CENIC News

Many CENIC members and readers of CENIC Today may not fully understand the extent of connectivity among national research and education networks, the role CENIC plays in this connectivity, and the value such connectivity bring to researchers, educators, and students. I'd like to go through a short review of current events in this arena related to the National Science Foundation's International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program.

There is a significant amount of connectivity among other countries' national research and education networks and those in the US. The map below obtained from GLIF illustrates this connectivity, which connects resources and researchers around the globe and effectively makes the Earth one large laboratory:

The US is a major beneficiary in the connection of national networks. Other countries pay for transport to the US, and the US, through the above-named modest NSF program, provides funds to interconnect these countries' international networks once they touch down in the US. CENIC participates in two IRNC projects, TransLight/Pacific Wave (TL/PW) and AmLight.  Together these enable the interconnection of international research and education networks with US research networks, with TL/PW operating on the West Coast among Pacific Rim networks and AmLight among Central and South American networks. Via their interconnections with one another, such as the 10G connection linking TL/PW and its sister international landing point TransLight/StarLight in Chicago and another 10 G connection between TL/PW and AmLight West, researchers in many countries are able to collaborate seamlessly with one another.

Reaching computing resources and other researchers is not the only benefit of this type of international networking, however. In many sciences such as astronomy and ocean observing, the most valuable instruments are extremely rare and remotely located. For example this type of connectivity provides astronomers access to some of the most advanced telescopes in the world in the Chilean Atacama desert and atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii which, while obviously not a foreign country, receives its most robust network connectivity as a result of the Australian AARNet passing through the state on its way to two locations on the West Coast. Ocean instrumentation such as the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Regional Scale Nodes and the Canadian NEPTUNE ocean array are further examples of the value of international networking.

Other collaborations in the Americas include genomic research taking place between Argentina, Chile, Peru, and the United States that promises new food-based innovations, lake observations that unite Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, and the US, and high-energy physics research based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the US that unites scientist throughout the Americas.

The end result of this Earth-wide connectivity will be an equally global vision of collaboration which has already begun to gel, to the point where such research ceases to be seen as collaboration and is simply viewed as the way research is done. The fact that colleagues, data, instruments, and processing power occupy multiple time zones will no longer enter into consideration. There will be no "collaboratories," but only laboratories, and the Earth will be the biggest one of all.

Interested readers of CENIC Today can find out more about all of these projects through presentations at the IRNC Kickoff Workshop website at http://irncworkshop.indiana.edu/.

During the first month of the new 2010-11 fiscal year, California's Community Colleges received several new circuits. Imperial Valley College now enjoys a Gigabit connection to the El Centro CalREN backbone node. Monterey Peninsula College also has received a new Gigabit connection to CalREN, and Mt. San Jacinto College's Menifee Campus received a Gigabit connection to the Los Angeles CalREN backbone node; CENIC is currently in the final stage of working with Menifee Campus to put the new circuit into production.

California's K-12 System received new connections as well, as new K-12 node site the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District received a Gigabit connection. This new node site will serve schools and districts in northern Santa Barbara county. The Tehama County Office of Education also received a new Gigabit connection. Like the Santa Maria JUHSD, this is a new K12 node site in Tehama county which will have redundancy via the Red Bluff Joint Union High School District node site.

Lastly for this month, in order to have expansion capabilities in our Los Angeles backbone node, four temporary new circuits were installed to permit the upgrade of existing equipment. The last of these circuits -- a Gigabit connection to UC Irvine -- was put into service.

10 Gbps paths from CENIC's, and PNWGP's Research & Education Networks to leverage
Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 to Boost NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative

When a national network of ocean observatories begins streaming environmental sensor data in March 2012, researchers throughout California will be able to use the state's high-speed academic network to transmit some of that data to storage and computing clouds operated by Amazon Web Services.

On July 15, CENIC and PNWGP announced two 10 Gigabit per second (Gbps) connections to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for the use of CENIC's members in California, as well as PNWGP's multistate K-20 research and education community. With these new ultra-high-performance peering connections, members of CENIC and PNWGP can take full advantage of those services, whether for K-12 education or for university-based research.

