CENIC News

In last month's CENIC Today, I addressed World IPv6 Day and the motivations behind it, namely that with the recent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, a new way of encoding addresses on the Internet using IPv6 is needed. Perhaps the most optimistic sign that IPv6 is ready for the "big time" is that World IPv6 Day -- the global test flight of this new way of handling Internet addresses -- came and went without a hitch.

Most connected citizens might not even have been aware that anything unusual was happening. While network routers use the IPv4 or IPv6 numeric addresses to send packets from their point of origin to their destination, a typical Internet user doesn't. If someone wishes to visit the CENIC website, for example, they would likely not wish to enter the IPv4 address "207.62.80.66" into their browser's navigation field but instead the far friendlier www.cenic.org. The necessary translation from one to the other takes place by use of a vast distributed database based on the Domain Name System or DNS and which matches the v4 and v6 numeric addresses with the text-based addresses that users recognize.

And as network devices have begun to use the new IPv6 addressing scheme to connect with one another across the Internet, users will soon begin doing so as well. On June 20, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced a decision that will allow for the proliferation of what may become thousands of freeform text addresses. For those who may not be familiar with ICANN, it was created in 1998 to provide oversight on Internet-related tasks performed by diverse organizations; up to that point, this oversight function had been carried out by the US Government. The management of the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses used by network equipment and the text-based addresses used by network users are among ICANN's most visible responsibilities, and members of the CENIC community may know that CENIC founder, first President, and first Chair of the CENIC Board Stuart Lynn also served as President and CEO of ICANN and an ex officio member of its Board of Directors from 2001 to 2003.

This recent decision on the part of ICANN may have interesting consequences for the Internet and the World-Wide Web. For most of the Internet's history, servers have been given their easier-to-recall text-based names according to a fairly standard set of rules. Corporate web and mail servers had addresses that ended with ".com," educational institutions with ".edu," government with ".gov," and so on. Over the years others were added, including .biz, .info, .tv, and the many two-letter country codes currently in use such as ".fr" and ".au" for France and Australia. These final suffixes are known as top-level domains.

While such domains cannot quite "run out" in the same way that IPv4 numeric addresses have done, organizations have had to become increasingly creative in their choice of domain names, perhaps competing with similarly named organizations worldwide for ownership of their company-name.com. The practice of cybersquatting also reared its head fairly early in the history of the web, where people may register a domain name proactively, hoping to sell it for a hefty profit to a wealthy organization with the same name.

With the new announcement on the part of ICANN, generic top-level domains or gTLDs will be permitted, greatly expanding the possibilities for URLs and hopefully addressing some of these concerns. For the price of a $185,000 application fee and a $25,000 annual fee, organizations will be able to create their own top-level domains, resulting in URLs ending in anything they choose. Soon, we will be navigating to URLs ending in .restaurant, .games, .movies -- even .whatever is fair game. Furthermore, any language is permitted. The application period will open on January 12, 2012 and close on April 12, 2012. The announcement followed many discussions, comments from interested parties, and multiple revisions on the part of ICANN.

Top terms like .music and .games will likely be auctioned off and owned by organizations that can charge qualifying businesses who wish to use a popular gTLD. Others may be subject to competitive claims or auctions that could push costs higher -- should CSU go to the California, Colorado, or Cleveland State University? USC could stand for the well-known CENIC Associate or equally for the University of South Carolina.

The history of these decisions to expand possible top-level domains is checkered in terms of utility, especially with many people using bookmarks and search engines to navigate to sites instead of individual URLs, and using e-mail programs featuring auto-complete and other functions to allow the user to avoid entering a full e-mail address. Other considerations include the ease with which people may currently remember or guess at a given domain. With .college, .university, or .school to choose from, plus many more, users searching for their local high school or community college's website may come to rely even more on bookmarks, search engines, and other means of locating the information they need.

However, if domains are less likely to be consciously recalled and cause more reliance on search engines, e-mail programs, and other software tools, the branding advantages of owning a gTLD may be minimal and incur needless expense. The process could become expensive for some organizations that will now have to buy up many different domains to protect their trademarks and brand identities.

