CENIC News

In a previous issue of CENIC Today, I mentioned the ways in which CENIC's California Research & Education Network has always supported the bleeding edge of network innovation, most recently with the rollout of the California OpenFlow Testbed Network (COTN), which has enabled CENIC Associates to participate in research using software defined networking.

This month, I'd like to broaden my focus from state-level to international by calling readers' attention to three recent announcements by Pacific Wave, the distributed international peering facility run jointly by CENIC and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, with the support from the University of Washington and USC.

Regarding software defined networking, the exchange now supports dynamic circuit provisioning using the On-demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System (OSCARS) developed by ESnet. As Pacific Wave is currently the dominant means by which the world's research and education networks cross the Pacific Ocean between the U.S. and the Asia Pacific region, this will greatly increase the collaborative possibilities for research into the advanced networks of tomorrow.

Global collaboration also took a leap forward with the exchange's announcement of a new 10-Gigabit fiber path that enables Pacific Wave to connect with the StarLight facility in Chicago. Northern Wave is an NSF-funded optical network connection along a fiber path provided by PNWGP and the BOREAS network, a collaboration among the Universities of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin-Madison, and Iowa State University. Not only does this new connectivity enable even greater collaboration between researchers in Asia and Europe, but it also welcomes new participants along the Northern Wave path in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington.

Lastly, I'd like to bring reader's attention to the announcement made by Ciena Corporation of the new 100-Gigabit backbone underlying Pacific Wave from Los Angeles to Seattle. Some of the most effective scientific drivers of advanced networks have always been research facilities that generate massive amounts of data. In the past, these have been sensor networks and astronomical observatories, but even individual labs with multiple genetic sequencers are beginning to generate significant amounts of data, hinting at a future when each biosciences building on a typical research university campus might generate as much data as a radio telescope array. Advanced networking has always worked to connect widely distributed resources, be they observatories, data, or researchers themselves, into a transparent, seamless, easily reconfigured research entity. As more locations become capable of generating vast amounts of data, a robust 100-G backbone along the length of the US West Coast will be vital to ensuring continuing regional and global collaboration.

Finally, I'd like to conclude by mentioning the opening in Emeryville of a Northern California office for CENIC, which replaces the previous location in Sacramento. With this new location, shared with Internet2, CENIC can further collaborations with its Northern California members, remain in touch with industry, government, and policy makers in Silicon Valley, the Bay Area, and Sacramento, and further activities to bring broadband to areas of the state that are currently un- or underserved such as those taking place in the Central Valley and Northern California.

October and November have seen activity for multiple segments of the CENIC community. For the California K-12 System, this activity has included an upgrade from Gigabit to 10-Gigabit connectivity for the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools and the San Francisco Unified School District, as well as a test-and-acceptance of a new 10-Gigabit connection to Chaffey Joint Union High School District. For California's Community Colleges, San Bernardino Valley College has received a new 10-Gigabit connection to the CalREN-DC network tier -- the first 10-Gigabit community college connection.

A great deal of activity has taken place on behalf of the California State University as well, with an upgrade to 10-Gigabit connections for San Jose State University, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's student dormitories, CSU Chico's connections to CalREN-DC and CalREN-HPR, Sacramento State University, and CSU Fullerton.

Lastly, Chapman University's previous 500 Mbps connection to CalREN was upgraded to a full Gigabit.

CENIC is delighted to announce that not only has online registration opened for its 2013 Annual Conference, which will take place at Calit2 at UC San Diego, but attendees will also enjoy compelling and informative Keynote Addresses by Calit2 Director Larry Smarr, University of Montana Professor of Neuroscience Gwen Jacobs, and ESnet Director Greg Bell.

Dr. Smarr will be speaking on Monday, Dr. Jacobs on Tuesday, and Dr. Bell on Wednesday.

As well as being the founding Director of Calit2, a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, Larry Smarr also holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) of UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 he received the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for his lifetime achievements in distributed computing systems. He serves on the NASA Advisory Council to the NASA Administrator, the DOE ESnet Policy Board, and chairs the NSF Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure. For eight years he was a member of the NIH Advisory Committee to the NIH Director, serving 3 directors. He served as PI of the NSF OptIPuter project and for the last 7 years he has been the PI of the Moore Foundation CAMERA global microbial metagenomics computational repository.

Gwen Jacobs maintains an active research program focused on informatics and cyberinfrastructure. Recently, she led the Lariat Networking project, an effort to upgrade the physical network infrastructure in 6 rural state institutions thereby improving the research competitiveness and collaborative activities of scientists at those institutions. Her current research efforts are developing tools and approaches for data management and informatics including the Yogo Data Management Framework (http://yogo.msu.montana.edu) and the Virtual Observatory and Ecological Informatics System (VOEIS: http://voeis.msu.montana.edu). At the national level she has been engaged in science policy for many years serving on the NSF Biological Sciences Advisory Committee, the NIH National Advisory Research Resources Council, NSF TeraGrid Science Advisory Board, as chair of NIH NOIT Study Section and for iPlant and Internet2.

