CENIC News

Along with the ever-increasing demands for bandwidth powering many 100G upgrades to major networks and the ways in which institutions are looking to cloud services to help them fulfill their missions, the proliferation of mobile devices (and wireless R&E networking to reach them) is shaping up as one of the hotter topics of interest to CENIC and CENIC members. Just this year, smartphones exceeded both laptops and desktops in terms of total number shipped according to Morgan Stanley research, making them the most common Internet platform and a natural way for California's K-20 research and education institutions to reach out to their constituency.

Thus for any institution, the "mobile face" that it presents to the world is every bit as important as the desktop-browser version still often seen as the default one. And if the trends mentioned above are any indication, the "mobile face" may even overtake the desktop version in importance, both for the delivery of research and education resources as well as for class signups and the institution's own website.

However, one of the biggest challenges in developing resources for web-enabled personal devices is the devices' diversity. Multiple platforms abound, and they are used in dozens of ways. Resource developers must already take into account the many ways that people use mobile technology to enhance their experiences; developing content while also allowing for the vagaries of multiple devices adds even more time, expense, and complexity to an institution's responsibility to serve their communities through these means.

To address this, the University of California system has developed the UC Mobile Web Framework. With the MWF toolkit, resources can be developed once and quickly to enable an institution to reach their constituents through mobile devices. And the Framework's uses are not limited to the institution's own website. Tools are available to carry out functions ranging from event management to gauging audience/population response, making rich classroom materials available, and more.

The initiative was developed at UCLA and includes contributors from multiple UC campuses, all of whom are helping to develop the Framework further. Participation from the California State University system and California's Community Colleges is particularly encouraged, and readers of CENIC Today will be kept updated on further developments, not only for the UC Mobile Web Framework and similar toolkits but also in wireless R&E networking advances that will help to make them available.

This month, CENIC completed testing a on new point-to-point DS-3 circuit for Alpine County Office of Education which is scheduled to be put into production in early June. This will allow us to cancel the OC12 OCN circuit currently needed to carry the existing DS-3.

Readers of CENIC Today will recall the Central Valley Next Generation Broadband Infrastructure Project from the December 5 issue, where it was announced that the project was ready to launch construction. CENIC together with the Central Valley Independent Network established a strategic relationship to develop and deliver a middle-mile broadband fiber-based infrastructure throughout 18 counties in Central California: Amador, Calaveras, Colusa, El Dorado, Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Nevada, Placer, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Sutter, Tulare, Tuolumne, and Yuba. In August 2010, CVIN, on behalf of the CVIN-CENIC partnership, was awarded a $46.62 million stimulus grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Subsequently, CVIN also received a $6.66 million grant from the CPUC's California Advanced Services Fund. CVIN's Affiliates committed an additional $13.32 million to complete the funding for this $66.6 million project.

CENIC is delighted to report that its network engineers turned up 10 Gigabit backbone links in preparation for the Project buildout. CENIC Today readers will be kept up to date on the latest news on the Project and other infrastructure projects that CENIC is a part of as developments occur.

California based CENIC will also provide engineering support, and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
will support the NLR TelePresence Exchange

National LambdaRail (NLR) and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) announced on May 24 that they have completed the transfer of NLR's Network Operations Center (NOC) to CENIC. CENIC has a long history of providing NOC services at the optical layer to NLR since its inception in 2003. In addition to optical layer services, CENIC will now be responsible for switch, router, and engineering support desk NOC services and, in a recently-expanded agreement, CENIC will deliver network design engineering capabilities for NLR.

National LambdaRail also announced that technical support for its TelePresence services would now be supported by the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. NLR provides the research and education community with access to the largest available TelePresence network, reaching over 250 end points and 14 countries. It also provides interconnection to commercial carrier networks to enable the R&E community to connect to industry.

NLR Chairman and CEO Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong welcomed the agreements with both CENIC and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. "NLR now has very robust support for our NOC, engineering and TelePresence services and we look forward to excellent enhanced partnerships with both CENIC and UW-Whitewater," he said "We currently have the right infrastructure in place now to meet our objectives to support the growing 'big data' demands of scientific research, in particular the massive new data demands that genomic medicine will need as it transforms healthcare in the country."

"As a founding member of NLR, CENIC is pleased not only to be providing all of NLR's Network Operations Center, but also to be supporting NLR's engineering requirements," said CENIC Chief Executive Officer, Louis Fox. "This reinforces our combined mission to serve the research community, not only throughout California but also across the United States."

