CENIC News

As many CENIC Associates no doubt are aware, World IPv6 Day is fast approaching. For 24 hours on June 8, 2011, many top companies and providers including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, YouTube, and Cisco Systems will be among the over 300 organizations to offer their content via Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6. Currently, Internet content is offered over IP version 4, or IPv4. A basic primer may be in order to help some readers of CENIC Today understand what this will entail.

The primary difference between IPv6 and IPv4 is the means by which a packet of information sent out over the Internet encodes both its address of origin and its destination address within each protocol. For a packet created according to IPv4 specifications, the origin and destination addresses are each allotted 32 bits within the packet header, permitting roughly 4.3 billion possible values for each address. Amazingly for those of us who recall the early days of the Internet, the last block of such addresses was allocated to the Regional Internet Registries in February of this year. Much like the similar situation with telephone area codes, the addresses contained within each allocated block have not been utilized with optimum efficiency; only 14% of the total IPv4 addresses have actually been used. However, the fact remains that no more such addresses exist within IPv4 to be allotted in the future.

The solution was of course to create a new way of encoding addresses within packet headers, which IPv6 allows. With 128 bits allocated within the header for both origin and destination addresses in the new protocol, 3.4 undecillion addresses (more than 3 followed by 38 zeros) are possible. That's 5 x 10²⁸ addresses for each person now alive!

The benefits of IPv6 do not stop at a greatly increased address space, however. Inherent multicasting, inherent support for Internet Protocol Security or IPsec, and more efficient processing by routers are also among the features supported by the new packet format.

World IPv6 Day promises to call attention to the increasing need for providers to begin offering content over IPv6 and will function as a test-run for the inevitable transition to IPv6-only, as many of the Internet's most popular websites will offer content via both protocols. For users with proper IPv6 readiness, they will notice no change. For those with acceptable means of “translating” between both, they may notice a small delay as their browser attempts to connect via IPv6 and instead falls back to IPv4. For the estimated 0.05% of users with incorrect translation, known as "IPv6 Brokenness," they will not be able to reach some sites during that 24-hour period.

Users seeking to access the CENIC websites will experience no change in performance.

CENIC has long been a supporter of IPv6, having routed it on the High-Performance Research or HPR tier of the CalREN network since 2004. In 2009, CENIC began offering IPv6 as a service on the CalREN-DC tier as well, making IPv6 available not only to the high-performance users at California's research universities but also to those throughout the K-20 community who are using CalREN for day-to-day activities such as e-mail and browsing the web. Today, 38 CENIC Associates make use of IPv6, with inquiries regularly coming in from others. Work also continues apace to make CENIC's own web content available via IPv6. This transition to IPv6 is critical, and the time is now.

As we move into the summer, CENIC completed several network upgrades in May. Among them is the finalization of network connections for the California Community Colleges' Community-Based Online Learning Project, which provides access for online learning for community-based non-profit organizations.

The seven organizations are connected via DS3 circuits behind the CCC System Office Datacenter:

• Karuk Tribe Community Center (Panamnik Center) in Orleans, CA
• Aspiranet DBA Sunset Neighborhood Beacon Center in San Francisco, CA
• Proteus Inc. in Sacramento, CA
• Boys and Girls Club in Goleta, CA
• Foundation for Successful Solutions in Los Angeles, CA
• Center for Academic and Social Advancement in Solana Beach, CA
• Amador-Tuolumne Community Action Agency in Ione, CA

The CA Community College System also received a new Gigabit connection for the Contra Costa Community College District, which serves roughly 62,000 students at the following colleges or centers: Contra Costa College, Diablo Valley College, Los Medanos College, San Ramon Campus, and Brentwood Center.

Upgrades and new connections for the University of California and the California K-12 System consist of a 200 Mb/s connection to UC Berkeley's International House, and a Gigabit circuit for the Siskiyou County Office of Education, which replaces the Office's former DS3 circuit.

Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), Internet2, National LambdaRail (NLR), and The Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) are partnering with SCinet to provide wide area network services support for the SC11 conference in Seattle, Washington. In order to plan the WAN and metro resources required to support conference participants, exhibitors and network entities are required to identify their WAN circuit requirements into the Washington State Convention & Trade Center no later than June 15, 2011. WAN circuits are needed for any exhibitor that requires point-to-point connectivity to a remote location to support a large-scale booth demonstration.

