CENIC News

Climate change and the economic challenges facing us all have impacted every aspect of research and education here in California and beyond, and the 2009 CENIC Annual Conference, RIDING THE WAVES OF INNOVATION, reflected these concerns with a program that featured sustainability and green computing issues, the uses of advanced networks to relieve the burden of travel costs and other budget constraints, and even thriftier use of paper in our conference materials.

But even though reducing costs and carbon were on everyone’s mind, CENIC is delighted that there was no reduction in conference attendance compared to previous years. Particularly in tight travel times, this reflects a confidence and value placed in the services that CENIC provides to the communities we serve – confidence and value in which we take great pride.

However, the conference program wasn’t limited to sustainability and green issues. The advanced topics that always add value to the CENIC Annual Conference were an important part of the program this year as well, and were joined by humanities and the social sciences including interactive digital cinema and 21st century archaeology. Regional and international networking and collaborations were examined, and the keynote addresses by Stanford University’s Guru Parulkar and Telepoly Consulting’s John Windhausen focused on some of the hottest topics in advanced networking: the reinvention of the Internet to better meet tomorrow’s needs, and overcoming the obstacles facing the ubiquitous spread of broadband, both crucial parts of any social and economic success in the years ahead. Post-conference surveys indicate that many attendees appreciated the broad mix of topics and found both keynote addresses insightful and highly topical.

Research topics ranged from advanced networking in extreme environments, distributed computing, high-definition cinematic content, collaborative research tools, and disaster recovery. The teaching and learning sessions included some topics of great interest to the CENIC community as well, including the varied uses of videoconferencing, how advanced networks can bridge the distance between classrooms and remote archaeological sites, and the preservation and availability of invaluable eyewitness accounts of history such as those held by USC’s Shoah Foundation Institute. Extending the classroom and using advanced networks to reshape the pedagogical process itself were also hot topics, with presentations addressing the California Virtual Campus, the new NSF-funded Mid-Pacific ICT Center, and various online structures for adult second language learning.

Online instruction also intersects with an area of great interest judging from the post-conference surveys: increased online participation for the CENIC Annual Conference. It’s certainly a great topic especially for an organization created to facilitate the use of advanced networks, and one that is sure to impact planning of future conferences.

And of course, none of the CENIC Annual Conferences would be possible without the generous support of corporations who have always been proud to stand as valued allies in bringing the benefits of high-performance networking to California. We're proud to thank the following corporate allies for their support and hope to see them again at a future conference:

• Titanium Sponsor: Cisco Systems
• Platinum Sponsors: AT&T and Juniper Networks
• Gold Sponsors: Brocade and Qwest Communications
• Silver Sponsors: Level3 Communications and Comcast

In the meantime, early preparations are already underway for the CENIC 2010 Annual Conference, to be held next March in Monterey. We look forward to seeing you all there!

As well as constructing a temporary Gigabit network for the use of attendees at our annual conference at the Hilton Long Beach, CENIC has established quite a few permanent connections to CalREN during the month of March.

The University of San Francisco is now enjoying a 250 Mb/s connection and the Auxiliary Data Center for Stanford University received a Gigabit connection to CalREN. Also, one of UCLA’s two connections to CalREN was replaced with a 10 Gb/s connection this month, and Sacramento State University received a Gigabit connection to CalREN through the backbone node in Sacramento.

For California’s K-12 System, a node site previously located at Truckee Donner Public Utility District was moved to Truckee High School, and a DS-3 between Lake Tahoe Unified School District and Truckee High School was replaced with a Gigabit connection.

Facilitator of the GLiMERNet international videoconference on archaeology Ed Johanson is fond of the story of Lycurgus, a famous lawgiver of the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta. Legend has it that Lycurgus ordered the removal of the walls surrounding Sparta with the quote, “I will replace this wall of bricks with a wall of men." Johanson finds it a fitting metaphor for GLiMERNet, which he sees as a reimagining of the traditional bricks-and-mortar model for museums, making them museums not of bricks but of people with the help of advanced networks.

