CENIC News

This month I'd like to share my thoughts about one of the hottest topics in technology: cloud computing and services, or as I might refer to it, "cloud everything." In doing so, I'm reminded of a conversation I had some years ago with colleague and friend Richard Katz, whom some of you know as founder of EDUCAUSE's ECAR service, and who today is a consultant to higher education institutions and a CENIC Board Member.

Richard was asking me about my thoughts about cloud: was it real, would it really have an effect on the way in which services are delivered in education, would it have staying power, etc.? My strong opinion at that time, as it is today, was that cloud is in fact going to have a profound influence on technology and service delivery in the education community.

At the time my opinion was based, as it continues to be, on the extent to which it just makes good sense. As technologies become more embedded in more activities, and as the technology becomes more powerful (in other words, more complex), there is simply no way that an individual institution can be an expert in and support the full range of technologies underlying the delivery of services. Thus, educational institutions availing themselves of services provided by someone else via the cloud is an obvious solution to the challenge of simplifying the already astonishing range of technologies used and supported by them. A further motivation for cloud adoption is the possibility of achieving lower costs, which comes as a result of cloud provider organizations' abilities to leverage economies of scale.

With such advantages to offer, cloud is a "no brainer" -- at least in concept. Of course, the greater availability of high-speed networking, as compared to a decade and more ago, makes it even more feasible for institutions to do more with less by turning to any of a variety of clouds -- and there will be variety. Not all services will be appropriate for delivery via the cloud, and there will be many flavors of cloud services, ranging from those in private clouds to those in the public cloud, and from infrastructure to applications.

So in summary, I do think the cloud will "happen" although all institutions will not take advantage of it in precisely the same way. I believe CENIC is well positioned to help our member institutions avail themselves of cloud-based services, by providing a robust network for direct connection to cloud providers, and by being a provider of cloud services ourselves where it makes sense to do so.

Our first major, tangible cloud service will be our VoIP service offering, to be available in 2012. At the same time, we are testing and identifying how to broker cloud services from such major cloud service providers as Amazon, Savvis, and AT&T -- the latter being a company which has already contributed to CENIC's success in the networking business by connecting hundreds of our members to the CalREN backbone, but which is now recognized as a major force in the cloud services arena and which is also just as committed to our success in this new area.

It will be interesting to look back in a two to three years to see if my advice to Richard was correct regarding the transformative importance of cloud. My bet is that it was, but we'll gauge this better a few years out.

Network upgrades have spanned the segments for CENIC members during the month of August, starting with a new DS-3 for CSU East Bay's Concord campus. Pepperdine University's Malibu campus received a new 300 Mb/s connection to the CalREN backbone, giving Pepperdine redundant CalREN connections with hub site diversity.

A new Los Rios Community College District center at UC Davis received a 1 Gb/s connection to CalREN as well; the Davis area saw further activity with new 10 Gb/s connections to the CalREN-DC and HPR network tiers (for day-to-day use and high-performance research use, respectively) for the UC Davis Medical Center.

Finally, California's K-12 System received a new, permanent 10 Gb/s circuit from the Orange County Department of Education to the CalREN backbone.

Various backbone upgrade work also took place, including two 10 Gb/s backbone trunk upgrades between the CalREN backbone nodes located at Los Angeles and Riverside, and an additional two 10 Gb/s backbone trunk upgrades between the backbone nodes at Los Angeles and Sunnyvale.

Mark your calendars now for March 12-14, 2012 -- that's when California's research and education community will come together in beautiful Palo Alto, CA for three days of programming, demonstrations, and human networking at the CENIC Annual Conference!

The conference will be held at the Sheraton Palo Alto and Stanford University. Be sure to keep an eye out for future issues of CENIC Today for updates about registration, programming, travel, hotel rooms, and more!

One of the major "killer apps" of advanced networks -- the ability it gives researchers in data-intensive sciences to respond quickly to sudden events -- was illustrated dramatically beginning on August 24 when a Type Ia supernova ignited in a relatively nearby galaxy, the "Pinwheel" galaxy located within the northern hemisphere constellation of the Big Dipper. Mere hours after the supernova was first detected, and quite early in the life of the explosion, the large ground-based telescopes at the W. M. Keck observatory began observations of the area.

Data from the Keck observatory, located on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, travels to the mainland via transoceanic fiber which connects to CalREN upon reaching shore, thus connecting the facility to researchers at CENIC Associate institutions Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories and UC Berkeley, who first pegged the event as a Type Ia supernova.