"The ability to use cost-effective cloud services to store and process large amounts of data is vital for researchers in many of the most active areas of research," says CENIC President and CEO Jim Dolgonas. "Collaborative research is dependent on the ability to share, and seamlessly access and manipulate data. With these new peering connections to Amazon Web Services, both the CENIC and PNWGP communities can obtain maximum speed and benefit from AWS cloud services."

CENIC owns, operates, and manages the ultra-high-performance California Research & Education Network (CalREN), an Internet-based network comprising nearly 3,000 miles of fiber-optic cable that stretches throughout California and to which the state's entire K-20 public education system and a significant number of private institutions connect. The 10 Gbps connection that PNWGP and CENIC have collaborated on to connect to Amazon S3 is now joined by a 10 Gbps connection linking CalREN and PNWGP to Amazon EC2. The connections enable out-of-the-box, server-based computation from any computer on the CalREN network in California.

Members of CENIC include the California K-12 system, all 114 campuses of California's Community Colleges, all 23 campuses of the California State University, all 10 campuses of the University of California, and prestigious private universities including Caltech, USC, Stanford, and others. With this type of fiber-optic path connecting California's research and educational institutions, data exchanges can take place in a fraction of a second -- enabling research and collaboration previously within the realm of science fiction.

California is not the only state that will benefit, however. Thanks to PNWGP's multi-state, high-performance research and education network connecting nearly all of the major research institutions and many other schools and colleges in Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, Idaho and Hawaii, will automatically get direct high-performance access to the full range of cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services.

Among the first users to benefit from access to Amazon Web Services will be researchers participating in the National Science Foundation-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Cyberinfrastructure (CI) project. The University of California, San Diego is building the information technology and telecommunications infrastructure that will bring ocean and atmospheric sensor data from the observatories and make them available to environmental researchers around the country and throughout the world. Research teams in California will have the option to do their storage and computing on their own machines, or remotely on Amazon S3 or Amazon EC2.

As far back as 2006, OOI CI researchers recognized that given the scale of the initiative, it would be too expensive and unwieldy to manage all storage and computation via the traditional model; i.e., by building large, dedicated data centers.

"We always envisioned cloud computing as a key component of our implementation strategy," said John Orcutt, OOI CI Principal Investigator and a professor of geophysics at UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "At our core we are a sensor network, and with streaming data from sensors, we need both continual and periodic computation, including elasticity to deal with a highly variable demand. So we focused on core measurement processing as well as distribution and presentation of the data. This led to a shared model where some work could be managed by academic computing and other work by commercial clouds."

"21st century discovery will be driven by the automated analysis of massive amounts of sensor data captured from the world around us," said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering and Director of the eScience Institute at UW. "The focus is on data, more than cycles. Cloud resources are an essential component. The direct connections from to the Amazon Web Services cloud from CENIC and PNWGP provides scientists with the bandwidth they need to utilize these resources."

CENIC officials identified a set of research opportunities where Amazon Web Services could be of substantial use in the academic world. In addition to K-12 storage and computation, one such class of opportunities was environmental observation. Both UW and UC San Diego are involved in the $400 million Ocean Observatories Initiative, and its Cyberinfrastructure group -- led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography and based in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) -- determined that cloud computing and remote storage would reduce the need for capital expenditures.

"We view cloud computing as providing two core benefits," said OOI CI project manager Matthew Arrott. "With cloud computing you buy computing resources on demand, as you need them. It's also different from the standard, fixed data center model, with more emphasis on agility of deployment."

The OOI will monitor and forecast environmental changes in the oceans on global, regional and coastal scales. Scientists will be able to extrapolate from data gathered by an array of more than 50 diverse sensor types and other scientific instruments that will communicate through permanently installed seafloor cables and satellite telemetry. Scientists will then be able to share data with their colleagues around the world via OOI's networked cyberinfrastructure, which is being implemented by a team of computer scientists, engineers and geophysicists.

In the long run, hundreds or thousands of researchers will benefit from the new high-bandwidth connections between CalREN and PNWGP's networks and Amazon Web Services. "We anticipate that many OOI users will need Amazon's cloud," said OOI CI's Matthew Arrott.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. Like Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 is a web service. It provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud, and it is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2 features a simple web service interface that allows a researcher to obtain and configure the massive compute resources that innovative research requires.