Before joining ESnet, Greg Bell worked in Berkeley Lab's IT Division as Chief Technology Architect, reporting to the CIO. Bell's professional interests include advanced networking, collaborative tools, sustainable IT, cloud services, high-performance computing, and security models for open science. Prior to his work for the IT Division, Bell served as a network engineer for Berkeley Lab's LBLnet Services Group. Before coming to Berkeley Lab, Bell managed a non-profit agency serving political refugees and served as an analyst for Amnesty International.

More information about the conference, including hotel and travel, sponsorship, and registration, can be found online at cenic2013.cenic.org. CENIC would also like to thank Titanium Sponsor Cisco Systems for being valued supporters of our annual conference and for their support of the California research and education community.

International distributed network peering facility Pacific Wave announced today the enabling of dynamic circuit provisioning using the On-demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System (OSCARS) developed by the US Department of Energy -- Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). This new capacity of Pacific Wave will allow researchers (via their regional network provider) to reserve, and have dynamically allocated during the reservation period, a point-to-point network facility across one or more networks.

Pacific Wave is a distributed international peering facility that enables high-performance research and education networks in the Pacific Rim and beyond to connect with one another in any of three cities in the US West Coast (Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Los Angeles). Pacific Wave is a joint project of the Corporation for Education and Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), and is designed to enhance the efficiency of IP traffic across the west coast of the United States and with partners around the Pacific Rim. With the advanced connectivity provided by Pacific Wave, researchers in data-intensive sciences including astronomy, ocean research, genomics, and high-energy physics can collaborate with one another from anywhere in the world.

"This new offering by Pacific Wave, a major international interconnect point for research and education networks around the Pacific Rim, could vastly expand the number of networks that can interact via such a utility and the kinds of research that can be enabled by it," said Louis Fox, President and CEO of CENIC.

"The implementation of OSCARS with the new Pacific Wave 100G capacity, when combined with Science DMZs at research institutions, brings a whole new set of collaborative opportunities for data intensive science," noted Amy Philipson, Executive Director, PNWGP. "More importantly, testing and refining this utility now will enable the research, data sharing, and collaboration envisioned by projects like the Square Kilometre Array which seeks to probe the early universe, test Einstein's theory of gravity, and search for intelligent life."

OSCARS open-source software is the most widely adopted inter-domain dynamic circuit services application within the global research and networking community. Its open and evolving framework is inspiring, and inspired by many collaborators that include academic institutions, global networking members as represented at Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) and standards body, Open Grid Forum (OGF).

Pacific Wave and Northern Wave announced an agreement that will allow their participants to peer with each other. Northern Wave will now connect Pacific Wave in Seattle to the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility in Chicago. This relationship provides new opportunities for international research and education networks and university participants to exchange networking traffic at multi-Gigabit rates between the Pacific Rim, the US, and Europe. In addition, researchers and educators at any connecting institution along the Northern Wave path in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington will have access to participants on the Pacific Wave exchange.

Pacific Wave is state-of-the-art peering exchange facility that, for over 10 years, has connected research, scientific, and education institutions and networks throughout the Pacific Rim and the world, increasing network efficiency and throughput while reducing latency and costs. Pacific Wave is a joint project of the Corporation for Education and Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) and is designed to enhance the efficiency of research and education network traffic across the west coast of the US and with partners around the Pacific Rim.

Northern Wave is a similar facility recently funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) via North Dakota State University (NDSU) and PNWGP to provide a new shared 10Gbps optical network connection between Seattle and Chicago for research and education institutions. The grant, part of NSF's Academic Research Infrastructure program, funded optical equipment to build the network along a fiber path provided by PNWGP and the BOREAS network (a collaboration among the Universities of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin-Madison, and Iowa State University (www.boreas.net).

"Northern Wave brings a significant new capacity to research and education networks through improved international communication facilities as well as the easy exchange of data for initiating collaborations with other institutions. This is especially important for the establishment of large competitive research centers. It will also provide connectivity to large computational and visualization platforms at remote locations," says Kalpana Katti, North Dakota State University Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering and NSF CAREER Award grantee.

"Connecting Northern Wave and Pacific Wave puts into place a new piece of the cyberinfrastructure necessary for complex interdisciplinary work on the cutting edge of science and technology," said Amy Philipson, Executive Director, PNWGP. "Together with the other advances that Pacific Wave offers its participants, such as 100G networking along the US west coast, dynamic circuits, support for Science DMZ-model research networks, and software-defined networking, we're delighted help facilitate the arrival of true 21st century networking."

Northern Wave is supported by the National Science Foundation ARRA ARI Award No. 0963559.

Pacific Wave is supported by the National Science Foundation IRNC Award No. OCI-0962931.

StarLight receives support from the National Science Foundation, IRNC Award No. OCI-0962997 and ARRA ARI Award No. 0963095.

Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN), the network specialist, today announced that the Pacific Wave international network peering facility -- which connects research and education (R&E) networks in 40 countries in the Pacific Rim and beyond -- was recently upgraded with Ciena's 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, equipped with WaveLogic™ coherent optical processors. This deployment will provide 100Gb/s networking capabilities to Pacific Wave's extensive R&E network infrastructure across the western coast of the United States, from Los Angeles to Seattle.

