CENIC News

The data-intensive sciences have always been major drivers for the creation of advanced networks and even of the Internet itself. However, the potential of networks to have a profound impact on daily life beyond big science became clear when the volume of personal communications began to overtake scientific data on the ARPANET, the world’s first packet-switched network which began operation in California in 1969. As a means to connect people in addition to computers and research facilities, networks have transformed society – and the networks themselves have been transformed by the demands of serving a population of customers quite different from the initial user population of somewhat close-knit research scientists. Security and intellectual property/copyright concerns, among others, have placed requirements on network operation that can be troublesome for scientific users, who may find their network use constrained by firewalls and security protocols meant to stymie illegal behavior. In other less problematic cases, research users at large institutions are sometimes frustrated to see their data transfers competing with or affected by more numerous but less bandwidth-intensive uses from dormitories or similar non-research-oriented facilities.

This reality is the motivation behind the latest model for big science networking promoted by the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), called the "Science DMZ," which conceptualizes a high-performance research network as a portion of the larger institutional network devoted to data-intensive science and optimized for its demands in terms of equipment, firewalling, performance measurement, and security policies. With large-bandwidth research use kept separate from general-purpose and enterprise use, this approach allows researchers to benefit fully from advanced networks without having to negotiate the constraints of the day-to-day production environment.

Worth noting is the fact that this approach, as mentioned in last month’s CENIC Today, has been in place in California for over a decade as CalREN-HPR, a production-quality network designed to serve High-Performance Research and featuring not only the big bandwidth demanded by today’s cutting-edge research but also performance measurement, security practices that allow for the safe but unencumbered transfer of large data sets, and the flexible provisioning of network resources to meet time-sensitive needs.

It has always been the desire of California’s research and education communities from the dawn of the advanced network age to enable not only day-to-day communication and enterprise needs but also the needs of cutting-edge high-performance research, a staple of the state’s higher education -- and a major economic driver -- since the middle of the last century.

The foresight of those communities is what motivated them to create CalREN in its current form: a multi-tiered network where each tier operates separately and independently, serving day-to-day and enterprise needs as well as those of data-intensive science on an equally reliable production-quality level. As this tiered model for scientific networking becomes more and more frequently implemented worldwide, it will be interesting to see how advanced networking is affected on a global scale.

The California State University now has six more 10-Gigabit connections to the CalREN backbone. San Francisco State University's dark-fiber connection to the CalREN backbone node at San Francisco was upgraded to 10 gigabit, as was Cal Poly Pomona's to the backbone node at Los Angeles. Two other campuses received double 10-Gigabit upgrades in connectivity: Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's connection to the San Luis Obispo and Soledad backbone nodes, as well as CSU Northridge's connections to the Los Angeles and Tustin backbone nodes.

Two connections were also completed for the California K12 System, with the Colusa County Office of Education currently enjoying a new Gigabit connection to the CalREN backbone node at Sacramento, and the Del Norte County Office of Education obtaining a 100 Mb/s connection to the backbone node at Los Angeles, completing a network ring for the Del Norte and Humboldt County Offices of Education as well as the Northern Humboldt Union High School District.

Network-Enabled CENIC Associate Researchers Play Prominent Role in Discovery

It isn't every day that one of the more abstruse branches of physics becomes a global hot topic, but when it does, there is a fairly good chance that the Franco-Swiss high-energy physics complex CERN will be at the heart of the matter. This month demonstrated that yet again, as some of the most prominent researchers in high-energy physics announced that decades of data gathered as a result of two CERN-based experiments indicated that indicated the existence of a particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson. (A boson is a type of elementary particle of matter.)

Researchers from California played a prominent role in the discovery, including Joe Incandela of UC Santa Barbara spokesman for the scientists affiliated with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. Six other California institutions (and CENIC Associates) were involved in the global collaboration represented by CMS. The second experiment which produced Higgs-relevant data was the ATLAS experiment, led by CERN's Fabiola Gianotti. Equally global in scope, ATLAS also includes participants from the United States and California's research and education communities.

The existence of the Higgs particle was proposed in 1964 by British physicist Peter Higgs, as evidence of an equally theoretical "Higgs field," a field penetrating all of space the interaction with which serves to give mass to all elementary particles. Should this field exist, a corresponding elementary particle would also have to exist. Thus, proof of the existence of the Higgs boson is seen as proof that the Higgs field also exists, and hence of the mechanism by which elementary particles obtain their mass. (Larger aggregations of these particles -- such as ourselves -- also obtain mass from other means.) As a result, nearly five decades has passed between the proposition of the Higgs particle and this announcement. More work will of course be necessary in order to confirm that the Higgs-like particle indicated by the data is in fact the Higgs and not a heretofore unknown elementary particle.

