CENIC News

CENIC has always been supportive of and has for many years been involved in activities to help eliminate the digital divide and to bring broadband to communities in the State where it does not exist. Beginning in 2003, CENIC conducted a "One Gigabit or Bust" initiative, the objectives of which were to educate policy makers and elected officials of the importance of broadband and to initiate discussions on how to eliminate the pockets of unserved areas throughout the State. Because of the costs of serving some areas of the State, in addition to low overall demand in sparsely populated areas, market forces then and now have not been sufficient to eliminate the digital divide.

Through a combination of public and private efforts, however, these obstacles can be overcome. CENIC has helped address the need for broadband in a number of un- or underserved areas by advocating for infrastructure where none existed, by encouraging demand aggregation to help telcos make a business case for new infrastructure, and by participating with private telcos in a successful grant application for the installation of over 1,300 miles of new fiber infrastructure in 18 Central Valley counties as part of the Central Valley Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure Project.

As part of these efforts, CENIC and the CSU Chico Center for Economic Development recently applied for two grants from the CA Public Utilities Commission's Rural and Urban Regional Broadband Consortia Grant program, in order to develop plans to address the broadband deficit in 11 northern counties of the State. Applications were also accepted by the CPUC for other areas of the State, and seven applications in all were awarded.

I'm pleased to inform readers that the two applications submitted by CENIC and the CSU Chico Center for Economic Development -- for the Northeastern California Connect Consortium and the Upstate California Connect Consortium -- were among those awarded grants by the CPUC on December 1. The first Consortium will focus on developing a broadband infrastructure and adoption plans for Butte, Lassen, Modoc, Plumas, Shasta, Siskiyou, and Tehama counties and the second on Colusa, Glenn, Lake, and Sonoma counties. These efforts will coordinate with one another and other efforts in northern California to ensure that the roughly one and a half million Californians living in those areas have a greater likelihood of having access to the broadband services that are an essential part of a good quality of life in the 21st century.

We hope that these grants will lay the foundation for improving broadband access in these counties, for helping CENIC serve the schools there that currently are unable to obtain broadband, and for providing students, parents, teachers, faculty, and administrators with home broadband access to educational resources as well as the access they enjoy today while at educational institutions.

I'm pleased that CENIC and the CSU Chico Center for Economic Development are working together on these grants and look forward to our members receiving benefits from them in years to come. Readers of CENIC Today will be kept updated on further developments in these efforts.

To close out CENIC Today for the calendar year 2011, CENIC has been hard at work in other activities including preparations for new circuits that will come online in early 2012. The following is a summary of network activities across the segments:

For California's K-12 System, CENIC has been monitoring progress with an E-rate Year 13 circuit from Colusa County Office of Education to our backbone site in Sacramento, as well as new network connections for the Alameda County Office of Education node site and a ring redesign involving the Santa Clara and San Mateo County Offices of Education node sites. It is expected these new configurations should all be ready for the first quarter of 2012.

CENIC and K12HSN have recently found a solution to close a ring which will provide an alternate routing path for the Humboldt and Del Norte County Offices of Education node sites. The Form 470 has been posted to obtain competitive quotes for potential circuits for the next E-rate cycle. CENIC and K12HSN will be reviewing bids received during the coming weeks. The new E-rate application window opens January 9, 2012 and will close at 11:59 EDT on March 20, 2012. Lastly, CENIC engineers and the CENIC NOC are working on replacing and deploying new terminal servers to K12 node sites throughout the network.

On behalf of California's Community Colleges, network activities have centered around making necessary topology changes for efficiency and as needed to accommodate budgetary limitations. CENIC engineers are in the midst of working with the North Orange County CCD to put their three district sites on a Gigabit ring with hub site diversity. That project is expected to be completed in January 2012.

Having added the ability to aggregate circuits at a second San Diego area hub site, we are also in the process of moving several community college connections which will provide hub site diversity for several community college districts in the area.

Current network activities in for the California State University include working on San Diego State University's diverse 10 Gigabit connection. We are also in the process of replacing CSU San Bernardino's OC3 SONET circuit with a Gigabit connection and plan to deploy a new Gigabit connection for CSU Chico which will provide hub site diversity for this campus. Efforts are also underway to address bandwidth increases for all campuses in the CSU system with high circuit utilization.

Lastly, CENIC has been working with several University of California campuses to evaluate increased diversity options and improving connectivity to satellite campuses, medical centers and research stations. For example, CENIC is planning an upgrade to 10 Gb/s for UC Santa Cruz's CalREN-DC connection at the Sunnyvale backbone site, as well as a circuit to Oakland to support 10 Gb/s connectivity for the campus to the CalREN-DC and HPR network tiers.

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) will hold its 16th annual conference, Beyond the Network, March 12-14, 2012, at the Sheraton hotel in Palo Alto, CA.

Registration for CENIC 2012: Beyond the Network opened on November 7, and attendees will enjoy the same flexibility of payment as in previous years. Attendees will have the option to pay for their registration with check or credit cards, before or at the conference, and can access an online attendee list to see which other colleagues will be in Palo Alto as well.

Readers of CENIC Today can take a look at the conference website for information on how to reserve your hotel room, sponsorship info, and more! For those who are unable to attend in person, the conference will once again be webcast live and archived by Gold Sponsor NCast.