CENIC and PNWGP member researchers who are interested in making use of the new 10 Gbps connections to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) can contact CENIC at info@cenic.org mailto:info@cenic.org for more information.

July 28, August 3 and August 5, 3pm
Three Exclusive Public Events and Webcasts:
In the museum or on the web
http://www.exploratorium.edu/okeanos

In a series of live programs and museum installations, the Exploratorium, in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will connect audiences in San Francisco (and around the world) to the high seas from aboard the Okeanos Explorer. The Okeanos Explorer is the newest vessel in NOAA's fleet and the first to be dedicated solely to exploration and discovery missions. Currently on its maiden expedition, the Okeanos Explorer has been streaming live data from the ocean floor off Indonesia using high-tech mapping systems and HD cameras on its remotely operated vehicle (ROV). In three exclusive webcasts, live at the Exploratorium and streamed live on the its website on July 28, August 3, and August 5 at 3pm PDT, audiences in the museum and on the Web can join in the conversation with crew members, scientists and technicians aboard the Okeanos Explorer. Webcasts (both live and archived) can be found here. On August 3, Exploratorium in-studio guest is Craig McLean, Acting Assistant Administrator of NOAA, and head of the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. This public event is included in the price of admission to the Exploratorium.

The ship's current mission is a joint expedition between NOAA and the Republic of Indonesia to explore the deep ocean north of Sulawesi, an area known for its extensive volcanic activity and rich underwater ecosystems. The Exploratorium is letting audiences peek over the shoulders of these ocean explorers in a special installation on the museum floor that streams the ship's live video and data over high-speed networks. The three exclusive webcasts where the Exploratorium will connect to the ship to discuss recent findings, including the first maps and ROV explorations of a towering underwater volcano and some of the first-ever glimpses of thriving ecosystems and stunning creatures in previously unexplored Indonesian waters are as follows:

July 28 at 3 PM PDT:
Discussion of the current mission in Indonesia and the recent explorations of a 3000-meter (10,000 foot) active volcano, the Kawio Barat, with the ship's operations officer, Nicola Van der Planck. (Archived video is online for CENIC Today readers who wish to view this webcast.)

August 3, 3 PM PDT:
Discussion of the ship's ROV ("Little Hercules") with engineer, Dave Lavolvo, with some of the stunning HD video it has captured in Indonesia. Exploratorium in-studio guest is Craig McLean, Acting Administrator of NOAA, and head of the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.

August 5, 3 PM PDT:
As the Okeanos Explorer wraps up its first international mission in Indonesia, we'll discuss the highlights and discoveries made during this historic expedition.

The Okeanos Explorer is NOAA's most sophisticated exploration vessel, equipped with an ROV, state-of-the-art multibeam sonar technology for mapping the sea floor as deep as 6000 meters (nearly 20,000 feet), and 24-hour satellite telecommunications equipment to beam images in real time from the ship and ROV to destinations on shore. The Okeanos Explorer will map and explore the world's ocean depths, primed for making new discoveries with every mission it undertakes. With its continuous telepresence during missions, the ship provides opportunities for scientists, students and public audiences to experience these discoveries as they happen.

The Exploratorium's ability to receive the high-definition video and audio from the Okeanos Explorer is provided by its connection to a special, high-performance Internet network in California developed for the exclusive use of the state's K-20 research and education community. Called the California Research & Education Network or CalREN, it consists of nearly 3,000 miles of ultra-high-capacity optical fiber throughout the state, and nearly all of the state's public education is connected including over 8,000 K-12 schools and all Community College, Cal State, and UC campuses. Many prestigious private universities also connect, including Caltech, USC, and Stanford. The network is owned and operated on behalf of California's research and education community by the nonprofit Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, or CENIC.

Networks, even advanced networks like CalREN, are strange things. Invisible to most users in and of themselves, they show their value best by the relationships they enable among those users and the processing power, data storage, and sensing equipment with which they perform their research. CalREN finds its purpose by making other lights shine, and one of the brightest such lights is the Center for Networked Systems (CNS), under the directorship of UC San Diego's Amin Vahdat.

