CENIC News

I am writing this message while I have the title of President and CEO but in fact, by the time this article is published, I will be former or outgoing President and CEO. Yes, as announced on our home page for the last month, CENIC now has a new CEO -- Louis Fox, who assumes the role today, February 1. That makes this issue of CENIC Today the perfect opportunity both to reflect on the past and look ahead to the future.

And looking back, I see some great history during the nine and a half years I have been at CENIC, the majority of them as CEO. I see the then-Board making the critical decision to serve the entire education community in California, rather than only serving the research Universities. Following that, I see another major decision to acquire our own fiber backbone infrastructure in the State.

I see some of our major business partners, including but not only Level 3 Communications, Cisco Systems, and AT&T stepping forward to aid in implementing multiple logical networks on our fiber and in reaching out to each of our member institutions. I also see CENIC participating with other organizations in receiving National Science Foundation funding to help connect CENIC's CalREN network to similar international networks north and south of the border and throughout the Pacific Rim, providing connectivity to other countries for educational and research purposes. All of these decisions have had a vast impact on CENIC and hence on the ability of the greatest research and education community in the world to extend its legacy of innovation and education across the globe.

However, the most profound achievement I see, underlying everything else that CENIC has accomplished, is the way that all of the educational segments came together to work toward common and often complementary goals under a collaborative and dedicated Board. A lot has been accomplished by everyone's working together to benefit the whole. The only word that seems to fit is, "Wow."

Looking forward, I see the strong foundation of the CENIC Board guiding CENIC in smart directions as technology changes, as CENIC member institutions' needs change, and as the environment around us changes. And I see in Louis a qualified leader, who has experience working with members such as CENIC's in other States, who has a deep understanding of the importance of collaboration, who will provide the Board wise advice and counsel, and who will continue to nurture CENIC's national and international relationships to the benefit of our member organizations. I'll be watching Louis' leadership from a distance -- but not too great a distance as he has asked me to consult with him on various projects and issues.

In whatever capacity you are reading this article, thanks for your involvement with CENIC as it has contributed greatly to CENIC's success in supporting the education and research needs of its members in California and the other states we serve.

As CENIC Today is not published on January 1, we have two months of activity to report. On behalf of California's Community Colleges, that activity includes a topology redesign for three sites in the North Orange County Community College District -- Cypress College, Fullerton College, and the NOCCCD School of Continuing Education now share a Gigabit network "ring" with backbone node site diversity, freeing them from their previous DS3 backup connection. Ohlone College's Newark Center for Health Sciences and Technology was also migrated off their DS3 to a new Gigabit connection connecting directly to the CalREN backbone node in Oakland.

A new 10 Gigabit connection was deployed between Sunnyvale and UC Santa Cruz. The new 10 Gigabit service will replace the campus's existing Gigabit connections to the HPR and DC tiers of the CalREN network. The new link has been tested, and readers of CENIC Today will be kept updated as to when the circuit becomes active.

On behalf of the non-Charter Associates, the University of San Francisco is now enjoying a twofold increase in their connectivity to CalREN as a new Gigabit connection was put into production, replacing their previous 500 Mb/s link. Lastly, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton | San Francisco campus has moved to a new location, and a new 100 Mb/s connection was deployed and put into production during December.

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.

The Keynote Speaker for Monday, March 12 is UC San Diego's Amin Vahdat, Director of the Center for Networked Systems. His Keynote Address is titled "Scale Out Networking in the Data Center."

Amin Vahdat is currently a Principal Engineer at Google working on data center architecture. He is on leave from a faculty position in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California San Diego, where he holds the Science Applications International Corporation Chair. Vahdat's research focuses broadly on computer systems, including distributed systems, networks, virtualization, and operating systems. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and is a past recipient of the the NSF CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Duke University David and Janet Vaughn Teaching Award.

The Keynote Speaker for Tuesday, March 13 is Gig.U Executive Director Blair Levin, formerly Executive Director of the National Broadband Planning effort.

Blair Levin became Communications & Society Fellow with the Aspen Institute after heading the National Broadband Planning effort. He is currently Executive Director of Gig.U, a project within the Institute that seeks to accelerate the deployment of next generation networks and services by using university communities as test-beds.

Previously, he had spent eight years as an equity analyst at Legg Mason and Stifel Nicolaus. As Barron's Magazine noted, Levin "has always been on top of developing trends and policy shifts in media and telecommunications -- and has proved visionary in getting out in front of many of today's headline making events."

Mr. Levin also served as Chief of Staff to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt from 1993 through 1997. Prior to that Mr. Levin practiced law in North Carolina. He is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.

