CENIC News

From the very beginning, the California Research & Education Network was conceived of not only as a production network supporting educational Internet use and the bandwidth-intensive uses of high-performance applications, but also supporting research on the network itself. This insight motivated the creation of CalREN itself as a three-tiered network, with two production tiers, CalREN-Digital California (DC) and CalREN-High Performance Research (HPR), to support daily network use and high-performance research respectively, and the CalREN-eXperimental/Developmental (XD) tier, a collection of project-specific network resources, to support bleeding-edge research on the network itself. This model further allowed all three levels of activity to take place on the same infrastructure with no concerns that activities on the bleeding-edge would impact day-to-day research and education users.

Such network research support was recognized by the state's research and education communities as playing a vital role in ensuring that CalREN and similar networks worldwide will continue to evolve with the insight of the world's best network researchers. As a result of these communities' foresight, CalREN today plays an equally vital role in California's global innovation leadership.

Supporting Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the latest way in which CalREN enables future-oriented research on itself, and the establishment of the California OpenFlow Testbed Network (COTN)* is a significant step further along this path. Instead of relying on complex routers and switches to implement the multiple protocols needed to share all of these forms of data, SDN (and its most common instantiation, OpenFlow) separates the information flowing over the network from the control data that governs how the information is sent. This allows researchers to redesign the network “slice” they are interested in as it operates by writing simple software programs that manipulate that slice's logical map.

Enabling this research on an infrastructure that supports high-performance applications as well as research on the network itself is also an important ingredient in the success of future Internets. Not only does an infrastructure like CalREN enable network researchers to test their innovations at-scale on real-world testbeds, but it also allows for collaboration between the network researchers and those who would put their innovations to use in tomorrow's production networks. This ensures that the future Internets generated by SDN are not only optimized for real-world infrastructure, but real-world uses as well.

California has always been a hotbed of network innovation, from today's OpenFlow pioneers at Stanford University all the way back to the days of the original ARPANET, initiated in October of 1969 by the now-famous team led by UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock with the transmission of the first host-to-host network message between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. The first four-node network soon followed, adding CENIC Charter Associate UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.

The three-node COTN network, with OpenFlow-enabled switches residing at the CalREN backbone nodes in Sacramento, Sunnyvale, and Los Angeles, continues this tradition.

Readers of CENIC Today who wish to learn more about OpenFlow, Software Defined Networking, and the Internets of tomorrow are invited to view the 2009 Keynote Address by Stanford University's Guru Parulkar and the March 12 Software Defined Networking session in the 2012 CENIC Annual Conference, archived video for which can be found online at the 2012 conference program.

Researchers who wish to access COTN to begin their own experiments on tomorrow's networks can contact Brian Court, CENIC's Director of Network Engineering & Design, at bac@cenic.org to learn more.

Thanks to this new testbed network and others that have been implemented nationally and internationally, tomorrow's Internets will once again be made real by California's research and education communities and colleagues worldwide, using today's network infrastructures.

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

August and September 2012 saw a great deal of activity on behalf of the California State University, with 10 Gigabit links currently in production between Sacramento State University and the CalREN backbone node at Sacramento, San Francisco State University and the Oakland backbone node, CSU Fullerton and the Los Angeles backbone node, and dual, diverse 10 Gigabit connections between CSU Northridge and the backbone nodes at Los Angeles and Tustin. San Jose State University also received a 10G upgrade.

For California's Community Colleges, the Coast Community College District received a Gigabit connection to the Los Angeles backbone node.Cuyamaca College received a Gigabit connection to the CalREN backbone in San Diego, as did Grossmont College, and the Lastly, Pepperdine University Malibu Campus's connection to the Riverside backbone mode was upgraded to 500 Mb/s.

Network researchers throughout California can now 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 itself is a high-bandwidth (10Gigabit Ethernet) dedicated research infrastructure spanning California. It has deployed OpenFlow-enabled switches into the backbone of CENIC's CalREN network at Los Angeles, Sunnyvale, and Sacramento and connects 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.