CENIC would also like to thank Titanium Sponsor Cisco Systems and Platinum Sponsor Level3 Communications for contributing to our annual conference and for their continued support of the California research and education community.

See you in Palo Alto next March!

During the SC11 Supercomputing conference, held in blustery late fall in Seattle's downtown, CENIC and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) hosted a booth on behalf of SC11 networking contributor Pacific Wave. Booth #6106 was located in the Seattle Convention Center during the conference, which ran from November 13-18. Several Pacific Wave participants used the Pacific Wave infrastructure for demonstrations within their Supercomputing booths.

One such demonstration of the DYNES project demonstrated how the instrument can be quickly deployed among different participants and used to do massive data transfers. Pacific Wave users Kyungpook National University (KISTI) and Caltech participated in this demonstration, utilizing Pacific Wave to do so.

Japan's National Institute for Information and Communications Technology, another PacWave user, demonstrated a 3-D perfSONAR Weather Map showing the Transpac, JGN-X and SX-Transport links across the Pacific into Pacific Wave. (shown at right). Utilizing bandwidth over Pacific wave, NICT displayed space weather forecast computing, a demonstration with dynamic network path creation protocols and sensor networking.

Also in the NICT booth, NTT GEMNET researchers prepared and ran an experiment using multiple paths and links to understand the optimum packet size for super high-definition transmissions. NTT plans to use this technology to broadcast the Summer Olympics, which are slated to take place in London next summer.

As well as facilitating bandwidth-intensive demonstrations for SC participants, Pacific Wave also took the opportunity to "spread the word" about international peering and reach out to network specialists as well as students and faculty of PacWave members institutions with giveaways and literature about PacWave, CENIC, PNWGP, and the University of Washington.

The 2010-11 CENIC Annual Report can be downloaded or read online at the following link:

http://www.cenic.org/2010-11AnnualReport/

Within the Report, you will learn of the updates to the CalREN network backbone as well as updates to connectivity for individual Associates, services above the network, and connectivity beyond California. Readers will also learn about our 2011 Annual Conference, Expanding Our Horizons, which took place in March of this year at UC Irvine, and the winners of the 2011 Innovations in Networking Awards whose achievements are made possible by CalREN and from which advanced networks will benefit in the years to come. Once again, our convenient, cost-effective electronic 2010-11 Annual Report features links to archived video of presentations that took place at the 2011 Annual Conference, enabling as many members as possible of our community and beyond to benefit from them.

Perhaps most importantly in the current economic climate, readers will also learn of the ways in which CENIC and CalREN make possible cost savings for Associates, who bear the responsibility of expanding on the research and education innovation so central to their missions despite the budgetary challenges facing us all.

Social media is one of the hottest topics in today's world, and the research and education community is eager to find ways in which this new always-on way of interacting can be used to facilitate and expand the student experience. Thanks to the South Orange County Community College District's Jim Gaston and others, the power of online human interaction is being harnessed to enable students at California's Community Colleges to make better academic choices.

The South Orange County Community College District has created Sherpa, a recommendation engine for courses, information and services that utilizes both human and machine intelligence. Based on an earlier project known as My Academic Plan or MAP, Sherpa uses time, event or location-based "triggers" to deliver multimodal (email, SMS, voice, text-to-speech, or Facebook announcements) personalized communications such as helping students find acceptable alternatives when their preferred courses are full; targeting at-risk students for academic interventions; and tailoring information about campus events to individual interests. The recommendations are delivered as "nudges" and can be consumed through a variety of social media platforms. Development work began in January 2010 and the project is being rolled out in phases.

Sherpa has been realized through the efforts of a substantial project team lead by Gaston, the Associate Director of Information Technology for the SOCCC District, where he and his team have been awarded several state and national awards for technology innovation. Gaston has a passion for the intelligent use of technology to further the goals of higher education and enjoys using his sense of humor to convey this message. He presents regularly at local, regional and national conferences and has also been an Adjunct Professor at Irvine Valley College where he taught HTML and Internet courses.

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

US & World Networking News:

A very innovative Canadian startup called Enomaly is offering a service called SpotCloud that allows IT departments to sell spare compute cycles into the global cloud market.

The California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office has announced the nomination period for its 2011 Technology Awards, which recognize excellence within the CCC system. Nominations for this will begin on December 1, 2011 and end February 1, 2012.

SCinet is built each year to support SC, the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. More than 150 engineers hailing from industry, academia and government institutions have volunteered their time over the past year to plan and build SCinet using over $27 million in donated equipment from leading vendors from around the world.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is now supporting scientific research at unprecedented bandwidth speeds -- at least ten times faster than commercial Internet providers -- with a new network that connects thousands of researchers using three of the world's top supercomputing centers in California, Illinois and Tennessee.

The University of California, Berkeley announced this week that it plans to open a large research and teaching facility in Shanghai as part of a broader plan to bolster its presence in China.

The newly formed Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health in Phoenix, AZ is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a nationally distributed computing system to make it happen. At the core of its efforts is the National LambdaRail.

The Federal Communications Commission has released its comprehensive reforms to expand access to high-speed Internet and voice services nationwide and benefit consumers by accelerating deployment of modern communications networks. Adopted unanimously late last month, the overhaul transforms the FCC's outdated universal service and intercarrier compensations systems into a new Connect America Fund.

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.