CENIC News

My column has over the many years I've been writing covered many topics, but never the one I'm addressing this month. This month I'd like to put the spotlight on a soon-to-be-retired CENIC employee – in fact the first person to retire from CENIC: the invaluable Greg Scott.

Greg is CENIC's Director of Infrastructure Initiatives and has been a foundational member of the CENIC team since 2001, when he was hired to assist with the roll-out of our new fiber backbone, which would soon begin serving California's research and education community. Greg joined CENIC from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was Director of Network and Telecommunications Services. I'm pleased to say that while I was not at CENIC myself at the time, I was probably as responsible as anyone for Greg's decision to join CENIC, as I recommended to then-CEO Tom West that he contact Greg about this new position. I did so because I thought Greg was a great fit for the position, and I have rarely been proven more right.

I imagine Greg didn't really understood what he was getting into when he took on this role – thankfully, or else he may have thought twice about it! His role was absolutely critical to CENIC's implementation of its fiber backbone network, to our ongoing operation, and to many projects to improve the connectivity of campus, college, county office, and other sites on CENIC's backbone network.

Much of the vital work that Greg performs is somewhat invisible to many in the CENIC community and includes coordinating the physical connections of the CalREN network, largely in a myriad rented colocation facilities spread throughout California, each presenting unique challenges all its own. This work is almost unimaginably complex and requires an understanding of different types of fiber, optical equipment, power, cooling, space needs and so on. Significantly, it also involves the ability to interact and negotiate with many different companies and organizations on behalf of the community that CENIC serves, from commercial firms to facilities managers at campus, college, and county office locations.

CENIC has enjoyed nearly a decade of amazing high-quality productivity from Greg, and I am completely confident that neither CENIC nor CalREN would currently be as robust and vibrant as they are today without his many contributions. He is always cheerful, willing to be of assistance, and pays attention to detail while juggling multiple incredibly demanding projects.

The demands of the projects seen to completion by Greg have also involved some unusual non-technological obstacles as well, including pole crews reduced to ineffectiveness by outcroppings of poison oak and hungry squirrels dining on aerial fiber installations. More exotic flora and fauna have also tested Greg's mettle, such as the elderberry bush that mandated hand-trenching at UC Davis to avoiding the harassment of Santa Cruz's rare red-legged frog. Happily, Greg was as able to develop creative solutions to these challenges as to any others that his career at CENIC has seen fit to present him with, and we're all much enriched for it.

Greg Scott is not only a bottomless reservoir of knowledge about CENIC's network, he is also a good friend and colleague who will be missed greatly. Fortunately I am hopeful that he will remain a resource we can depend on when his knowledge and expertise is absolutely required.

Please join me in wishing Greg well in his retirement. His last day with CENIC is November 30, and I encourage his many friends and colleagues to drop him a note before he leaves.

This month, CENIC Charter Associate Caltech received Gigabit connectivity to their new Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) headerquarters site located in Pasadena. The TMT, which will be located atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii and is scheduled to come online in 2018, will enable astronomers to study objects in our own solar system and stars throughout our Milky Way and its neighboring galaxies, and forming galaxies at the very edge of the observable Universe, near the beginning of time. Planning and designing are currently underway at the headquarters and involves the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy (ACURA), the University of California, and Caltech.

In addition to this connectivity, the CSU Office of Advocacy and State Relations also received a DS3 upgrade to enable the office put their Telepresence unit into service. Also, a Gigabit connection was put into place between the CalREN backbone node located at Cal Poly SLO and Allan Hancock College.

Lastly, the ongoing process of circuit consolidation continues. For further updates related to CalREN or Associate-related connectivity upgrades and other projects, be sure to keep an eye out for future issues of CENIC Today!

Just a quick update to remind readers that the deadline for the Call for Proposals for the 2011 CENIC Annual Conference, Expanding Our Horizons, is November 5, 2011 -- this Friday! We'd love to receive your submissions for presentations and demonstrations! For an idea of the types of presentations that CENIC features at our annual conferences, you can check out the websites for previous conferences at cenic07.cenic.org, cenic08.cenic.org, cenic09.cenic.org, and cenic2010.cenic.org.

Registration for the conference opens on November 8, 2010, so be sure to bookmark the site and subscribe to our RSS feed or visit the new Expanding Our Horizons Facebook page to stay up-to-date on the latest news!

Other information on the conference website includes:

• The Call for Award Nominations, for the 2011 Innovations in Networking Awards, where CENIC seeks to highlight applications of advanced networking in each of four categories which promise a revolution in the ways that research and education is conducted. Previous award winners can also be found at the above websites for past conferences.
• Hotel and Travel information, where attendees can learn about the UC Irvine campus where the conference will be held, how to get to UC Irvine from the major area airports and freeways, and how to make your reservation at the nearby Hyatt Hotel.
• Sponsorship information, where companies can find out how they can help make Expanding Our Horizons possible plus enjoy all the benefits from exposure to a select, decision-making research and education audience in the country's most populous and innovative state.

General questions may be addressed to Doug Hartline, Conference Chair, at cenic11-info@cenic.org.

