CENIC News

As the calendar year comes to an end, our country faces both serious economic ills and a time of political transition. As this is written, the incoming administration has expressed interest in an economic stimulus package that will put unemployed Americans back to work through investments in crucial infrastructure, such as bridges and roads, a clear plan to "kill two birds with one stone."

Another hallmark of the incoming Obama administration is its heavy use of and recognition of the importance of the Internet, which has been deemed a significant influence on the recent election. It's natural that this would spell an increase in the attention given to the continued growth and good health of the Internet and to increasing its reach to un- and underserved areas of the country. The education community, via groups such as EDUCAUSE's Network Policy Council, is considering what types of policy recommendations should be put forward. Questions posed include "What does digital policy 2.0 look like?" and "What policies are needed for the emerging cloud (computing, storage, mail, privacy, etc.)?" As policy recommendations are formed, it is important for the CENIC community to understand them and to advocate for what is deemed to be in our interests.

However, given that the new administration seeks to stimulate the economy and tend to the county's infrastructure -- and already recognizes the importance of the Internet -- I would speculate that perhaps this particular stone could kill three birds and not simply two. The Internet itself and its underpinnings are considered infrastructure by many forward thinkers in California and national research, education, and government, and my wish list for this holiday season includes increased spending and consideration in the new administration for Internet infrastructure as part of any economic stimulus package.

Such investment could take many forms, including discounts to telcos for providing Internet services based on construction of new infrastructure in un- or under-served areas, grants to states to build out infrastructure that would then be made available for the provision of Internet services, and a wide range of similar options. A solution that marries our need to improve Internet services to both a lagging economy and a healthy infrastructure seems so logical to me. Let's hope that others see the merits of such an initiative.

November traditionally opens a time of great activity for everyone as California and the country moves into the year-end holiday season, and at CENIC, the level of activity was equally high, as eleven of California's Community Colleges received Gigabit connectivity to the CalREN network, including Cabrillo College, Cerritos College, College of the Canyons, De Anza College, Los Angeles City College, Los Angeles Pierce College, Los Angeles Trade Tech, Los Angeles Valley College, West Los Angeles College, Moorpark College, and Santa Monica College.

The California State University also received an enhancement in connectivity as Cal State Los Angeles received its second Gigabit connection to CalREN. The CENIC Network Operations Center is working with the campus to put this new connection into production.

The California K-12 System also received several Gigabit enhancements in connectivity to the SONET circuits currently serving that system statewide, including connections between the Discovery Secondary School located in Chowchilla, CA and the CalREN backbone node at Merced, the Mendocino and Sonoma County Offices of Education, and the Lake and Mendocino County Offices of Education. Also, the Kern County Superintendent of Schools and the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education received a new DS-3 connection between them.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $3 million Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grant over four years to establish the Mid-Pacific Information and Communications Technologies (MPICT) Regional Center, which will be headquartered at City College of San Francisco (CCSF).

Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-San Francisco-San Mateo), announces, "This grant from the National Science Foundation will not only benefit the thousands of students in CCSF's Computer Networking and Information Technology Department, but the entire community by helping to train the next generation of innovators who are so vital to the economy of the greater San Francisco Bay Area."

MPICT's mission is to coordinate, promote and improve the quality of ICT education, with an emphasis on two-year colleges, in a region consisting of northern California, northern Nevada, southern Oregon, Hawaii and the Pacific Territories.

"I am very pleased to see the launch of the Mid-Pacific ICT Center at City College of San Francisco," says CCSF Trustee John Rizzo, Chair of the Board's Technology Committee. "Business is increasingly relying on information technology and network security and needs qualified employees to run the systems."

"City College of San Francisco is very pleased to host the new Mid-Pacific Center in partnership with Ohlone College, Foothill College, Santa Rosa Junior College and Cabrillo College, as well as other community colleges," says Dr. Don Q. Griffin, Interim Chancellor. "It is great to see community colleges collaborating to realize efficiencies and mutual benefits for our communities," he adds.

ICT is an umbrella term, widely used outside the U.S. and in the U.N., to encompass all rapidly converging computer, software, networking, telecommunications, Internet, programming, and information systems technologies. MPICT will leverage the abundant ICT industry and academic resources of the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley to enrich educational experiences and outcomes for faculty and students throughout its region.

MPICT Principal Investigator Dr. Pierre Thiry states, "ICT industry representatives care deeply about ICT education and want to contribute toward its improvement and success. However, they cannot or will not interact individually with 100+ community colleges in the State of California alone. MPICT will serve as an efficient vehicle to improve ICT educational programs throughout the region and across the U.S.

