CENIC News

Like most of our Associates, CENIC is on a July 1 through June 30 fiscal year, and with the end of one year and the beginning of a new one, three major events occur concerning the CENIC Board of Directors. First, we welcome new Board members appointed by Associates to fill open positions. Second, we elect officers, and lastly, we engage the Board in a two-day retreat during which the direction CENIC will take in the upcoming fiscal year is discussed and planned.

CENIC is in the unique position of being governed by the community we were created to serve, and as a result, the feedback and direction given by our Board of Directors is particularly valuable to us. This fiscal year, we’re looking forward to the participation of the following new Board members as representatives of the K-12 community:

• Todd Finnell, CEO of the K12 High Speed Network, the organization operated by Imperial County Office of Education and selected by the California Department of Education to coordinate K12 network throughout the State, including K12's participation in CENIC, and
• Keric Ashley, Director of the Data Management Division of the California Department of Education.

The welcoming of new Board members comes of course on the heels of the departure of other members. CENIC would like to extend its gratitude to the following departing members of the Board of Directors for their tireless work in support of our mission and goals:

• Don McNelis, Superintendent of Butte County Office of Education, who finished two one-year terms on the CENIC Board,
• Kristine Hafner, former CIO and Associate Vice President of Information Resources and Communications at the UC Office of the President, who served on the CENIC Board for six years,
• Gavin Payne, Chief Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction at the California Department of Education, who also served on the CENIC Board for two years, and
• Jim Davis, the Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology at UCLA, who has served on the CENIC Board for six years, serving as the Chair for the last two.

Our gratitude is extended both on our behalf and on behalf of the California K-20 research and education community, which has benefitted in countless ways from their dedication and expertise.

The Board also elected the following corporate officers:

• Associate Vice President and CIO at the UC Office of the President David Ernst, as Chair,
• Associate Vice Chancellor at UC Riverside Chuck Rowley, as Vice Chair,
• Professor of Electrical Engineering at USC John Silvester, as Secretary, and
• CIO at CSU East Bay John Charles, as Treasurer.

Subsequent to the end of the fiscal year, David Ernst departed the California State University Chancellor’s Office to accept his current position at the UC Office of the President. With David's departure from the CSU, Michael McLean, acting CIO/Assistant Vice President for the CSU Chancellor's Office, was appointed by Chancellor Charles Reed to the CENIC Board. CENIC also welcomes Michael to the Board of Directors.

Lastly, the CENIC Board retreat was held on July 10 and 11. Among the major areas of discussion were ways in which CENIC and the CalREN network can enable cloud computing, disaster preparedness, the reduction of the K-20 community’s carbon footprint and the amelioration of climate change, and how best to achieve effective advocacy on issues of importance to CENIC and our Associates.

More specifics on CENIC activities in these areas will be shared in future editions of CENIC today. There are a lot of great things on the horizon for California research and education in the coming fiscal year, and CENIC looks forward to enabling you all to explore those frontiers, and to exploring them with you as well.

As part of the ongoing upgrades to various SONET circuits serving K-12 sites, July 2008 saw the following K-12 circuits replaced by Gigabit connections: the San Joaquin County Office of Education's connection to the Merced CalREN backbone node, the Riverside County Office of Education's connection to the Orange County Department of Education, and the connection between the Tulare County Office of Education and the Kings County Office of Education (site of the KCOE Last-Mile Project, 2007 winner of a CENIC Innovations in Networking Award in Gigabit/Broadband Applications).

California's Community Colleges also received increased connectivity to CalREN, as connections to the following campuses were tested and accepted: MiraCosta College's connection to the San Diego CalREN backbone node, the State Center Community College District's connection to the Fresno backbone node (State Center CCD serves Fresno City College and Reedley College), the Santa Ana College's connection to the Los Angeles backbone node, and the Santa Rosa Junior College's connection to the San Francisco backbone node.

Keep an eye out for future issues of CENIC Today to stay informed about circuit upgrades!