Unlike the more cut-and-dried issue of IPv4 exhaustion and the successful test-flight of IPv6 at the beginning of this month, the decision to increase the possible address space for mail servers, websites, and other such locations on the Internet in this fashion is a far subtler undertaking, and one that will need time to reveal its consequences. Only time will tell the wisdom of the ICANN decision.

California's Community Colleges received a new Gigabit connection during the month of June for Chaffey College, which is the oldest community college in California, having been established in 1883.

CENIC also began the testing and acceptance process on a new diverse Gigabit connection for Sonoma State University. The new connection will replace the university's existing OC-3 backup connection. When the testing and acceptance process has been completed, Sonoma State will enjoy dual Gigabit connections with diversity in both the circuits' wire center, and in their connections to the CalREN backbone.

The University of California also received a new connection this month, with the completion of UC Irvine's permanent Gigabit connection to the High-Performance Research (HPR) tier of the CalREN network at Los Angeles.

Lastly, CENIC engineers have been working on a number of backbone upgrades throughout the network, including the upgrade to the Coachella Valley route, which has been completed. The route, which consists of a ring extending from San Diego to Riverside through El Centro, Yuma, and Palm Desert, now provides 10GE connectivity throughout that region.

A case can be made that the single most significant purpose of advanced networks is to make distance disappear, whether it be between researchers and the data or remote resources they require, students and the educational opportunities they need to succeed, or simply the distance between people and one another. Arenas of scientific inquiry such as deep ocean research or astronomy, that depend on remote and often unique installations such as undersea sensor networks and telescope arrays, know well the importance of connecting with one-of-a-kind resources that must be made available to a global community.

Another such discipline possessed of singular and treasured resources, irreplicable and hotly pursued by teams of widely distributed researchers, is archaeology. Not only are archaeological sites often located in out-of-the-way places, but they are also in the unenviable situation of only being able to be studied in full -- excavated and documented -- once. To excavate a site is, after all, to disassemble it, and it will never again be available in its pristine state for other researchers, or to excavators of the future, who will have improved methods at their disposal. These considerations make it imperative that such global treasures be documented and made available as completely as possible to researchers the world over, and with advanced networks like CalREN, such things are at last possible.

CalREN has been used as a tool for researchers into our shared past, and our annual conferences have featured archaeological uses of the network before, including the launch of the of the Global Library and Museum Education and Research Network (GLiMERNet) by Ed Johanson and a look at cyberarchaeology taking place at UC Merced by Maurizio Forte during the 2009 annual conference. And attendees to the 2007 conference will recall the visit to the UC San Diego branch of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the dazzling array of ways in which the Institute uses the CalREN network to help erase the distance between "here" and "there," making virtual worlds and far-flung parts of this world equally accessible to all.

One of those far-flung locations recently made more accessible in 3D by Calit2's Tom DeFanti is the temple complex at Luxor in Egypt, where he and researchers from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) tested the 3D CAVEcam -- two Lumix GF1 cameras carefully calibrated to take simultaneous right and left images. Ensuring that the cameras would operate properly in the hot, dusty environs of the Nile Valley was a challenge, almost as much of a challenge as the necessary approvals to carry out the photography in the prized location. However, the internationally renowned Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, saw the value in testing the 3D photography immediately and created a special permit for the team. Without Dr. Hawass's approval, the research would certainly not have taken place.

"The test mission to capture Luxor in 3D was a stunning success," said DeFanti. The first nine of these surround stereo images have already premiered in the Calit2 StarCAVE, familiar to CENIC Associates, and NexCAVE (a 3D virtual reality display made from passive stereo HDTVs). They were also shown in the KAUST Cornea and NexCAVE via the high-speed network between UCSD and KAUST and facilitated by UCSD's connection to the CalREN network, which allows the transfer of dozens of Gigabytes easily.

Among the CENIC projects which focus on the CalREN backbone itself has been an upgrade to the Coachella Route. This project focused on 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 was slated to provide increased redundancy for associates in the San Diego region. We're delighted to report that the upgrade has been completed.