The SCinet WAN Transport Group will work with ESnet, Internet2, NLR and PNWGP to implement the required circuits for SC11 from the PNWGP in the Westin Building to the Washington State Convention & Trade Center Center. The following WAN services are planned to be available: ESnet's IP Network and Science Data Network, Internet2's IP Network and dynamic circuit ION Service and NLR's PacketNet and FrameNet. Commodity Internet services will also be available.

If your organization will make extensive use of the previously mentioned service or will require additional WAN circuits (i.e. NLR WaveNet, Internet2 WaveCo, etc.), please respond to this message with the details of your particular requirements and include the following information:

• Circuit type and bandwidth: (i.e. OC-48c/STM-16c, OC-192c/STM-64c, OC-768c/STM-256c, GigE, 10GigE-LAN, Fibre Channel (specify type), HDTV, etc.)
• Carrier or provider: (i.e. Level3, Qwest, NLR, Internet2, etc.)
• Circuit origination point: (i.e. Level3 POP in Seattle, Level3 Sunnyvale, MANLAN in New York, etc.)
• Circuit termination point on the SC11 show floor: (i.e. SCinet Layer2 network, directly to exhibitor booth via dark fiber, etc.)

Even if you are unable to provide all the above details please contact the SCinet WAN Team with your intentions as soon as possible. The deadline for submitting your organization's WAN circuit requirements is June 15, 2011. Unless otherwise expressly agreed to by the SCinet WAN Team, all WAN circuits will be terminated at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center and all WAN circuits into the Washington State Convention & Trade Center will be served by the PNWGP pop located at 2001 6th Avenue, Seattle, WA.

Please send your circuit requirements, questions or concerns to the SCinet WAN Team at wan-team@scinet.supercomputing.org.

The CalREN network and other similar advanced networks around the world utilize lightwaves as links between computer equipment and the researchers and educators that rely on it. However, be it desktop or laptop computers, videoconferencing devices, projection devices, or any number of other things, that equipment does not use light waves to perform their functions. While particles of light, called "photons," can be sent back and forth between computational devices, those devices themselves carry out their processing by manipulating particles of matter -- electrons. Thus, in order to complete the link between computers and the light-based network that link them around the world, the electronic information must be "translated" into light-based information before it can be sent down the optical fiber on the way to its final destination.

Many researchers at CENIC Associate universities are hard at work to find ways to enable processing to take place via light particles or photons as well, thus making computation and communication entirely photon-based from end to end. The advantages of this are many: photonic equipment often runs at room temperature, while electronic equipment becomes untenably warm and must be cooled to keep operating. Cooling is extremely expensive; the majority of the operating costs and power budget for any processing center are consumed by cooling requirements. Photonics are also very, very fast -- literally operating at the speed of light -- permitting extremely rapid processing. Also, just as optical network infrastructure can support multiple networks via different colors or wavelengths of light, photonic processors can do the same. In fact, optical networks may themselves become platforms for computation as well as communication in the future.

The following is a survey of the photonic research taking place at CENIC member universities:

The Photonics Laboratory at UCLA: www.photonics.ucla.edu

The Photonics Laboratory at UCLA performs multi-disciplinary research and development in the fields of silicon photonics, microwave photonics, and biophotonics for biomedical and defense applications. The Lab has two complementary missions. The first is to solve critical problems faced by defense, commercial industries, and medicine through innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in devices or systems. The second and equally important mission is to produce creative and highly skilled scientists and engineers who will be the driving force for technological innovation in the 21st century. The Lab enjoys the strong support of the Department of Defense, National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and private companies. A list of areas of research along with events and seminars can be found on the lab's website.

The Center for Integrated Access Networks: www.cian-erc.org

The Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN) is a multi-institutional research effort consisting of the University of Arizona (Lead)and its partner institutions, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Southern California, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, the University of California at Los Angeles, Norfolk State University and Tuskegee University.

The vision of CIAN is to create transformative technologies for optical access networks where virtually any application requiring any resource can be seamlessly and efficiently aggregated and interfaced with existing and future core networks in a cost-effective manner.