Attendees to the conference were able to see this firsthand with the GLiMERNet kickoff, a live international videoconference which included participants from the Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerche (National Research Council) in Rome, UNESCO, Indiana University, and North Dakota State University. The session was moderated by Sofia Pescarin from the CNR with her colleagues Francesco Antinucci, Lucrezia Ungaro (Director of the Roman Forums and Museum of Roman Civilization), and Eva Pietroni. Alonzo Addison participated from UNESCO, along with Anna Arici at Indiana University and Jeffery Clark from North Dakota State University.

Attendees were also able to judge the robustness of the advanced network built into the Hilton Long Beach when the interactive, high-def comedy/mystery movie “Alternate Endings" was screened by USC Professor Richard Weinberg. A 2009 Innovations in Networking Award winner, “Alternate Endings" merges live, high-definition content on the fly as the audience chooses the path that the movie’s plot will follow. The screening was a highlight of the Tuesday afternoon program, and the movie itself demonstrates the potential for advanced networks to reshape our shared cultural landscape.

The importance of international networking was also demonstrated during a panel on Monday afternoon featuring presentations and discussion by leaders of some of North America’s most advanced research & education networks (RENs). Introductions were made by CENIC President and CEO Jim Dolgonas, and presentations followed by Carlos Casasus of Mexico’s CUDI/CONOCYT, Phil Baker of the Ontario network ORANO/ORION, British Columbia’s Michael Hrybyk of BC.Net, and Jim Williams of the Texas research and education network LEARN.

Panelist presentations included information about each network, its history, the communities it serves, and its plans for the future, and the subsequent discussions and attendee questions focused on lessons learned and how best to facilitate collaboration between the national and international RENs.

Video from this panel and other presentations will be made available on the CENIC 2009 conference website, and an announcement will be sent to the CENIC community via e-mail when the video is available.

Educational Applications: Alternate Endings

Alternate Endings is a high-definition comedy-mystery movie that allows its audience to choose the direction of the plot through one of 16 separate paths. The movie itself is streamed from the Trojan Vision television studios in the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts on the USC campus and is merged at the various decision points with remote hosts located elsewhere on campus at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, and sent via high-performance networks to remote audiences. Audience feedback is used to guide the characters' decisions. Characters' guilt, innocence, and even survival were determined by audience feedback.

Gigabit/Broadband Applications: Redwood Coast Connect

The exhaustive Redwood Coast Connect study was carried out by Redwood Coast Rural Action, a regional network of community leaders in partnership with the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF), with the aim of providing broadband providers, telecommunications carriers, service providers, elected officials, and any other interested parties with precisely the kind of hard data on people, places, and technology needed to propose and implement effective solutions to the unique networking challenges facing the rugged and often heavily forested California Redwood coast.

Experimental/Developmental Applications: Project GreenLight

Researchers at Calit2 have initiated Project GreenLight to discover creative ways to ensure that the next generation of data centers supports a sustainable lifestyle and that the research sectors that use them are aware of the issues surrounding carbon-thrifty computing. Not only will the hardware and software itself be studied to determine how best they can be optimized, but the equally crucial factors of cooling and structural engineering will be studied in depth along with applications from a myriad of data-intensive disciplines. Project GreenLight will also analyze how best to share the insights that will result to enable as many other researchers to benefit from them as possible.

High-Performance Research Applications: iWarp-Based Remote Interactive Scientific Visualization

Sending frame after frame of high-definition video reliably from one place to another, possibly located on another continent, is enough of a challenge to merit its own recognition. When the individual on the far end of the fiber-optic cable expects to rotate, grow or shrink, and otherwise manipulate the video images in real time and experience no latency, that challenge becomes even more daunting. And yet this is precisely what Scott Friedman of UCLA's Office of Information Technology achieved with with iWarp-Based Remote Interactive Scientific Visualization. As part of the project, cluster-based high-performance interactive visualization resources are available to remote researchers by leveraging the latest high-speed wide-area networking technologies.

The SuperComputing 2009 conference is scheduled for November 14th through 20th at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon.

CENIC will work with national research and education networks such as National LambdaRail and Internet2, as well as other regional optical networks such as Network for Education and Research in Oregon (NERO), the Oregon GigaPOP (OGIG), and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), in identifying and supporting circuit requirements for its member institutions. We are requesting CENIC participants planning involvement in SC09 submit their WAN networking requirements no later than May 29, 2009.