CENIC and Imperial County Office of Education (ICOE) announce the availability of K20Video Services, a state-wide videoconference infrastructure over the California Research and Education Network (CalREN) to serve educational institutions across California, including all CCC, CSU, K12 and UC sites. This new service is a collaborative effort to combine CalREN Video Services (CVS) with K12Video.org, providing greater opportunities for California's K-20 education segments to utilize multi-point videoconferencing for both academic and administrative needs. By forming a single state-wide infrastructure, K20Video seeks to encourage increased collaboration between segments and facilitate continued and new distance learning programs.

Training for K20Video is now available at http://training.cenic.org/. It is anticipated that campuses will transition from CVS to K20Video at their own pace during November and December, 2010. CENIC will continue to provide 24x7 support for videoconferencing via the CENIC Video Services Desk and CENIC NOC.

Questions may be directed to the CENIC Video Services Desk during regular business hours via email to SchedDesk@cenic.org or by telephone at (714) 220-3465. We are eager to share this new direction in videoconferencing and look forward to continuing to serve the CalREN videoconferencing community!

The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) was formed in 2001, when researchers within the UC system realized that the real opportunities lay not just in developing new and innovative technologies, but in applying them. For nine successful years, CITRIS researchers located at UC Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz have worked together on matters relating to energy and the environment, healthcare delivery, intelligent infrastructure, new media, and technology for emerging economies -- all of which are further empowered by the advanced networking offered by CalREN.

Paul K. Wright is the Director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute @ CITRIS Berkeley. He is a professor in the mechanical engineering department, and holds the A. Martin Berlin Chair. He is also a co-director of the Berkeley Manufacturing Institute (BMI) and co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC). Under his leadership, CITRIS has made enormous strides toward meeting the particular challenges of the new century, a list of which can be found on the CITRIS website. Among the arenas of special importance to the world of advanced networking are grid-enabled buildings, active power management, network-enabled healthcare, deep geo-science, active transportation, monitoring, and medical tele-immersion, and other even more astonishing areas of research, many of which were made possible by the support of advanced networks.

CENIC is proud to deploy, operate, and maintain CalREN for the use of the CENIC community, but it is that community that takes the power inherent in advanced networks and uses it to improve people's lives. Under Dr. Wright's leadership, CITRIS continues to be a stunning example of why networks like CalREN are so important not only for the state's research and education community, but for society as a whole.

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

Last month, CENIC Today reported on extensive visits to organizations in the Central Valley which would benefit from the Central Valley Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure Project, a $66.6 million project partly funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which involves building, operating, and maintaining a fiber-optic network infrastructure that will traverse 1,371 miles of California's Central Valley in addition to last-mile wireless capability over parts of four counties (Fresno, Kern, Kings, and Tulare).

This month, technically focused site visits continued as network specialists from CENIC and CVIN examine the counties closely to determine the finer points of detail for the Project. Madera, Merced, Tulare, and Kings counties were visited recently, with Tuolumne, Calaveras, and Amador next on the list.

Up-to-date information can be found at the Project website.

US & World Networking News:

Four decades after it hosted the first message to be sent out over the Internet in 1969, the University of California, Los Angeles will be managing a joint institutional research project to lay out the framework for a new Internet. This time, however, the computer scientists and networking experts will be joined by theater arts and film people.

With 433,000 students in the largest university system in the country, the CSU system will receive one-time federal stimulus funds to help payroll and bring back classes that were cut in recent years.The budget will bring back $199 million to CSUs, as well as include an additional $60.6 million for new enrollment.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently allotted $3 billion to the University of California in his 2010-11 state budget.

Signed into effect last Friday, the governor’s budget represents an increase of $370.4 million in state funding for the UC over last year.

Some of the most recognizable names in the world of academic ePortfolios lead the ePortfolio California Summit 2010 in Los Angeles on October 11.

Helen Barrett, John Ittelson and Helen L. Chen are just a few of the well known scholars that gathered with Summit participants on October 11 to explore ways in which ePortfolios can and should be integrated into the teaching and learning environment to support students’ goals in their journey from K-12 to colleges and universities and, ultimately, into the workplace.

The 10th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop was held on the 13th and 14th of October 2010 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The home of the Large Hadron Collider was an appropriate venue as this multinational experiment is one of the biggest users of state-of-the-art optical networking, and also one of the most active participants in the GLIF community.

This month, 6,700 people from 41 different countries gathered in the Anaheim Convention Center to talk about higher education IT at the EDUCAUSE 2010 conference. And an estimated 2,500 people followed the sessions live online. Featured sessions arr archived online.

Rajesh Bhaskaran at Cornell's Space Systems Design Studio CUSat Satellite Project is leading a multi-year effort to create and deploy an autonomous in-orbit inspection satellite system using a MATLAB-based simulation.

Meanwhile, Ricky Harjanto at UC San Diego's Cartilage Tissue Engineering Lab is also using MATLAB to examine changes in the shape of mice femurs during postnatal development via statistical shape modeling techniques to determine variations in mouse development at different stages of growth.

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.