Integrated Photonics Laboratory at UC Berkeley: nanophotonics.eecs.berkeley.edu

Principal Investigator Ming Wu's group has recently developed a new image-driven optical manipulation tool called "optoelectronic tweezers." Using light-induced dielectrophoresis on a photoconductor, virtual electrode pattern is generated by projecting an LED light through a DMD spatial light modulator. A single LED is capable of generating more than 15,000 individually addressable traps. The results was published in the July 21, 2005 issue of Nature titled, "Massively Parallel Manipulation of Single Cells and Microparticles Using Optical Images". Presentations, publications, research, and rich media about the lab's work can be found at their website.

The Stanford Photonics Research Center: photonics.stanford.edu

The Stanford Photonics Research Center builds strategic partnerships between the Stanford University research community and companies employing optics and photonics in their commercial activities. SPRC offers member companies facilitated access to Stanford faculty, students and researchers via faculty-led Working Groups, SPRC workshops and symposiums, research project collaborations and visiting researcher programs. Information on the Center's research, events, working groups, and photonics-related resources can be found at their website.

Photonics at the Caltech Office of Technology Transfer: www.ott.caltech.edu

The Office of Technology Transfer at Caltech maintains an online list of the multiple patents that have been awarded to Caltech researchers related to photonics. The Caltech Nanofabrication Group also conducts research into photonics, and information about the group's research and publications can be found at their website.

Center for Biophotonic Science and Technology: cbst.ucdavis.edu

The recently announced Center for Biophotonic Sensors and Systems (CBSS), created by UC Davis and its partner Boston University and funded by the NSF, promises to be the the only cooperative research center in the country focused solely on biophotonic sensors. The CBSS's Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology is located at UC Davis while the Boston University Photonics Center will be located in Boston.

The Advanced Photonics Devices and Systems Laboratory: apdsl.eng.uci.edu

The Advanced Photonics Devices and Systems Laboratory (APDSL) was established by Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Ozdal Boyraz in 2005. The lab's major research areas include silicon-based integrated optics and optical communications systems and devices. Current research activities include active photonic devices development based on nonlinear optical properties of silicon and optical access networks. News and publications can be found at the lab's website.

The Photonic System Group at UC San Diego: phosys.ucsd.edu

The Photonics Laboratory currently supports multiple research thrusts in signal processing, sensing, and communications. The group has developed a new class of parametric devices and used them to achieve records in terabit-scale signal processing, analog-to-digital signal conversion, and coherent band mapping. The laboratory also hosts research on communication and sensing in bandwidth-constrained physical channels. Further information about research, publications, and a look at the group's campus facilities can be found at their website.

The UC Santa Barbara Industry Center: industry.ucsb.edu

The UCSB Industry Center webpage maintains links to the UCSB Institute for Energy Efficiency, the California Nanosystems Institute at UCSB, and the UCSB Nanofabrication Facility, all of which conduct photonics-based research. More information on the activities taking place at the above institutes and fabrication facility can be found at their websites.

UC Santa Cruz Applied Optics Group: photon.soe.ucsc.edu

The main research theme in the UCSC Applied Optics Group is single-particle optics. They develop new, highly sensitive methods to study single particles with optical methods. They use these and other established techniques to gain new understanding of these particles and light-matter interactions in general.

The group is affiliated with the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3), the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering (CBSE), and the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC). Group director Holger Schmidt also directs the W.M. Keck Center for Nanoscale Optofluidics.

The Photonics Center at USC: www.usc.edu/dept/engineering/eleceng/photonics

The Photonics Center at the USC School of Engineering is internationally recognized for its contributions to commercial telecommunications and data communications as well as myriad applications in radar and sensing. The center's faculty has made seminal contributions in photonic materials technologies, device technologies and designs, and novel systems applications and designs.

For seven years the center's faculty led the DARPA-funded National Center for Integrated Photonic Technology. USC faculty are now partners in the Center for Chips with Heterogeneously Integrated Photonics (CHIPS), a DARPA-sponsored consortium of California research universities.

In the Network Projects & Activities section of CENIC Today, CENIC tends most often to report on new and upgraded Associate connections to the CalREN backbone. But while Associates are understandably most focused on their site or institution's connectivity to CalREN, CENIC is always hard at work on the CalREN backbone itself.