Please send inquiries and responses to Chris Costa at ccosta@cenic.org. You can learn the details of what information you must provide to CENIC at our website.

As part of a sister-school agreement between the Fresno and Long Beach Unified School Districts, faculty and staff from both districts will establish a formal structure to share knowledge and collaborate with the aim of preparing all of their students to be ready for success in higher education or pursue a career path with significant economic growth potential. Major areas of focus will include mathematics, English for learners, and leadership development.

Naturally, such a deep collaborative effort requires a great deal of planning and effort -- which would normally mean a great deal of travel, costly nowadays in terms of time, money, and carbon since Fresno and Long Beach are more than 200 miles apart as the crow flies.

However, thanks to Cisco Systems' TelePresence high-definition videoconferencing technology and the advanced networking of CalREN, this and other similar efforts become much simpler and much less costly, even in tough economic times. Both Fresno and Long Beach have chosen the Cisco technology, and attendees to the CENIC 2009 Annual Conference were able to see it demonstrated firsthand as they were connected to the Fresno school district in beautiful, high-definition video, as well as discuss the technology itself and how it will be used with Cisco representatives.

Participants hope to extend the program beyond Long Beach and Fresno, enabling schools and offices statewide to leverage the lessons learned in the use of technology to create convenient, money- and carbon-wise collaborative opportunities for education. Keep an eye on future issues of CENIC Today as more CENIC Associates take advantage of the high-performance networking of CalREN to expand their reach and effectiveness even in times of economic and climate-based challenge.

US & World Networking News:

UC Santa Cruz, Foothill-De Anza Community College and NASA Ames Research Center will partner to build a green research campus in Silicon Valley, university and NASA officials announced Friday.

"We envision a vibrant and sustainable community of students, teachers, researchers and Valley partners who will contribute to the economic vitality of the region," UCSC chancellor George Blumenthal told an audience at NASA Ames in Mountain View, where the new campus will be built.

The UCLA professor called on one of the students in his classroom during a discussion about whether the genes in your chromosomes can be patented. He then called on another student in a classroom some 370 miles away, at the University of California, Davis.

Undergraduates from both campuses are participating in a distance-learning honors course on genetic engineering and its implications that uses state-of-the-science technology, including high-quality audio and video over [CalREN].

A group of 38 companies and academic groups have signed on to a so-called Open Cloud Manifesto, calling for open standards for cloud computing. The document echoes a recent paper on the subject by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley.

Cloud computing lets users tap into big data centers to run applications remotely. The approach is increasingly seen as the next big step in the evolution of computing in the Internet era.

The state's stem cell agency has approved nearly $16 million for eleven California State University (CSU) campuses to study stem cell technology and advance the field of regenerative medicine.

Bridges to Stem Cell Research Awards will facilitate instruction, laboratory work, internship placement, faculty mentoring and career guidance. The grants were funded for the CSU campuses of Channel Islands, Humboldt, Long Beach, Pomona, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San José, San Luis Obispo and San Marcos. Cal State L.A. is a partner in the Cal Poly Pomona project – which will pool the campuses’ faculty expertise in research, curriculum development and mentoring.

A newly laid, 32-mile underwater cable finally links the state's only seafloor seismic station with the University of California, Berkeley's seismic network, merging real-time data from west of the San Andreas fault with data from 31 other land stations sprinkled around Northern and Central California.

A broadband seismometer placed on the ocean floor in 2002 is now connected to land by a new 32-mile underwater cable installed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The seismometer - the only seafloor seismic station off the California coast - provides better data on earthquake activity along the San Andreas Fault. Laying of the MARS (Monterey Accelerated Research System) fiber-optic cable was completed in 2007 by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) to power and collect data from a cluster of scientific instruments nearly 3,000 feet below the surface of Monterey Bay, 23 miles from the coastal town of Moss Landing.

A University of California Regents' committee has approved a program to work with the state's utilities to boost energy efficiency at UC campuses and medical schools over the next three years.

The plan to reduce energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions was approved Tuesday by the UC Regents' grounds and buildings committee. Approval by the full board is expected Thursday.

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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