CENIC News

This month I'm pleased to report that we're reached a major milestone in our efforts to maintain leading-edge networks for teaching and research. When CENIC's first network began operation in 1998, we had only one Layer 3, routed network, based on SONET technology rings in the northern and southern parts of the state. Those rings were connected with a slow-speed link through the Central Valley.

In 2002, that network was replaced and expanded into multiple network tiers, creating the DC (Digital California) Network and the HPR (High-Performance Research) Network, offering speeds of 2.5 and 10 Gigabits respectively throughout the entire CENIC-owned fiber-based backbone. Supplementing the two production networks was the capability of adding additional Layer 1 services for special purposes.

In 2006, the DC Technical Advisory Council brought forward to the CENIC Board a plan to refresh the DC network. The upgrade plan included a capacity upgrade, from the existing 2.5 Gigabit backbone speed to 10 Gigabits. I'm pleased to say that a major milestone in a multiple-phased DC refresh was completed at the end of April, with new backbone routers put into production throughout the network, with the exception of one facility where we are still working to obtain needed power.

Over the next several months, circuits connecting County Offices of Education, colleges, and universities will be migrated to the new routers, additional features brought into production, and the old routers removed from service. Subsequent to this, new optical equipment will be installed to provide for technology currency.

Following the completion of the DC refresh, the HPR network will be refreshed as well. Future articles will report on the progress of that upgrade.

The California K-12 System:
During the month of April, CENIC continued to work with the K-12 segment and telecommunications service providers on preparing for an upgrade of a significant number of SONET circuits to Gigabit connections. Currently, service providers are conducted site visits to identify site readiness other site issues. The process is moving forward toward the identification of circuit acceptance testing dates.

California's Community Colleges:
Acceptance testing was completed on new Gigabit circuits at the San Mateo and Kern Community College Districts. Migration dates for these two sites are still pending, and the DS3 circuits currently serving these two districts will be left in place afterwards to provide diversity.

A significant milestone was reached on April 28 when CENIC engineers completed acceptance testing on a DS3 circuit for Palo Verde College. Because of its relative geographic isolation and lack of telecommunications infrastructure in the area, Palo Verde College, located in Blythe, had not enjoyed broadband connectivity to CalREN until now.

The California State University:
The on-campus conduit work at CSU Stanislaus' Stockton Center has been completed and this site is now expected to get their DS3 circuit in early June.

The University of California:
The University of California Office of State Governmental Relations will be getting its own connection to CalREN. Be sure to keep an eye out for future issues of CENIC Today for more details as we move further along toward connectivity for this office, which serves to advance understanding of and support for the University's tripartite mission of teaching, research, and public service in Sacramento.

If 2008 continues as it's begun, it promises to be a banner year for the Pacific Wave distributed international peering facility, a joint project of CENIC and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop in collaboration with The University of Washington.

Pacific Wave helped UCSD's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) reach across the Pacific Ocean for an OptIPortal demonstration for Australian government officials on January 15-16, 2008. For more information you can read the AARNet release or Calit2's press release.

During January 17-25, 2008, people from advanced networks around the world came together at the East-West Center on the campus of University of Hawaii for Techs in Paradise 2008, featuring meetings, workshops, tutorials, and collaborations.  A 10-Gigabit connection from Pacific Wave to the venue provided some of the conference's high-bandwidth capacity for remote participation and video conferencing, and enabled scientists, researchers, and network engineers to present and collaborate on a wide variety of issues and topics.

As of March, the interface to connect the Internet2 DCN OC-192 link to CENIC/Pacific Wave facilities was acquired and sent to the facility. CENIC is awaiting installation of fibers from Internet2 to complete the connection.

Agreements were received for the Japan Gigabit Network’s (JGN2Plus) new 10-Gigabit connection in Los Angeles at the 818 W. 7th location.