The past decade has been spent in laying the infrastructure of advanced networks, and now that those networks have become an established part of the landscape for California's K-20 research and education communities, the timing couldn't be better. Advanced fiber-optic networks such as the California Research & Education Network, currently serving the majority of the state's K-20 research and education communities, can now be used to help institutions meet the challenges of the new century and increase service to their faculty, students, and staff while adjusting to a lean budgetary landscape.

Just as CENIC was able to aggregate demand across the K-20 community in order to build CalREN itself, it is doing the same in order to offer cost-effective cloud and cloud-related services over the network, with one example being the new CalREN VoIP Services. CalREN VoIP Services provide institutions with an easy to manage, low-cost way to enter the modern world of Unified Communications and next-generation voice solutions.

The CalREN VoIP integrated communications tool set supports fixed-mobile convergence across multiple devices, soft-phones, and smart-phone apps. Additionally, the integrated communications tool set supports text messaging, instant messaging, presence, videoconferencing, web collaboration, and webinar hosting without having to purchase, install, operate, and maintain additional infrastructure.

CalREN VoIP Services features bundled flat-rate monthly pricing according to a simple cost structure, and the service includes CENIC-managed campus-based session border controllers (SBCs), CENIC-provisioned SIP trunks, voicemail and 911 service, unlimited local and domestic long-distance calling, and business-class feature sets priced at $6.90/month (for Basic lines) and $7.90/month (for Premium lines), plus applicable federal and state taxes and fees.

Current service rollouts are taking place at Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University, UC Santa Cruz, Caltech, and others. Robust, diverse network connectivity is a must for participating institutions, together with a failover to the public-switched telephone network (PSTN).

While CENIC ultimately seeks to ensure that all institutions can benefit from CalREN VoIP Services, the current focus is on institutions with at least a thousand lines. Interested representatives of colleges and college districts with large numbers of lines are invited to contact CENIC to learn more about how CalREN VoIP Services can enable them to meet their mission of serving all who can benefit from higher education while reducing operational costs and preparing for the future of unified communications.

To learn how your institution can transition to CalREN VoIP Services, please contact CENIC at (714) 220-3450 or write to CENIC at voip@cenic.org. More information can also be found at voip.cenic.org.

The University of Utah and the Utah Education Network (UEN) are partnering with SCinet to provide both Internet-based and dedicated wide area connectivity services for the SC12 conference and exhibition in Salt Lake City, Utah, November 10-16, 2012. In order to provide the best experience possible for the conference participants, we are asking exhibitors and network entities to describe their advanced network resource needs in supporting their organization's presence and demonstrations at the Salt Palace Convention Center (SPCC).

SCinet will work with ESnet, Internet2, National LambdaRail (NLR), Netherlight, UEN, and other collaborating networking organizations to implement the required resources for SC12. If your organization will require network resources beyond a basic IPv4/IPv6 network service, please respond to this call with the details of your particular requirements. While we would like to have as many details as possible outlined early, we recognize that some issues will need to be worked out over time. Please describe your needs with the available information now, so we may plan accordingly.

• Network bandwidth required (e.g., GigE, 10GigE, Nx10GigE, 100GigE)
• Potential long haul network provider(s) to reach SPCC (e.g., ESnet, Internet2, NLR)
• Origination point(s) of network resources
• Will the network resources be dedicated to a single purpose or can they be shared with other SC12 participants?
• If the network resources can be shared, will you need Layer-2 (e.g., point-to-point Gigabit Ethernet) or Layer-3 (e.g., IPv4, IPv6) support?

Even if you are unable to provide all the details above please contact the SCinet WAN Team as soon as possible with what you do know.

Please send your connectivity requirements and questions to the SCinet WAN Team by June 8, 2012. The e-mail address is wan-team@scinet.supercomputing.org.

Network researchers throughout California will soon be able to carry out OpenFlow-related activities with one another and the larger OpenFlow community via the California OpenFlow Testbed Network (COTN)*. Through OpenFlow, a network switch software which gives researchers the power to modify the behavior of active network devices, innovative routing and switching protocols can be developed and then tested in working networks. Thus, the OpenFlow-enabled COTN will aid California network specialists in the development of tomorrow's Internet, using today's networks as a testbed for innovation.

COTN will be a high-bandwidth (10Gigabit Ethernet) dedicated research infrastructure spanning California. It will deploy OpenFlow-enabled switches into the backbone of CENIC's CalREN network at Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, and Sacramento. It will connect with emerging OpenFlow testbeds within the national research networks such as NLR and Internet2. Because COTN will be colocated with major network Points of Presence (POPs) in California, it can be readily expanded to include connectivity to other testbeds throughout the nation.