High-energy and particle physics, together with many other similarly data-heavy disciplines, is heavily enabled by advanced networks that allow researchers worldwide to gain access to the vast amounts of data that such specialized and expensive facilities as CERN produce. For a historical look at the relationship between such physics and advanced networks, readers of CENIC Today are invited to view a presentation from the 2012 CENIC Annual Conference given by Stanford University's Richard Mount, Experimental Particle Physics and the Network -- from Flirtation to Total Dependency (mp4 format -- please right-click and save to view).

From helping to facilitate the transfer of massive data sets from CERN during past Supercomputing conferences by Caltech's Harvey Newman and others to connecting to the Large Hadron Collider Open Network Environment as announced in the May 3, 2012 issue of CENIC Today, the advanced networking provided by CENIC has always been a vital part of discovery in data-intensive sciences, as are advanced networks all over the world.

Pacific Wave (www.pacificwave.net) is a distributed international peering facility that enables research and education networks to come together and share traffic at any of five locations in three cities along the US West Coast (Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, and Seattle). Over 25 networks participate in Pacific Wave, representing more than 40 countries throughout the Pacific Rim and beyond to Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East.

And you can learn more in Salt Lake City at Supercomputing 2012, so stop by Booth 3647 to say hello and find out how your institution or network can benefit from the international collaboration empowered by Pacific Wave.

Follow the PacWave@SC12 Twitter Feed for announcements from the show floor!

California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC 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. Over the past few years the scope of CENIC services has broadened to include cost-effective and scalable "above the network" technology services.

To meet this need, CENIC invites the submission of proposals for:

1. Cloud compute and storage services for its member institutions;
2. Cloud transition services allowing movement of member institution application workloads to a cloud environment; and
3. Co-location services for those member institution application workloads not suitable for a public cloud environment.

See RFPs at http://www.cenic.org/RFP.html.  Vendors may bid on any one or more of these procurements.

Proposals are due no later than 5pm PT, September 14, 2012.

CENIC will host a required vendor conference at 10am on August 9, 2012, 16700 Valley View, Suite 400, La Mirada, CA 90638. Vendors interested in submitting proposals must attend.

Vendor finalists will be selected by September 28, 2012, and will be invited to sign up for a half-day interview scheduled on October 9 or October 10, 2012.

Best and final proposals from the vendor finalists will be due no later than 5pm PT, October 19, 2012. CENIC intends to notify the winner(s) by October 23, 2012.

All official correspondence (transmittal of proposals, etc.) pertaining to this proposal should be directed to John Charles, CENIC COO, at 16700 Valley View, Suite 400, La Mirada, CA 90638. However, if you have any questions, please contact Rich Hintz at rjhintz@cenic.org.

New partnership will serve healthcare organizations throughout California and Arizona

National LambdaRail (NLR) and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) have announced that they will partner in the delivery of ultra-high bandwidth services to healthcare organizations in California and Arizona working in the diagnosis, prevention, treatment and management of illness and medical conditions of all kinds. Such organizations will include cancer centers, university schools of medicine, research institutions, hospitals, clinic, doctors' offices, payers, providers, medical services companies and laboratories, imaging centers, genomic sequencing centers, computing facilities and data centers.

This announcement follows the announcement last week of a collaboration between NLR and AT&T on communication services to healthcare organizations, first in California and ultimately across the United States. The addition of CENIC to the partnership creates very comprehensive connectivity within the California and Arizona healthcare community. It also marks a further enhancement of the developing partnership between NLR and CENIC, following the news in May that CENIC was providing full Network Operations Center (NOC) services to NLR as well as engineering support.

"This is another vital step towards an integrated health information infrastructure for the United States," said NLR Chairman and CEO Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. "These key partnerships for high volume, high speed data services to all medical institutions, put us well on the way towards making genomically-informed, evidence-based medical care a reality. Whole genome sequencing data can be deployed quickly to the service of clinical decision making at the point of care."

Dr. Soon-Shiong added that the Cancer Knowledge Action Network - an initiative he announced in April - was an example of the kind of integrated information infrastructure that would be supported by the NLR-CENIC partnership. "Our partnership will be a vital tool in cancer care case management," he said.

