brightness from night to night. It contains the world's largest digital camera, with 1,400 megapixels.

This month, researchers at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland and the University of California, San Francisco began the highly automated, large-scale process of analyzing that DNA, which is being extracted from tens of thousands of saliva samples donated by Kaiser members in Northern California since 2008.

The goal of the study is to help scientists uncover the genetic roots of chronic disease and, perhaps, to find out why some people live longer than others.

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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