MPICT Executive Director James Jones says, "In the 21st Century, we all increasingly depend on information and communications technologies and the increased connectivity and productivity they enable. Improvements to deployed ICT solutions -- and people's abilities to use them productively -- are issues of tremendous strategic importance, to individuals and their families, organizations of all kinds, and local, state, national and global economies."

Jim Dolgonas, President and CEO of the Corporation for Educational Networking Initiatives in California (CENIC), points out, "We believe information and communications technologies (ICT) are an important foundation on which much of modern productivity and current knowledge and information economies depend. We need competent information and communications technologies technicians to make our economies and enterprises efficient."

Jim LeValley, Global Education Programs Director, Microsoft Learning, says, "MPICT is a shining example of education focused public-private partnerships to drive economic development. Working together with MPICT, we will as an industry assure the next generation of workers have the technology skills necessary to further advance science and remain competitive.

For more information on the MPICT Center, please email Principal Investigator Dr. Pierre Thiry or Executive Director James B. Jones or telephone (415) 239-3600.

From November 15-21, 2008, booth 568 at the Austin Convention Center was humming with activity as the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Calit2 and its guest the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the , and CENIC gave talks and demonstrations illustrating the work being done by all to advance global sustainability and green computing at SC08, the 20th anniversary of the first Supercomputing conference.

The conference opened on Monday morning with a welcome address by SDSC Director Francine Berman wherein she highlighted the work being done at the Center to accelerate green computing and networking – including its new "green" facility. Other luminaries such as Calit2's Tom DeFanti's and the SDSC's Allan Snavely also discussed other green computing projects taking place, including the GreenLight project, to improve data center and computational energy efficiency. Other presentations focused on high-performance analytics at the SDSC, the EVL's Global Visualcasting, the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring and Cancer Center projects at the SDSC, measuring TeraGrid performance, and more. CENIC Publicity and Communications Manager Janis Cortese also gave two presentations available at the CENIC website on the CalREN Network and CENIC itself, as well as the CalREN-XD/HPR Workshop held at Calit2@UCSD last September.

Demonstrations taking place at the booth included the OptIPortal's stunning Gigapixel display and the interface used by viewers to interact with it, as well as one of the bandwidth challenges put forth for this year's conference by the EVL and previously run at the CalREN-XD/HPR Workshop, Global Visualcasting. (More information about the demo can be found at the Workshop website.)

This year's Bandwidth Challenge winner was also in attendance at the Workshop, the University of Illinois at Chicago's cloud computing demonstration, Towards Global Scale Cloud Computing: Using Sector and Sphere on the Open Cloud Testbed, led by Dr. Yunhong Gu of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Dr. Robert Grossman of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Open Data Group.

Other CENIC Associates in attendance at SC08 included Bandwidth Challenge finalist Caltech Center for Advanced Computing (which used the previous CENIC Innovations in Networking Award-winning projects MonALISA and UltraLight), the University of Southern California, NASA (including CENIC Associate the NASA Ames Research Center), and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which serves as a Tier 2 computing center for the ATLAS experiment at the recently inaugurated Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the French-Swiss border.

As topical as the booth theme of green computing was this year, with the current keen interest in making computing centers more energy-conscious, particularly in areas of cooling, next year's Supercomputing conference, to be held in Portland, Oregon, will be even more so with its theme of "Computing for a Changing World." For information about next year's SC09, you can visit the conference website.

CENIC is happy to announce that the 2007-08 Fiscal Year Annual Report (PDF) is now available online at the CENIC website. To learn more about the year's many improvements to the CalREN network currently serving nearly ten million Californians, and how the state's K-20 research and education community has used the benefits of high-bandwidth networking to create stunning innovations, you are invited to download and read the report.

Topics covered include CENIC itself, the CalREN network, the innovative and potentially revolutionary ways in which the Associate community is using the network to change and improve the lives of millions, and the outreach currently conducted by CENIC to promote the community's interests in the state and beyond.

CENIC values your feedback highly. If you have any suggestions for next year's report, please feel free to contact CENIC at info@cenic.org.

CENIC is pleased to announce the first Keynote Speaker for the 2009 Annual Conference, Dr. Guru Parulkar of Stanford University and the Clean Slate Design for the Internet program.

Dr. Parulkar has been active in the field of networking for more than 20 years and has worked in academia, start-ups, a large company, a top-tier venture capital firm, and a federal funding agency (NSF).

Dr. Parulkar joined Stanford University in August 2007 as Executive Director of its new research program on the Clean Slate Design for the Internet and as a consulting professor of Electrical Engineering.