Among these areas of research are the facilitation of wide-area network control plane and management plane research, the provision of wide-area network monitoring and operation capability, sliceable new generation of applications requiring high-bandwidth, low-latency, and/or specialized QoS or security requirements, the support integration of packet, circuit, and flow oriented applications, and wide-area interconnected WIMAX networks and heterogeneous networking across wireless, wireline, and optical networks.

However, there are many ways in which the abilities made possible for researchers by COTN and similar networks can be used not only to study the network itself, but to subsequently optimize it for particular uses, such as the operation of data centers, grid computing, and supercomputing. As we enter the Dawn of the Cloud -- and search for new ways to optimize power usage and make advanced networks more energy-thrifty and sustainable -- such applications become vital "wins" for the concept of Software-Defined Networking. It is worth noting that many such applications have been facilitated by CalREN for some time, such as the GreenLight and Scalable Energy-Efficient Datacenters (SEED) projects, grid computing management applications such as MonALISA and UltraLight, and many digital media applications requiring real-time network management.

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 is also be a dedicated, breakable research network. There are 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.

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.

To meet this need, CENIC invites the submission of proposals from qualified service providers for various communications circuits and optional dark-fiber segments across California. The physical addresses and NPA/NXX numbers for all sites are provided in the Exhibits which can be found on the CENIC website.

Proposals are due no later than 5pm PT, November 30, 2012.

With the creation of the California OpenFlow Testbed Network (COTN), California's network researchers are further enabled to continue their decades-long tradition of network-based research, much of which has resulted in worldwide benefit and social change. This month's CENIC Star Performer is only one of the luminaries currently imagining the Internets of tomorrow, UC Berkeley's Scott Shenker.

A world leader in the movement toward Software Defined Networking and co-founder of the Open Networking Foundation, Shenker is a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at UC Berkeley. He is also the chief scientist and the leader of the Networking Group at the International Computer Science Institute, where he was a founding member of the ICSI Center for Internet Research.

Shenker received his doctorate in physics in 1983 from the University of Chicago, and was later awarded an honorary doctorate from the same university in recognition of his contributions to Internet architecture. He has received both the SIGCOMM and IEEE Internet awards. Along with Stanford University's Martin Casado and Nick McKeown, he has been a leader in the movement toward Software Defined Networking.

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

US & World Networking News:

If you have used a public, private, or commercial cloud resource for scientific research, engineering, education and/or outreach, please complete the XSEDE Cloud Use Survey. Your input will help XSEDE management understand your cloud computing experiences so that we can better plan for integrating clouds into the XSEDE architecture.

Washington Monthly rates schools based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country). Once again, CENIC Associate institutions make an impressive showing, with UC San Diego taking the top spot nationally, and Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Riverside all placing in the top ten. Other UCs (Santa Barbara and Davis) and private CENIC Associates Caltech and USC finished in the top 50.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced on October 4th that his agency is on track to meet its goal of freeing up 300 MHz of spectrum for mobile broadband by 2015.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego is the lead institution on a National Science Foundation (NSF) planning grant for a Science Gateway Institute that would offer a complete range of services aimed at connecting numerous individual groups developing domain-specific, user-friendly, Web-based portals and tools that enable scientific research.

The California STEM Summit 2012 will bring together leaders in STEM fields from education, business and industry, policy, research, non-governmental organizations, and governmental agencies to create new partnerships that bring full-scale change to how STEM is taught and learned.

EDUCAUSE and Internet2 are implementing a new series of pilot efforts to evaluate technologies and business models in the fast evolving migration from traditional textbooks to electronic content. For the fall 2012 term, the pilot is being conducted in partnership with McGraw-Hill Education and Courseload, through which more than 25 colleges and universities will provide etexts to their students.

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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