Conference registration is also open, with 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.

We also invite you to take a look at the conference website for information on how to reserve your hotel room, sponsorship info, and more! Don't forget that the deadline for reserving your hotel room at the discounted rate is coming up fast: February 10.

For attendees who are unable to be there 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, Platinum Sponsors Level3 Communications, AT&T, and Comcast Business Class, and second Gold Sponsor WTC Consulting, Inc. for once again being such valued supporters of our annual conference and for their support of the California research and education community.

See you in Palo Alto next March!

Two projects to develop cohesive infrastructure for broadband services in Northern California and to encourage adoption among the one and a half million residents living there were funded by the CA Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) on December 1st. Both joint efforts by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the Center for Economic Development at California State University, Chico (CED, CSU Chico), the Northeastern California Connect Consortium (NECCC) and the Upstate California Connect Consortium (UCCC) are funded for $449,991 and $448,184, respectively, over a period of three years.

The counties within the scope of the NECCC are Butte, Lassen, Modoc, Plumas, Shasta, Siskiyou, and Tehama. The counties within the scope of the UCCC are Colusa, Glenn, Lake, and Sonoma. Both the NECCC and the UCCC will work with other consortia as part of a comprehensive Northern California Broadband Plan to set the stage for a robust, integrated, and open-access fiber-optic middle-mile -- and combination fiber-optic and wireless last-mile -- infrastructure throughout the 11 counties listed in addition to Del Norte, Humboldt, Mendocino, Trinity, and Yolo counties.

Many of these counties are rural with rugged terrain as well as relatively low population, all of which pose great challenges to the construction of such an infrastructure over which broadband services can be delivered. Hence, these counties currently lack the broadband services that are an essential part of a healthy economy and a good quality of life in the 21st century, and which are already enjoyed in other regions of the state.

The NECCC and UCCC both consist of a multi-phase, three-year planning effort. During the first year, the two consortia will concentrate on developing and designing the 16-county Regional Middle-Mile infrastructure, as well as 11 countywide backbone systems and last-mile community plans. The NECCC and the UCCC then will facilitate the implementation of these infrastructure plans as well as developing and implementing adoption and training programs to ensure that every citizen has the opportunity to effectively use these capabilities.

"There is a deep awareness at the highest level in California of the importance of broadband availability and adoption to the state's historic global position of economic and technology leadership," said Tom West, Manager for the two Consortia. "These two funding decisions speak volumes of the state's commitment to ensuring that California remains a global leader in all areas of 21st century life."

The Consortia Associate Manager, Cathy Emerson of CED, is passionate about giving the rural communities a collective voice. "I learned that the northern counties want action, not more studies, and that someone was needed to guide a process, not tell them what to do or how to do it. These consortia are intended to include people from all aspects of the region, and based on the membership pledges and letters of support we are receiving, I'd say that's what we have: a group of dedicated, committed individuals who at the end of the day can say they not only were a part of something, they actually affected change, and to the collective benefit of the whole region."

Kelly Cox, Chief Administrative Officer for Lake County and a member of UCCC, stated, "This grant will enable us to develop a much needed comprehensive broadband plan for our county. Such a plan will enable us to pursue providers and funds to effectively implement broadband for our citizens and help us advance the county's economic development plans."

"Developing and implementing a broadband plan for Northern California will help fuel the economies of counties like Modoc by enabling us to attract investment capital to make local resources and products available to consumers across the state and nation," stated Chester Robertson, Chief Administrative Officer of Modoc County and member of NECCC.

More information about the NECCC and the UCCC can be found at the following URLs:

• NECCC: www.necalbroadband.org
• UCCC: www.upcalbroadband.org

The April 4, 2010 7.2 magnitude El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake, near the US-Mexican border, killed four people and injured over 100. This quake ruptured the Pescadores-Borrego fault system, adjacent to the Laguna Salada fault that produced a similar-sized shaker in 1892. Why the earthquake occurred where it did presents an important challenge to understanding of the physics of earthquake slip and recurrence. Given the fault’s location, international collaboration is a vital part of empowering seismic experts to gain an understanding of this event that will enable them to predict similar events in the future. But that collaboration has been hindered by lack of bandwidth.

One of the technologies used to study such events is Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). LiDAR uses lasers to provide rapid and uniform mapping of a wide range of geological features. This technology produces raw datasets in excess of 100 GB or 4 billion data measurements, placing the data out of reach of many researchers. In order for the data to be most effective, researchers and students need ready access to it.