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

Computational power is sometimes a mixed blessing, making it possible to answer and even ask far more questions than researchers were able to do before the invention of the vacuum tube or Internet but also as a result often deluging researchers with far more data than can be digested in a reasonable amount of time. As a result, researchers in many fields may be haunted by the feeling that solutions to some of their most pressing problems are there, but hidden in a vast sea of data. And when those solutions promise improvements in care or even a cure for people struck by cancer, the need to find concomitant solutions becomes even more pressing.

Enabling researchers to add to and mine the already existing universe of data on cancer research without being overwhelmed by it is the purpose of CYCORE, the Cyberinfrastructure for Comparative Effectiveness Research, a collaboration between Calit2, the MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The vision behind CYCORE is of a far-reaching cyberinfrastructure that can operate on the enormous amounts of diverse data about cancer treatment and prevention, both collecting it and making it available to medical professionals and comparative effectiveness research (CER) specialists. However, the infrastructure itself and supporting software are only part of the project. In order to make sense of such diverse data, abstract models for data gathering, patient/doctor interaction, and the data itself must be developed in order to facilitate the comparison of results from highly variable situations, and the infrastructure must ideally reflect and support this model while remaining flexible, scalable, and above all, easy to use.

It's a daunting problem, and one that will require the full attention of some of the arena's brightest minds. One of those bright minds is Kevin Patrick, the UC San Diego Principal Investigator for the CYCORE project. Dr. Patrick is an adjunct Professor with the UC San Diego Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, within the Cancer Prevention and Control Program. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and the Director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at Calit2.

Alongside specialists from MD Anderson and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dr. Patrick is responsible for providing technical oversight of the project for the Calit2 team. He, with Dr. Susan K. Peterson of MD Anderson, will be responsible for the implementation of the Scientific Agenda, the Leadership Plan and the Specific Aims and ensure that systems are in place to guarantee institutional compliance with relevant US laws and with DHHS and NIH policies regarding human-subjects research, data and facilities. Dr. Patrick will oversee the project elements related to interfacing with the MD Anderson team, providing an overview of project objectives and soliciting their input requirements. He will also take the lead in the weekly teleconferences of domain experts and in ensuring that the web platform for the domain researchers is maintained.

Interested readers are invited to download this case study about CYCORE.

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

US & World Networking News:

Federal IT officials prefer private or hybrid cloud models over public clouds, many state and local governments are using virtualization to achieve cost efficiencies, and many higher education IT pros see significant benefit in a national cloud for higher education. However, the distinction between virtualization and cloud computing causes some confusion at the organizational level in public sector, security guidelines need to address cloud environments more specifically, and organizations with exit strategies for their cloud presence are rare.

The UC Davis West Village will combine a number of innovative energy-efficient technologies, including a 4 megawatt, high efficiency SunPower solar power system.

The first phase of the project, which will be completed this year, will include apartment housing for 2,000 students, an education center for Los Rios Community College, recreation and study facilities, a village square and neighborhood retail, and 343 single family homes available for sale for faculty and staff.

Two expanses of the North Pacific Ocean are attracting an array of marine predators in predictable seasonal patterns. Institutions participating in the study with OSU and Stanford included Dalhousie University, San Jose State University, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center, University of California-Santa Cruz, and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission.

A partnership between the California Community Colleges (CCC) and California's energy providers addresses energy efficiency at colleges statewide. The program offers IT energy incentives that result in energy savings at no cost to colleges.

National Lambda Rail, Inc. (NLR), the advanced research network established by the U.S. research and education community, announced today that the National Coalition for Health Integration (NCHI), a non-profit organization dedicated to the transformation of healthcare, has become a Class A Sustaining Member. Working together, NLR and NCHI will accelerate advances in medical research, and provide efficient delivery of healthcare services, while supporting long-term education and research initiatives.

To highlight the latest wave of emerging innovations, Internet2 is seeking 2011 IDEA Award candidates from Internet2 community institutions that demonstrate the application of advanced networking to enable transformational progress in research, scholarship, collaboration, teaching and learning by researchers, faculty, and students.

This year, the IDEA awards will also add a new Student category to showcase student led projects that are having a major impact on the research and education community.

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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