"CENIC is proud to be leading the way, as the regional network to partner with NLR in support of its healthcare focused mission," said CENIC President and CEO, Louis Fox. "A national health network is going to be essential for our country, to maintain our leadership in research as well as to achieve better, affordable healthcare. That network begins here today."

It is now a year since it was announced in July 2011 that NLR would form the backbone of a "national health intranet." With the announcement last week of the AT&T partnership, beginning with Saint John's Hospital in Santa Monica as the first to be connected, and now the CENIC partnership, California will be the first state to benefit from the new infrastructure. California will further benefit from CENIC and NLR's connection with the California TeleHealth Network, a statewide broadband network which has so far enrolled over 300 rural healthcare provider sites, the combined resources thereby creating connectivity all the way from research and sequencing centers to local physicians in remote or underserved communities.

Together with other Consortia, the Northeastern California Connect and Upstate California Connect Consortia aim to create a comprehensive, integrated, open-access, middle-mile, and last-mile broadband infrastructure that will connect 16 rural counties in Northern California (Butte, Colusa, Del Norte, Glenn, Humboldt, Lake, Lassen, Mendocino, Modoc, Plumas, Shasta, Siskiyou, Sonoma, Tehama, Trinity, and Yolo). Having such a cohesive network infrastructure throughout Northern California will have a similar impact as roads and waterways currently have. Without such a comprehensive broadband infrastructure, the over 1.6 million northern Californians living in these counties will continue to be deprived of proper access to the broadband services that are increasingly essential to the quality of life in the 21st century.

The latest quarterly newsletters for the Northeastern California Connect and Upstate California Connect Consortia have gone out, full of information about the latest activities in both projects. Readers of CENIC Today are invited to visit NECCC and the UCCC websites to read the latest issues of the Consortia newsletters and sign up for future updates.

The Higgs boson -- a theoretical construct since 1964 -- took a giant step closer to recognition as a validated part of the physical universe this month with the report from CERN that a particle consistent with the Higgs was observed in data collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Always rigorous in their use of language, the international team was careful to state their discovery as that of a Higgs-like particle, and to assure an interested public that further work would need to be done to verify that the particle indicated by the data was in fact the Higgs boson.

Experiments associated with two particular detectors, called ATLAS and CMS, played a vital role in the discovery, with leading researchers of the latter from the CENIC Associate institutions Caltech and UC Santa Barbara. These include UCSB physics professor Joe Incandela, who presented CMS findings in Switzerland on July 4, and Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, co-leader of the Caltech contingent of scientists together with previous Star Performer Harvey Newman. (CENIC Associate researchers who have taken part in the CMS experiment include those from UC campuses at Davis, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Riverside, as well as Caltech and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.)

Born and educated in Macedonia/Greece, Spiropulu moved to the U.S. to pursue her Ph.D. at Harvard and worked at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). She has worked on silicon sensors, calorimetry, trigger and data acquisition and on searches for new physics. Spiropulu is interested in the search for dark matter at the LHC, questions on dark matter that cut across particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Her research efforts target instigating innovation in data analyses and creative thinking towards answering fundamental questions on the physics of the universe at the largest and smallest length scales.

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

US & World Networking News:

UC Davis has received a $1.6 million grant from the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation that will allow it to improve science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in schools throughout Davis and Dixon.

When 12 more top universities announced on Tuesday, July 17, that they will offer some of these online courses, the higher education community woke up to the reality that MOOCs will be a part of education's future.

As part of a seismic shift in online learning that is reshaping higher education, Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, will announce on Tuesday that a dozen major research universities are joining the venture.

On July 25, National LambdaRail (NLR) and AT&T jointly announced the first step toward a networking solution to virtually connect major cancer centers, universities, medical schools, research hospitals, laboratories and other institutions across the United States to help transform the healthcare industry's ability to diagnose, prevent, treat and/or manage illness and medical conditions of all kinds.

Commenting as soon as the link was completed, Dr. FF Tusubira, the CEO of UbuntuNet Alliance said, "This is history in the making - the first, authentic NREN cross-border link in sub-Saharan Africa, if not the whole of Africa." Echoing the theme, Bonny Khunga, the CEO of ZAMREN said, "We are very happy to be the first NREN to install a research and education cross-border link in Africa."

After two years of detailed engineering, environmental studies, and obtaining rights-of-way and permits, the California Broadband Cooperative has been cleared to begin construction on Digital 395. Digital 395 is the 583-mile broadband project, funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the California Advanced Services Fund, that brings high-speed Internet to the Eastern Sierra region of California, representing almost 15% of the State.

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.