NII/SINET's connections were upgraded from three separate Gigabit ports to a single 10-Gigabit port in Los Angeles at the One Wilshire location. Decommission of the Gigabit ports will be done after engineers determine the new connection is stable.

Pacific Wave is a state-of-the-art international peering exchange facility designed to serve research and education networks throughout the Pacific Rim and the world, and creates a new peering paradigm by removing the geographical barriers of traditional peering facilities. It enables any US or international network to connect at any of three locations along the US Pacific coast, as well as offers the option to peer with any other Pacific Wave participant, regardless of physical location.

By presenting a seamless, unified, international peering exchange facility at strategic Pacific coast locations, the Pacific Wave peering facility functions as a magnet for research and education partners throughout Canada, Mexico, South America and the Pacific Rim.

Other news is in the works for Pacific Wave, so be sure to keep an eye out for further updates!

Most of CENIC Today's readers are familiar with projects like SETI@home and the similar project Folding@home. Both projects use the power of distributed computing to perform calculations that would be prohibitive in terms of processing by taking advantage of the vast number of networked laptop and desktop computers in homes and offices around the world. Most such machines sit idle for a significant fraction of time, and through software that can be downloaded from these sites, they can be networked ad hoc during their idle time to create one of the largest de facto supercomputers in the world. Through SETI@home, Folding@home, and other related projects, every laptop and desktop computer can work with every other one to help solve some of the scientific world's most challenging problems.

To that set of creative projects, add Stanford University's Quake Catcher Network. Earthquake detection requires highly specialized equipment which is used to detect ground motion, and at first, the idea of using a distributed computing network to detect earthquakes seems like a strange one because of this.

When one realizes that many laptops have accelerometers built into them, it becomes much more plausible. Add in real-time networking, and suddenly a distributed quake-catcher network does indeed have the potential to detect earthquakes over a far larger and more granular area -- everywhere where there is a computer, in fact.

Laptops are subject to motion, but analyzing the signals from many such devices allows to separate out good candidates for earthquakes from random motion. Desktop computers are an excellent addition to the network as they tend to be more stably situated, and indeed the Quake-Catcher Network plans to offer low-cost USB motion sensors in the future to volunteers who wish to participate. The network also plans to include K-12 classrooms as participants.

Be sure to check out the Quake Catcher Network and sign up for their mailing list to stay abreast of new developments!

CENIC has entered into a new five-year, $50 million contract with AT&T.

This business agreement extends a relationship between AT&T and CENIC that spans more than 10 years.

The contract aims at increasing broadband connectivity for CalREN and will serve every segment of the state's public education system and the 9.5 million Californians who use CalREN every day.

The CENIC International Internet Exchange (CIIX), formerly known as the Los Angeles Access Point (LAAP), provides physical interconnections at locations in the Los Angeles area for its participants to exchange Internet traffic through co-operative bi-lateral peering agreements.

ISPs, content providers, cable networks, universities, not-for-profits, etc. are all welcome to join the CIIX providing they meet the participation criteria. These criteria are clearly laid out in the CIIX Services Agreement Service Policies and Procedures, to which participants must agree and adhere. Organizations who think they may meet CIIX participation criteria and are interested in participating are encouraged to contact the CIIX.

Co-founded in 1996 with Metropolitan Fiber Systems' MAE-LA, the Los Angeles Access Point (now CIIX) was previously a project of the Information Sciences Division of the University of Southern California. It now features locations in the most interconnected building on Earth -- One Wilshire at 624 S. Grand -- with interconnections to Telehouse's LAIIX, located at 626 Wilshire Blvd.

US & World Networking News:

The success of the BBC's iPlayer is putting the internet under severe strain and threatening to bring the network to a halt, Internet service providers claimed yesterday.

They want the corporation to share the cost of upgrading the network — estimated at £831 million — to cope with the increased workload. Viewers are now watching more than one million BBC programmes online each week.

The BBC said yesterday that its iPlayer service, an archive of programmes shown over the previous seven days, was accounting for between 3 and 5 per cent of all internet traffic in Britain, with the first episode of The Apprentice watched more than 100,000 times via a computer.