On his web site, he states that his professional life "has been a great ride so far, full of opportunities to learn, contribute, create value, work with great people, and have fun in the process." CENIC is absolutely delighted to welcome Dr. Parulkar to RIDING THE WAVES OF INNOVATION, and we look forward to the insights that his Keynote Address will provide to the California K-20 research and education community.

The Clean Slate Design for the Internet is a research program centered at Stanford University that asks and then seeks to answer the questions: "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?", and "How should the Internet look in 15 years?"

The program's mission is to essentially "reinvent the Internet" so that the Internet of the future can:

• overcome fundamental architectural limitations (e.g. lack of security and mobility support) of today's Internet,
• incorporate new technologies (e.g. sensor networks, optical networks),
• enable new class of applications and services (e.g. content dissemination, sensorized physical world, large scale virtual world environments), and
• continue to be a platform for innovations and thus be an engine for economic growth and prosperity for the society.

Registration is open online at RIDING THE WAVES OF INNOVATION, and be sure to reserve your hotel room at the Hilton Long Beach early to take advantage of the discounted room rates.

Australia is fast shaping up to be a major partner with California institutions on large-scale, collaborative science projects following a unique initiative organized and led by the Australian American Leadership Dialogue (AALD).

That's one of the conclusions reached by Larry Smarr, Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), after a three-week barnstorming tour of Australian universities and research centers as the 2008 Leadership Dialogue Scholar.

"Australia is clearly committed to implementing the bandwidth and collaborative tools originated by the OptIPuter project at Calit2," says Smarr, a computer-science professor at the University of California, San Diego. "This sets up lots of new opportunities for collaboration between California and Australia in green IT, neurosciences, stem cells and many more fields."

"Because of the 15 years of the Leadership Dialogue," says Smarr, "Australia is the only country I know of that is pre-organized at the highest levels of government, the research sector and industry, giving it the capability of moving quickly to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to ensure Australia's increasing participation in innovative research worldwide."

Read more at the Calit2 website, including Australian media articles about Dr. Smarr's whirlwind tour of the Land Down Under.

US & World Networking News:

At the PROMPT workshop on "Next Generation Internet to Reduce Global Warming" researchers from Barcelona, Amsterdam, Ottawa and Chicago demonstrated the world's first "follow the sun/follow the wind" Internet and computational grid where routing and computational nodes of HPDMnet, sitting on top of an optical infrastructure provided by GLIF, SURFnet, CANARIE, i2CAT, STAR LIGHT were rapidly relocated around the world simulating the availability of renewable energy sources at these nodes.

As of June 2008, Nintendo has sold nearly 30 million Wii game consoles, making the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. By pointing a Wiimote at a projection screen or LCD display, you can create very low-cost interactive whiteboards or tablet displays, of great potential use to the educational community, particularly when combined with networking when such technology can enhance distance education and combined classrooms cost-effectively -- important in times of tight budget restrictions.

Visit the Procrastineering website, project blog of HCI specialist Johnny Chung Lee, to see a video of a K-12 competitive math "relay race" done using this technology and to download the free, open-source software.

Schools and libraries can begin applying for 2009-10 e-Rate discounts on Tuesday, Dec. 2, and they'll have until 11:59 EST on Thursday, Feb. 12, to submit all necessary Form 471 application materials, says the Schools and Libraries Division (SLD) of the Universal Service Administrative Co., the agency that administers the program.

In recent years, the e-Rate filing window has opened toward the beginning of November. This year's filing window opens later than usual.

When consumers use their cell phones, reception can depend on the strength of the signals coming to and from wireless base stations. Those base stations in turn depend on high-power amplifiers to extend their range – amplifiers that typically consume ten times more power than they generate, for a 10 percent efficiency rate.

Three years after breaking the 50 percent efficiency barrier, researchers at the University of California, San Diego report topping an average 58 percent power added efficiency (PAE) -- the best rate reported for a single-stage WCDMA base-station power amplifier -- with average output power of 42 watts and a gain of 10.2 decibels.

Does your superintendent "get it" when it comes to technology? Does he or she demonstrate exemplary vision for the use of technology to improve all facets of education—and show outstanding leadership in working to make this vision a reality?

If so, then help us recognize these accomplishments by nominating your district's chief executive for eSchool News' ninth annual Tech-Savvy Superintendent Awards.

Students throughout California will be able to develop electronic portfolios, or ePortfolios, allowing students to create an online showcase of their works, designs, art and other achievements, through a new partnership between the California Virtual Campus (CVC) and the Minnesota System of Colleges and Universities (MnSCU).

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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