CENIC News

In March 2010, the Federal Communications Commission issued a national broadband plan, Connecting America, as directed by Congress as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). I'm pleased to say that the Commission has been working to implement portions of the plan.

On February 9, the FCC launched a Broadband Acceleration Initiative. The objective of the plan is to expand the reach and reduce the cost of broadband deployment.

The FCC has created a three-pronged strategy to address this objective:

Unleashing spectrum:

The FCC states that historically freeing spectrum from broadband use has spurred massive mobile innovation and investment.

Accelerating broadband:

The FCC believes that removing barriers to broadband build-out and speeding up processes lower the cost of deployment.

Transforming the Universal Service Fund (USF):

The FCC states that an objective of this strategy is to help companies build out networks to communities where there was no economic case for the service.

The reform of the Universal Service Fund is intended to streamline existing programs to incentivize broadband buildout in unserved, rural areas. As part of this initiative, the FCC proposes to shift funding to a new Connect America Fund. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has said, "If we care about the U.S. having world-class 21st century infrastructure, if we care about U.S. leadership in innovation and our global competitiveness, if we care about fiscal responsibility, we have to move forward with USF ... reform as we propose to do so today."

For those who are interested in more details, the FCC's proposed USF reforms to enable implementation of the Connect America Fund are included in its February 9, 2011 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM).

It will be interesting to see how the USF reform turns out and what impact it has on broadband deployment in the U.S. Regardless, it is heartening that the FCC understands the importance of universal broadband and is taking steps to help achieve that goal.

Aside from completing a major move of Sunnyvale SONET and Gigabit connections from one colocation space to another, circuit turnups this month have focused on the California K-12 System, with a new 10 Gigabit connection for the Sacramento County Office of Education and another 10 Gigabit connection for the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

CENIC has also been active once again in preparations for the upcoming Supercomputing conference in Seattle, SC11, taking place from November 12-18, 2011 at the Washington State Convention Center. CENIC's Project Manager Ed Smith is the co-chair of the WAN Transport Group that will play a major role in the creation of SCinet, the high-performance network built each year to support the demonstrations, bandwidth challenges, and other activities on the showfloor during the conference. Ed's co-chair this year is Caren Litvanyi from the Global Research NOC at Indiana University who will focus on fiber and engineering issues while Ed will concentrate on vendor and project management.

This isn't the first time that Ed has played this role for SCinet, having co-chaired the WAN Transport Group in 2007 with CENIC Core Engineer Chris Costa when the conference took place in Reno, NV. We'll be sure to keep readers of CENIC Today and the California research & education community up to date on the latest developments and Calls for Circuits as SC11 approaches.

The 2011 CENIC Annual Conference Expanding Our Horizons is approaching fast! From March 7-9, 2011 at the UC Irvine Student Center in Irvine, CA will host three days of presentations, demonstrations, breakout sessions, and social events revolving around advanced networking for research and education.

The complete conference program is also online, with abstracts and presenter lists linked in, so be sure to check it out and begin planning your visit to UCI.

Below you can learn more about this premiere networking event, and be sure to visit the conference website for more details and register!

Jon M. Peha Carnegie Mellon Univ.

CENIC is proud to announce that attendees to its 2011 annual conference, Expanding Our Horizons, will enjoy a Keynote Address by Jon M. Peha on Tuesday, March 8, 2011 as well as the Monday Keynote Address by the NSF's Alan Blatecky.

Jon M. Peha has recently served as Assistant Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for Communications and Research issues, and before that as the Chief Technologist of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. He is also a Full Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Engineering & Public Policy and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and former Associate Director of the university's Center for Wireless and Broadband Networking.

He has been Chief Technical Officer of three high-tech start-ups, and a member of technical staff at SRI International, AT&T Bell Laboratories, and Microsoft. He has also addressed telecom and e-commerce issues on legislative staff in both the House and Senate of the U.S. Congress, and helped launch a US Government interagency program to assist developing countries with information infrastructure. His research spans technical and policy issues of communications networks, including spectrum management, broadband Internet, wireless networks, video and voice over IP, communications for emergency responders, universal service, secure Internet payment systems, dissemination of copyrighted material, e-commerce, and network security. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, and a B.Sc. from Brown.

In 2010, CENIC was delighted to make its annual conference available online through live webcast thanks to the efforts of Gold Sponsor NCast. Thanks to this, more CENIC Associates were able to benefit from the annual conference despite tightening travel budgets. Archived video of the 2010 conference can still be found online for interested readers through the 2010 conference program.

CENIC is also pleased that the 2011 annual conference will be webcast live, with the same interactive chat feature that remote attendees enjoyed last year. For those who would like to attend Expanding Our Horizons remotely, you are invited to visit the conference program to see when presentations and panel discussions will take place.