Two years after a report called "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" warned that the United States is falling behind in math and science education, endangering America's competitiveness in the global economy, education leaders, lawmakers, and cabinet members met for a national summit in Washington, D.C., to discuss what progress -- if any -- has been made in closing the gap.

Their verdict: The U.S. needs to make a greater investment in critical math, science, and research programs for these efforts to succeed.

In the two years since the National Academies issued its Gathering Storm report, Congress passed a bill called the America COMPETES Act, which outlined measures to improve math and science research and education. The legislation called for expanding science research by doubling the basic research budgets for the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and the Department of Defense.

An international report ranks the United States' Internet infrastructure among the best in the world, tempering dire predictions of Internet traffic jams and suggesting the U.S. system is getting better, not worse.

With a rural broadband health project under way and new political fervor for health IT brewing, prospects for online health applications in the U.S. are looking better as well, some experts say.

The Global Information Technology Report, released last month, ranked the U.S. fourth in the world in Internet readiness. The rankings -- done for the World Economic Forum by INSEAD, a French business school -- assessed 127 economies in its Networked Readiness Index based on variables such as total tax base, collaborations between universities and industry, and availability of venture capital.

The HealthGrid U.S. Alliance has finalized the program for the sixth annual International HealthGrid conference -- the first one to be held in the United States, "Global HealthGrid: eScience Meets Biomedical Informatics."

"As the first HealthGrid conference in the Americas, this is an historic event," says Jonathan Silverstein, M.D., President, HealthGrid.US, and Associate Director, Computation Institute, Argonne/University of Chicago. "The program will appeal broadly to the interdisciplinary eScience and biomedical informatics communities, including physicians, medical educators, students, epidemiologists, biomedical informaticians, military medicine specialists, computer scientists, security and policy makers, economists, and futurists."

The conference begins on June 2 with a day of workshops and tutorials which will provide training and demonstrations, including basic Grid concepts, case studies and the most advanced topics on infrastructure and applications for computational biologists and public health informaticians.

The formal conference will kick-off on June 3, with welcoming remarks by Robert J. Zimmer, Ph.D., President of the University of Chicago. Following the welcoming ceremonies, Ian Foster, Ph.D., will provide a keynote presentation on "eScience meets Biomedical Informatics." Scientific papers will be complemented with a roundtable discussion from U.S., European, and Asian government leaders on "Government eScience and Cyberinfrastructure Programs for HealthGrid," moderated by Michael Cowan, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, Bearing Point, and former U.S. Navy Surgeon General. Cowan will precede the government roundtable discussion with a keynote presentation on "The Role of Government in the Future Knowledge Society."

Internet2 held its annual Spring Member Meeting from April 21-23, 2008 in Arlington, VA. The meeting brought together nearly 600 leaders from research and education to address key advances in high-performance networking and leading-edge Internet technologies. The meeting encompassed a diverse roster of presentations, sessions, working group gatherings, and workshops in areas such as dynamic circuit networking, advancements and adoption of middleware capabilities, security on high-performance networks, as well as presentations on advanced applications.

Internet2 netcast a select number of meeting sessions live for worldwide viewing, and all netcasts are archived and available. This year, there was a particularly important focus on the Internet2 Strategic Planning efforts, a major undertaking by the Internet2 community to reinvent the direction and priorities of the Internet2 organization.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a way to transmit medical images such as X-rays and ultrasounds via cellphones.

The technology involves reducing large, complicated medical images to six kilobytes ("A one sentence, text-only e-mail message is bigger than that," one of the researchers commented in a university news release.) A cellphone transmits raw data to an offsite location. There the data is processed into an image and sent back to the cellphone’s screen. This technique is intended to bring sophisticated medical-imaging technology to developing countries, where expensive medical-imaging equipment is often out of reach.

The entire research article can be found online.

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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