Among those projects is an upgrade to the Coachella Route. This project is in the process of upgrading the Coachella Valley ring which extends from San Diego to Riverside through El Centro, Yuma, and Palm Desert, to provide 10GE connectivity throughout that region. In addition to providing greatly increased capacity to associates in that part of the state, the upgrade will provide increased redundancy for associates in the San Diego region. All related equipment is in place and awaiting installation, and completion is expected during the second quarter of 2011.

Other Projects are listed on the CENIC website. Bookmark the page for up-to-date information on CENIC Network Projects!

The University of Santa Barbara's AlloSphere Research Facility is far more than a conventional virtual reality environment. A 30-foot diameter spherical screen built inside a 3-story near-to-anechoic (echo free) cube, the AlloSphere offers researchers a seamless surround-view capabilities with a focus on multiple sensory modalities and interaction. The facility allows for the synthesis, manipulation, exploration, and analysis of large-scale data sets in an environment that can simulate virtually real and immersive perception.

Researchers find a multitude of interactive interfaces for research into: scientific visualization, numerical simulations, data mining, visual/aural abstract data representations, knowledge discovery, systems integration, human perception, and many other areas of inquiry. A non-exhaustive list of disciplines that the facility advances can be found at the AlloSphere website. With high-bandwidth networking, such a facility can access data anywhere in the world, allowing researchers to immerse themselves in entire worlds of remotely located or distributed data. As research at the AlloSphere continues to advance, readers of CENIC Today will be kept informed as to how the high-bandwidth networking offered by CENIC empowers the facility's reach.

Certainly a facility with such a wide scope of applicability would require an equally broadly-visioned director, and the AlloSphere has that in Professor of Media Arts and Technology, Professor of Music, and TED speaker Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin. A professor, composer, and researcher in multi-modal media systems content and facilities design, Dr. Kuchera-Morin was Chief Scientist of the University of California's Digital Media Innovation Program from 1998-2003. She also founded the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) and has been the director since its birth in 1986.

Dr. Kuchera-Morin worked with renowned architect Robert Venturi from 2001-2003 to plan the AlloSphere's location within the new 62,000 square foot California NanoSystems Institute building (Elings Hall) at UCSB.

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

US & World Networking News:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator W. Craig Fugate, top executives from AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon and others convened at the World Trade Center site to announce PLAN--the Personal Localized Alerting Network. PLAN is a free service that will allow customers with an enabled mobile device to receive geographically-targeted, text-like messages alerting them of imminent threats to safety in their area.

When the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake and resulting tsunami struck off the northeast coast of Japan on March 11, they caused widespread destruction and death. Using observations from a dense regional geodetic network (allowing measurements of earth movement to be gathered from GPS satellite data), globally distributed broadband seismographic networks, and open-ocean tsunami data, researchers have begun to construct numerous models that describe how the earth moved that day.

It turns out you really can be in two places at once -- if you have the right gear. Musicians Michael Dessen, Mark Dresser and Myra Melford certainly succeeded last month with TeleMotions, a networked concert enjoyed by audiences at UC Irvine and UC San Diego. The trio, whose members were separated by 90 miles, played as one and interacted with both audiences in real time during the telematic performance.

Butte College, located in Northern California and resting on a 928-acre wildlife refuge, has been recognized over the last few years as a national community college leader in sustainability. By May 2011, the college will move to the head of its class—as the only college in the nation that is grid positive -- producing more clean energy from sustainable on-site solar power than it uses.

For Tad Reynales, manager of Technical Infrastructure at the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), being recognized as one of San Diego's "Top Tech Execs" this month came a welcome surprise.

"Often, IT people are not acknowledged unless something goes wrong, like an outage or a security breach," says Reynales. "I'm especially pleased to see the IT sector recognized as an important part of business and education in San Diego."

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have demonstrated a new technology for graphene that could break the current speed limits in digital communications. The team of researchers, led by UC Berkeley engineering professor Xiang Zhang, built a tiny optical device that uses graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of crystallized carbon, to switch light on and off. This switching ability is the fundamental characteristic of a network modulator, which controls the speed at which data packets are transmitted.

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.