COTN was developed in response to a solicitation from the Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI), an NSF-sponsored virtual laboratory at the frontiers of network science and engineering for exploring future internets at scale. (GENI is supported by NSF award #CNS-0714770. )

The High-Performance Research (HPR) tier of CENIC's CalREN network already links California's research universities where a great deal of GENI-related research and collaboration is taking place. University of California campuses connected by CalREN-HPR have already designated faculty researchers in setting up an OpenFlow testbed, including Berkeley, Davis, Merced, Santa Cruz, and San Diego. These researchers operating under the aegis of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) are also collaborating with others at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UC San Diego and UC Irvine, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Other GENI-related research is also being carried out at Stanford University, UCLA, and the University of Southern California.

Furthermore, it is expected that a number of other regional networks will develop similar OpenFlow testbeds as a result of this solicitation, allowing for a rich topology of interconnected switches to develop that can facilitate GENI-related research and collaboration nationwide. COTN will thus directly benefit the network research and experiments and new applications invented and developed by the computer scientists and network researchers associated with University of California, Stanford, Caltech, USC, and many other campuses.

Lastly, COTN will also be a dedicated, breakable research network. There will be no restrictions with regard to configuration control, traffic monitoring, etc., as would be the case in a network with production traffic, nor will there be risk that COTN will be negatively impacted by production?related activity elsewhere on the network. Further, by creating a testbed running on the already-in-use CENIC infrastructure, the researchers using the testbed benefit from not having to concern themselves with outages, maintenance, and other issues.

Readers of CENIC Today will be kept up-to-date on further developments surrounding OpenFlow-related research enabled on CalREN.

*Supported by NSF award #0944089 for GENI Development and Prototyping (D&P) Infrastructure.

Mobile access to educational resources has fast become a major area of focus for university IT specialists who must consider that many members of their faculty, staff, and student population will be accessing rich media on a mobile computing device via a wireless network rather than a traditional laptop or desktop computer with a direct connection.

Borne out of a desire to provide a device agnostic, platform independent, easy to use, and easy to deploy framework for the mobile web, the UCLA Mobile Web Framework addresses this increasingly complex landscape and makes it simple to keep pace with the rapidly evolving mobile landscape.

While borne at UCLA, the Mobile Web Framework has since blossomed into a a collaborative, multi-campus initiative. While many institutions have chosen to simply leverage the framework as it stands today, others have gone a step further, contributing back to the framework and helping steer its future. these UC campuses include Berkeley, San Diego, San Francisco, and Riverside as well as UCLA.

UCLA Project Lead Rose Rocchio, a past presenter at the CENIC 2012 Annual Conference, is Director of the UCLA Office of Information Technology (OIT) Education & Collaboration Technology Group (ECTG). In that capacity, Rocchio handles governance and administrative functions related to the MWF project. She has steered the MWF through its growth from UCLA into the broader mobile IT space. As chair of the UC Mobile Collaboration Group (MCG), she also oversees the broader collaborative initiative and has guided the UC mobile strategy, authoring the UC Mobile Computing white paper submitted to the UC Collaboration Technology Group (CTG), a subcommittee of the UC Information Technology Leadership Council (ITLC). She received her undergraduate degree from MIT and a MBA from UCLA's Anderson School of Management.

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

US & World Networking News:

The Simons Foundation, which specializes in science and math research, has chosen the University of California, Berkeley, as host for an ambitious new center for computer science.

A recent wave of new submarine cable builds and upgrades to existing cable systems has brought an influx of submarine cable capacity to many historically high cost markets, including Africa, the Middle East, Southern Asia, and Latin America.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) to explore the use of Deployable Aerial Communications Architecture (DACA) technologies.

South Africa, Australia and New Zealand will host the biggest radio telescope ever built. The nations belonging to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) organisation took the decision at a meeting on Friday.

Institutions are finding new ways of achieving higher education's mission without being crippled by constraints or overpowered by greater expectations. Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies is a collection of chapters and case studies contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and other stakeholders.

Educators are increasingly looking to online courses as a way to handle more students with less funding.

The development of hybrid online courses, in collaboration with faculty in recent years, has helped more students move past "bottleneck courses" - classes in which there aren't enough faculty to handle large numbers of students, Cal Poly Pomona President Michael Ortiz said.

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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