The CNS is an industrial/academic collaboration investigating emerging issues in both very large (e.g., planetary scale) and very small (e.g., wireless sensor networks) computing systems, and Vahdat's research focuses broadly on computer systems, including distributed systems, networks, and operating systems. Key themes of the research that the CNS fosters are robustness, system and application security, manageability, and quality. Interested readers who would like to know more about Vahdat's research and musings on technology, academia, and professional activities can check out his blog, Idle Process.

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

In the May 3 issue of CENIC Today, readers learned about a number of network projects focused on the CalREN backbone itself, one of which was the CalREN Optical Refresh that promised to redraw the subway-style route map shown to in that article. Readers will be pleased to know that this Project has been completed.

With its completion, a redefinition of network Routes along CalREN such that the path from Los Angeles to Riverside and then northward to Sacramento, Oakland, and Sunnyvale will be referred to as the Inland Route, and the Coastal Route has been redefined as running along the coast from Oakland to Los Angeles. Readers can see the new network topology to the right, where white circles denote optical backbone nodes, black-outlined circles denote optical and CalREN-DC tier nodes, and black filled circles denote optical and CalREN-DC/HPR nodes.

The CalREN Optical Refresh consisted of replacing the end-of-life optical equipment underlying all three tiers of the CalREN network with newer equipment that reduces previous limitations on the number and type of circuits that can be provisioned between various points within the backbone network.

Readers will find other backbone-focused projects listed at the CENIC website. Among those projects are the CalREN-HPR Refresh and the Coachella Valley Route Upgrade. The former is being undertaken to provide additional services to Associates connected to the High-Performance Research (HPR) tier of the CalREN network and to "future-proof" the network. CalREN-HPR serves some of California's most prestigious public, private, and independent research universities and is used by them to support high-performance research applications in areas like astronomy, oceanography, high-energy and particle physics, metagenomics, and more. The CalREN-HPR Refresh is being undertaken in two parts: a refresh of the two existing Layer 3 (routed) network and the addition of Layer 2 10-Gigabit Ethernet switching services. The Layer 3 Refresh has been completed, and the Layer 2 Refresh is underway.

The Coachella Valley Route Upgrade will upgrade the Coachella Valley Route (shown at right), which extends from San Diego to Riverside through El Centro, Yuma, and Palm Desert, to provide 10GE connectivity throughout that region. In addition, this project will create a second regional aggregation point in the San Diego metropolitan area, which will allow sites in that area to connect to diverse hubsites cost-effectively. Completion is expected during 2010.

New Projects and developments and completion of existing ones will be reported on in future issues of CENIC Today.

US & World Networking News:

This new cooperative institute will replace the Joint Institute for Marine Observations, which has supported collaborations between NOAA and UCSD scientists since 1991. NOAA selected UCSD through a competitive application process. CIMEC will be based at UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northwestern University have received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to encourage and enhance digital communication and collaboration between the US and international science and engineering research and education communities.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman announced on July 22 an award of up to $122 million over five years to a multidisciplinary team of top scientists to establish an Energy Innovation Hub aimed at developing revolutionary methods to generate fuels directly from sunlight.

Eucalyptus Systems, a start-up offering open source tools to give companies the benefits of cloud computing on their own infrastructure, announced that it has raised $20 million in a second round of financing. The company uses technology developed by the University of California, Santa Barbara.

On July 7, Internet2 announced the appointment of H. David (Dave) Lambert as its new president and CEO. Lambert brings over 30 years of distinguished experience in the advanced research and education networking and information technology fields. Lambert will replace Internet2's current president and CEO Douglas Van Houweling effective July 13, 2010.

Research has shown that technology can, indeed, help improve teaching and learning when used wisely-and companies have responded in kind, creating hardware, software, and other devices that give teachers innovative ways to engage students, improve retention, and make learning more interactive.

With the generous support of Texas Instruments, eSchool News has assembled these stories to give you powerful examples of how technology can support creative -- and effective -- teaching and learning practices.

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.

Subscription Information: You can subscribe and unsubscribe to CENIC Today at http://lists.cenic.org/mailman/listinfo/cenic-today.