For more information, please visit the Ciena website where you can find the full text of the announcement.

CENIC is pleased to announce the opening of its new San Francisco Bay Area office in Emeryville. The Emeryville office provides a central location for serving CENIC's many Northern California members. The office replaces the long standing Sacramento office CENIC previously maintained and as such it will serve as a new venue for collaborations with and among its Northern California members, including among them University of California campuses, Stanford University, the Naval Post Graduate School, California State University campuses, Community Colleges, and K-12; and with key partners like the Department of Energy's ESnet and the Bay Area Regional Interoperable Communications System (BayRICS) for first responders. The location also will facilitate the growing numbers of collaborations with industry, government, and policy makers in Silicon Valley, the San Francisco Bay area, in Sacramento, and internationally.

The new location will also facilitate CENIC's activities to bring broadband to underserved areas of the State, and to those without adequate broadband, many in Northern California, helping to close the digital divide still adversely affecting education, public safety, and healthcare. CENIC has a close collaboration with the California Telehealth Network and its work to facilitate broadband deployment in underserved areas of the State will benefit the State's healthcare delivery goals. Similarly, reducing the digital divide in provision of health care will assist CENIC in its collaboration with National LambdaRail (NLR) to use advanced technology, including high-speed networking, to improve the early identification and treatments of serious diseases.

CENIC's new San Francisco Bay Area office is located at 6001 Shellmound St., Suite 850, Emeryville, CA 94608 [Google Maps]. CENIC's main office is located in Los Angeles County.

CENIC shares its Northern California office space with Internet2.

President & CEO Louis Fox is pleased to announce the appointment of Dave Reese to the position of Vice President of CENIC.

With the creation of this position, it is CENIC's objective to extend and strengthen CENIC's tradition of collaboration with CENIC Associates, private industry partners, and research and education partners in California, the U.S., and internationally to enhance the quality, efficiency, cost effectiveness, and availability of the CalREN network and CENIC network services across the State of California and in other geographies CENIC serves.

David Reese is already a key contributor in this arena. Reese will also continue his role as CENIC's Chief Technology Officer. This appointment recognizes the importance of CENIC's multi-faceted partnerships and Vice President Reese's critical role in nurturing and sustaining them.

2013 will see the 40th anniversary of Mexico's Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education (CICESE), and the Center's long history of promoting advanced networking within Mexico and beyond -- and collaboration with the California research & education communities -- is just as long. In many ways, the history of advanced networking between California and Mexico is inextricably tied up with the history of CICESE, from the Center's first (satellite) connection to the San Diego Supercomputer Center to the current cross-border 10-Gigabit connection to CalREN for which CICESE shared the 2012 Innovations in Networking Award for High-Performance Research Applications.

CICESE's current Director General is Federico Graef Ziehl. He has a degree in physics from Mexico's National Autonomous University and a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Hawaii. Dr. Graef Ziehl is known for his work on alternative energy, water, natural disasters and climate change. He directs projects such as Baja California's Climate Change and the Pelican Program, which teaches and promotes science. He is also coordinator of post-graduate studies on physical oceanography at CICESE.

He has contributed to several U.S.-based scientific publications, particularly on the subject of climate trends in the Baja California and has enabled multiple collaborations between researchers in Mexico, California, and beyond, making CICESE one of the most valuable resources for research into topics of great importance to California, the United States, and the world.

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

US & World Networking News:

As it gets ready to celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2013, Mexico's Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education (CICESE) is once again at the forefront of high-performance computing on a global scale thanks to its 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) connectivity.

For the first time in centuries, university administrators and intellectuals are seriously questioning the logic of how we teach and learn, and for the first time, we may actually have the technology to shift the education paradigm. The bad news, according to scholar William G. Bowen, is that there is no quick fix, though clearly technology is a large part of the solution.

DANTE, the operator of GÉANT, the pan-European research and education network; and UbuntuNet Alliance,the regional research and education network for Southern and Eastern Africa, announced the launch of the UbuntuNet network, a high-speed Internet network connecting scientists and academics throughout Southern and Eastern Africa to peers in the region and to Europe, the first network of its kind in Africa.

At an exploratory meeting of the Research Data Alliance held in Washington DC, US, around 120 people from around the world gathered to discuss the factors currently limiting the amount of data which can be shared by researchers across disciplines, institutions and countries. Technical interoperability issues were not the only factors discussed, however.

With the success of Gov. Jerry Brown's Proposition 30 — which will temporarily raise the state sales tax and income taxes on high earners -- the system will receive about $210 million in additional funding and be able to serve about 20,000 more students during the academic year, new community colleges Chancellor Brice Harris said.

The Chief Information Systems Officers Association (CISOA) annual conference is March 10-12, 2013 in beautiful Monterey, California.

This year CISOA has an exciting opportunity to work closely with Ellucian and offer many topics of interest to our membership. The theme this year is "Leadership for Student Success."

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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