The AmLight West high-bandwidth upgrade increases by a factor of 10 the network bandwidth between Mexico and the US to enable the rapid flow of information across the border to the OpenTopography facilities located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). It will allow geologists at the Centro de Investigacion Cientifica y de Educacion Superior de Ensenada (CICESE) located in Ensenada to quickly provide and analyze data that can then be visualized at the UC Davis KeckCaves facility.

This enhanced bandwidth connectivity will provide a viable conduit for researchers to contribute data to OpenTopography and other similar efforts. This data will then be available to researchers and students worldwide, enabling the planet’s best minds to work together on predicting where the next super-shaker is likely to strike or examining earthquake data in real time.

The AmLight West project is made possible through the funding support of the National Science Foundation (award# OCI-0963053), Florida International University, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), and the Corporación Universitaria para el Desarrollo de Internet (CUDI).

Thanks to the advanced network connectivity to the telescopes of the W. M. Keck Observatory located high atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, mainland astronomers as well as their colleagues all over the world can peer far out into our shared universe, studying new marvels and learning things that can help us understand our own little corner of the galaxy as well.

While astronomy has always made a special study of the grandest and most vast structures of the universe -- nebulae, galaxies, and other objects many millions of light years across -- one of the most exciting developments in astronomy has been the ability to locate far tinier objects of natural interest to the researchers and to all of humanity: planets themselves, orbiting far distant stars. California researchers at CENIC member institutions have established themselves as particularly skilled planet-hunters, thanks in no small part to the connectivity that they enjoy via CalREN and the Pacific Wave distributed peering facility run by CENIC and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop with the support of USC and the University of Washington. Thanks to such networking, the enormous amounts of data generated by distant telescopes in hostile environments can be accessed worldwide, greatly accelerating the pace of discovery.

Most of the currently known exo-planets are detected by several means, including their gravitationally "tugs" at their parent stars from one side to the other as they orbit around them, and the periodic dimming in brightness of the parent star as their planets pass in front of them relative to Earth. Larger planets, which "tug" harder at their home stars and cover more of their area as they transit across their faces, have been easier to find in the past. However, as the sensitivity and computational power at the researchers' disposal has increased, so has their ability to locate smaller and smaller terrestrial planets more similar in size to Earth and orbiting closer to their parent stars. Such planets, should they have liquid water on their surface, could be prime candidates for the development of life and thus targets of particular study.

Recently, a team of astronomers at Caltech announced that, thanks to data taken at the Keck Observatory and by the Kepler interplanetary exploration mission, they were able to detect the three smallest known exo-planets. All three planets orbit the same star, and appear to have rocky surfaces that indicate that they are similar in structure to Earth, as opposed to large "gas giant" planets like Jupiter. The small, relatively dim "red dwarf" star, called KOI-961, was first flagged as a potential planetary system by the Kepler mission, a space telescope that looks for planets around sunlike stars by scanning the sky for stars that periodically dip in brightness as one or more planets pass in front of them.

Philip Muirhead, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, is the lead author on the paper describing the discovery, which has been accepted by the Astrophysical Journal. The team also presented their results in two talks on January 11 at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas. Interested parties can find the paper online.

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

US & World Networking News:

Speaking earlier this year, Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, said he expects NASA's Kepler Telescope to discover a habitable planet within the coming year. "Sooner or later, Kepler will find a lukewarm planet with a size making it probably Earthlike," said Marcy.

A selection of infographics has appeared on Vizworld, that vividly illustrates some of the key data topics today. This includes the digital information explosion and its impact on business, data management troubles, understanding real-time data and online security.

On January 17, CSU Fullerton hosted a flip-the-switch event in celebration of the completion of three solar-power systems, each 1.16 megawatts in size, installed on the rooftops of two CSU Fullerton buildings.

Schools in California, Wales, and universities like Case Western are already starting to experiment with using such devices in the classroom. If the tablette in the classroom becomes popular, it will place enormous pressure on R&E networks. Imagine hundreds of tablets in the schools trying to access the Internet at the same time! [...] As more and more textbooks are designed to be available only on tablets, we will soon reach a critical tipping point.

If you're tired of hearing about cloud computing and big data, you might want to wear earplugs for the next year or so. These two trends are only going to get hotter, in large part because they're also becoming ideal bedfellows.

For more than 25 years, the Lifeline program has played a vital role in ensuring that the neediest among us stay connected to our communications networks. Today, the FCC reforms and modernizes the program for the 21st century, eliminating waste and misuse of public funds, imposing fiscal discipline and accountability, and ensuring that the program satisfies Congress's directive that "[c]onsumers in all regions, including low-income consumers ... should have access to telecommunications and information services."

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.