Before the development of advanced networks that gave researchers the ability to move and process enormous amounts of data rapidly in real time, events such as this have often been caught well after the nick of time. Instead, researchers can now avail themselves of supercomputers half a world away to process data delivered from equally far-flung observatories, discover rare events, and react immediately to them. Thus, the recent supernova -- named PTF 11kly -- is likely to become one of the most intensively studied and well-understood such events in history.

The discovery was first made by the Palomar Transient Factor or PTF survey, part of Caltech, which alerted telescopes around the world that something was happening. As the Earth turned, these other facilities such as the Grand Canary Telescope, located in the Canary Islands, began to take data as well. Twelve hours later, the Earth's rotation had brought the Lick and Keck Observatories in line with the Big Dipper, and researchers at CENIC Associate institutions began to access the Keck data thanks to the networking made available to them by CalREN. The Hubble Space Telescope was also utilized.

Supernovae come in a variety of types, and astronomers have a particular fondness for the Type Ia variety, as they often peak at a predictable value of brightness. Thus, they are extremely useful when they occur in distant galaxies, as their predictable brightness allows astronomers to calculate the distance to such an event, and thus to the galaxy that it occurred in, with some certainty based on its apparent magnitude. Similar supernovae have occurred in the recent past; however, this is the closest one yet at only 21 million light years away.

How to View the Supernova: Astronomers believe that as the explosion continues, it will become visible to amateur observers with good quality binoculars or telescopes. Interested readers of CENIC Today can find a map of the stars in the Big Dipper here; M101, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy and the home of the newsmaking supernova, is located in the top left corner of the star map.

In the June 2 issue of CENIC Today, readers enjoyed a brief catalogue of the photonics research being carried out at various CENIC Associate institutions, research that promises to transform the ways that optically-based networks like CalREN interact with and support data processing. Recently, research being spearheaded by Caltech and UC San Diego has advanced this frontier even further by developing a silicon-based optical waveguide that could prove to be an instrumental component in building low-cost, all-optical networks in the future.

One of the common components in electronic data processing is a diode, a tiny solid-state device that permits electrical current to pass in one direction only. With such devices, the flow of electrons and hence data can be controlled with precision. Thanks to the research taking place at the above named institutions, an optical waveguide has been developed that functions as a "light diode" of sorts, permitting the fine control of light-based data on the small scale required to build desktop-sized devices operating by photonics alone.

While similar "light diodes" have been created in the past, the major advantage of this new innovation is that it is silicon-based, enabling the devices to be manufactured more easily by an industry that is already heavily optimized for silicon-based manufacturing.

This research was described in a recent paper published in Science, the lead author for which was Caltech researchers Liang Feng, pictured at right, postdoctoral researcher in the Nanofabrication Group led by Prof. Axel Scherer at the Department of Electrical Engineering. His research is focusing on nanophotonics and plasmonics, as well as their bio-applications. Before joining Dr. Scherer's group, Feng obtained his PhD in Electrical Engineering (Photonics) in the Ultrafast Nanoscale Optics group headed by previous CENIC Star Researcher Shaya Fainman at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego.

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

US & World Networking News:

UCSD's "Vroom," which was built in partnership with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) -- is a 20'x20' totally virtual, self-contained "booth-on-wheels" capable of being rolled in and out of a conference venue.

Eleven University of California teams won this year's Larry L. Sautter Award for developing information technology projects that streamline operations and advance UC's teaching, research and public service mission.

On August 23, Gov. Neil Abercrombie launched the Hawaii Broadband Initiative, which aims to provide statewide access to affordable ultra-high-speed Gigabit Internet by 2018.

NASA has awarded grants to four universities and their partner institutions that serve large numbers of minority and underrepresented students to strengthen programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Among the awardees are CSU San Bernardino, and College of the Desert in Palm Desert, CA.

After raising money for three years, the Foundation for California Community Colleges has set up a $67.7 million permanent scholarship fund to help about 3,400 students per year. This is the biggest system-wide community college endowment in the United States.

We give colleges billions in public subsidies -- but what are they doing for us?

That's what editors at Washington Monthly aimed to find out with their unusual college rankings, released today. The Monthly's roster of schools rates them not on the basis of how exclusive they are, but on how much they help their communities and the nation in general.

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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