Next March 2009, the California's K-20 research and education community comes together once again to share knowledge, network, and demonstrate the uses to which they have put the cutting-edge network connectivity made possible by CENIC -- this time from March 9-11, 2009 in Long Beach, CA. The CENIC 09 Conference Committee has begun work on selecting a theme and pursuing the best presenters and demonstrations that will showcase the ways in which you and your community can benefit from CalREN.

Mark your calendars, and be sure to keep an eye out for future issues of CENIC Today for information about registration, conference events, calls for presentations and award nominations, keynote speakers, social events, and more!

US & World Networking News:

The University of California, San Diego has begun construction on a sustainable energy program that’s among the largest in the nation by a university. Yesterday's announcement by UC San Diego coincided with a meeting of officials and researchers from UCSD and UC Irvine to discuss possible areas of collaboration on energy and sustainability through the two campuses' largest joint research venture, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

According to Calit2 Director Larry Smarr, Calit2 can play a pivotal role in developing and deploying two-campus activities that could help make Southern California a powerhouse in combatting climate change, reducing our carbon footprint, and building new industry on sustainable technologies.

On July 21, Glendale Water & Power, Glendale Community College, and Chevron Energy Solutions unveiled the largest solar electric project in Glendale, which will help Glendale Water & Power meet its renewable energy target and provide shaded parking at the college campus.

The project is comprised of 872 solar panels with a rated output of approximately 262 kilowatt capacity and is expected to generate 400 megawatt hours of renewable energy each year, enough to power 125 homes.

Since 1978, Caltech Archives has conducted an oral history program centered on the Caltech community and its distinguished scientists, including interviews on specific projects such as the Keck Telescope and LIGO.

Selected oral histories are now available online at Caltech Archives Oral Histories Online. Users can browse a list of oral histories in the Archives' collections or search their entire catalog for related materials.

An low-cost open platform developed at Stanford University, NetFPGA is a a tool for teaching networking hardware and router design and enables researchers and instructors to build high-speed, hardware-accelerated networking systems. The platform can be used in the classroom to teach students how to build Ethernet switches and Internet Prototcol (IP) routers using hardware rather than software and can also be used by researchers to prototype advanced services for next-generation networks. Through partnerships and donations from sponsor of the project, the NetFPGA is widely available to students, teachers, researchers, and anyone else interested in experimenting with new ideas in high-speed networking hardware.

Hands-on tutorials on NetFPGA take place all over the world in Sydney, Australia; Beijing, China; Bangalore, India; Brno, the Czech Republic; Glasgow, Scotland; San Diego and Stanford, CA; and Seattle, WA, and documentation and code are available for download on the NetFPGA website as well as videos of tutorial sessions.

When University of California, Davis student Anthony Nguyen wants to spelunk a little more deeply into the day's geology lesson, he knows help is just a click away. All the college senior has to do is visit YouTube.com, where Davis geology professor Dawn Sumner regularly posts summaries of her in-class lectures, as well as instructional videos she thinks will help students like Nguyen make the grade.

Sumner isn't alone in her efforts to reach students through YouTube. For thousands of teachers, YouTube.com is more than a modern day video store -- it's a chance to redefine traditional education by engaging students in a format more tailored to the Modern Age. Education is a component of the site that continues to grow, said a spokeswoman for YouTube. In addition to user-posted material, the site has partnerships with several colleges and universities, from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Southern California system to Vanderbilt and Northwestern universities, which operate channels with full-length lectures and interactive Web sites for the schools.

Another take on video sharing in schools comes from SchoolTube.com, a site where student-created content is approved by registered teachers. Recently endorsed by the National Association of Elementary School Principals, SchoolTube promotes safe media sharing for schools across the country. While there are multiple video categories, the category devoted to elementary school-level learning sets this site apart from other, more higher education-geared resources.

Power availability is one of the most important challenges facing datacenters today. In the past, datacenter floor space has always loomed as the primary issue. Now, more and more datacenters run out of power availability before they run out of floor space. In addition, cooling requirements for dense servers are driving power demand and taxing the normal datacenter operational procedures. Operations are not properly "tuned" to accommodate the new energy-hungry environment.

This articles illustrates existing electrical consumption patterns and suggests various strategies for reducing consumption ...

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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