Links to the live webstreams will be placed on the front page, and each webstream will have an interactive chat feature through which remote attendees can ask real-time questions of the presenters.

As attendees to the 2011 CENIC Annual Conference know, the program will take place this year at the UC Irvine Student Center on the UCI campus in Irvine, CA. Directions between the Irvine Hyatt and the UCI Student Center have been linked under Hotel & Travel on the conference website, but in an effort to make the new conference layout more convenient for attendees, CENIC has created a Carpool App at ceniccarpool.cenic.org to assist attendees in getting from the hotel to the conference and back again.

Attendees who offer a ride will be asked to provide the days and times they are available, the number of passengers they can take, and what their starting and destination locations will be. Those in need of a ride will be able to sign up for one of the offered rides online.

Visit ceniccarpool.cenic.org today to make your conference experience even more convenient or to help out another attendee!

A single frame of 4k video is just over 4,000 pixels wide, and 15 minutes of 4k video adds up to more than one Terabyte of information -- without taking audio into account. The audio information of course adds even more heft to this figure, and given that post-production processing is often performed on uncompressed information, the creation, manipulation, and sharing of high-quality digital cinema can easily strain the capacity of any but the most advanced optical networks. Given that many such projects are global collaborations with filming, processing, editing, and so forth taking place on separate continents, high-quality digital cinema stands to benefit tremendously from advanced networks and the bandwidth they offer.

Designing, creating, and applying the tools and workflows necessary to enable this however is not a trivial undertaking. Meeting these challenges is what the international organization CineGrid was created to achieve, and one of the driving forces behind its creation is being honored next week at the 2011 CENIC Annual Conference Expanding Our Horizons, international digital media guru Laurin Herr.

As well as organizing CineGrid, Laurin Herr is also President of Pacific Interface, Inc., an international consulting company. He was previously vice president for strategic development at Pinnacle Systems. Previously, Herr held senior management positions at Truevision, Radius and SuperMac Technology during periods of rapid growth of the desktop publishing and desktop video markets. He has also worked in the television production industry for 20 years as a producer/director of broadcast and industrial programs in Japan and the United States. Herr wrote, produced and hosted a series of five critically acclaimed video reports about computer graphics technology and market trends published in the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review between 1987 and 1992. Laurin Herr has spoken in front of international audiences on topics such as HDTV, desktop production of digital media, applications of image-intensive informatics, digital archiving, computer graphics, and immersive virtual reality. He is also the author of several in-depth market studies on the topic of digital cinema.

From 1982-1992, Herr was the official ACM SIGGRAPH liaison to Japan and served on the board of directors of the National Computer Graphics Association (NCGA) from 1988-1989. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1972, Herr -- who is fluent in Japanese -- pursued additional graduate studies at Cornell and in Tokyo at Sophia University.

Readers of CENIC Today who would like to learn more about Herr, CineGrid, and the CineGrid@Disney Demonstration that has been honored with the 2011 Innovations in Networking Award for Experimental/Developmental Applications are invited to register for the conference, or be sure to check out the live webstream between 3:00PM-3:30PM from Pacific Ballroom C to enjoy Herr's presentation on the award-winning project.

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

US & World Networking News:

Longtime Calit2 participant John Orcutt, a Distinguished Professor of Geophysics at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. The academy recognized Orcutt "for international leadership in development of new ocean-observing infrastructure and environmental and geophysics research."

A CITRIS-supported collaboration between Bales at UC Merced and Steven Glaser, a Berkeley professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering, deployed networks of wireless sensors in a prototype project at the National Science Foundation's Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory (CZO), located in Providence Creek, south of Shaver Lake and about an hour west of Fresno.

The University of California at San Francisco today opened a simulation learning center that school officials say is one of the first of its kind in the nation.

The Teaching and Learning Center, located on the second floor of the UCSF library on its Parnassus campus, will serve 2,500 students in the school's dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy programs, all of which rank among the top four nationwide in their fields.

The annual award, established in 2009, recognizes outstanding individual efforts aimed at extending the benefits of advanced networking to the broadest education community. The award will be presented at the Internet2 Spring 2011 Member Meeting in Arlington, Virginia to be held April 18-20, 2011. Nominations will be accepted until March 15, 2011.

The joint CISOA/SecureIT 2011 Conference will be held April 4-6, 2011 in Santa Clara, California. The two organizations developed the conference program together in order to present a unified set of sessions that will address many of the current concerns of the IT professional in management, security, information systems and IT curriculum.

The university unveiled its Stem Cell Instrumentation Foundry on Wednesday. The 3,905-square-foot facility, which includes two ultraclean rooms that prevent particles from interfering with the research, was supported with a $4.36 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, or CIRM.

The National Broadband Map, released by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on Feb. 17, reveals that while the majority of schools are connected to the internet, those connection speeds are not meeting the needs of students and teachers.

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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