CENIC Today: Volume 10, Issue 1

Welcome to CENIC Today, the monthly newsletter of the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California. In this issue:

CENIC News:

President's Message: Telemedicine, eHealth, and Broadband

The recognition of the importance of broadband across the state and nation, a major theme of CENIC’s for a number of years, continues to grow. Just a few months ago I reported on the Governor’s executive order that focuses on removing barriers to broadband deployment through, in part, input provided by a newly created Broadband Task Force. Now there are a number of new activities at the Federal and State level surrounding telemedicine and eHealth that extend the broadband focus into these areas.

One such initiative is the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed pilot program to fund regional infrastructure to be used for telemedicine purposes. In September of last year, the Federal Communications Commission held a meeting at which they adopted an Order concerning "how the rural health care funding mechanism can be used to enhance public and non-public health care providers’ access to advanced telecommunications and information services." This Order establishes a two-year pilot program to help public and non-profit health care providers build state and region-wide broadband networks dedicated to the provision of health care services, and connect those networks to Internet2. The FCC believes that such networks will bring the benefits of innovative telehealth, and particularly, telemedicine services to those areas of the country where the need for those benefits is most acute.

Increased telemedicine initiatives in the State are also underway. The California Emerging Technology Fund, mentioned in a previous month’s article, which seeks to expand broadband deployment in the State, has as one of its goals the increases in telemedicine. And, the Governor has increased funding to the University of California for investments in telemedicine.

Why the increased interest in this area? I think there are a number of factors at work here. One, of course, is the growing demand on the health care system with an aging population and I think a sincere interest to expand healthcare to a greater share of the population. If routine health screenings can be made more readily available, for example, geographically and throughout the hours of the day, through the use of telemedicine, more of the population will be able to take avail themselves of such services. Of course, pressure on the cost of health care is another factor pointing to finding lower cost means of delivering more routine health care interactions.

CENIC is keenly interested in working with our Associates on helping them participate in the Federal and State initiatives in telemedicine and eHealth. And in doing so we look forward to helping the Federal and State governments achieve their objectives in the growing telemedicine and eHealth areas.

-- Jim Dolgonas, CENIC

CalREN Update: Network Projects and Activities

CSU Update:
So far during the 2006-07 fiscal year which began last July 1, the California State University has received ten new leased Gigabit Ethernet connections and seven new CENIC-managed fiber connection to CalREN as part of the Campus Access Infrastructure Initiative (CAI), which seeks to provide all Cal State University campuses with diverse Gigabit connectivity to the CalREN backbone. CENIC has continued to move forward on the CAI Project, and during this past month, CSU Monterey Bay standardized its two Gigabit connections to CalREN according to CAI standards.

CSU East Bay also began to use its two CENIC-managed fiber connections to CalREN, and the necessary permits have been issued and construction has begun for the needed fiber path to connect the CSU Chancellor's Office to CalREN. Lastly, both of Sacramento State's new fiber connections have been tested, and the campus is currently scheduled to begin using these connections in early February.

Community College Update:
This past month, two more community college districts have been approved for Gigabit connections to CalREN. Soon, the Coast and San Diego Community College Districts will be able to enjoy high-bandwidth connectivity to CalREN. The Coast CCD district hub is located in Costa Mesa, while the San Diego district hub is located at Miramar College. We're delighted to provide both of these districts with broadband connectivity and look forward to seeing what they will accomplish for their students with the increased bandwidth.

We're also happy to announce that the San Ramon Valley Campus of the Diablo Valley College has received a direct DS3 connection to CalREN. Our Network Operations Center, about which you'll read more below, is currently working with the campus to put this new circuit into production.

K-12 Update:
So far during the 2006-07 fiscal year, CENIC provided Gigabit connections to the Los Angeles Unified School District, Orange County Department of Education, and Tulare and Sacramento County Offices of Education), and K-12 E-rate application activity continues apace as CENIC works to provide our consultants with the enormous amount of information they require in order to complete the CENIC 2007-08 E-rate application for all eligible K-12 circuits. Currently, the application is expected to exceed 1,400 pages and is due into the Schools & Libraries Division (SLD) by February 7. You can learn more about the E-rate application process at http://www.e-ratecentral.com/.

-- Ed Smith, CENIC

CENIC's Network Operations Center Customer Survey Results

With the support of California's K-20 research and education communities, CENIC has been privileged to create, operate, and maintain CalREN -- the premiere high- performance R&E network in the country and one of the best in the world. We take equal pride in providing our Associates with the highest standard of customer care as well, as the most recent results from our 2006 Network Operations Center (NOC) Customer Survey show.

In the categories of Response Time, 91% of our customers report that our Network Operations Center met or exceeded their expectations. Regarding Status Updates, 94% of respondents report that our NOC provided them with updates to their queries in a timely manner. 93% of respondents report that their Time to Resolution met or exceeded expectations, and we're particularly pleased to report that when asked about Overall Satisfaction, 97% of our respondents report satisfaction with the service that the CENIC Network Operations Center provides.

When asked about their experience working with CENIC's Operations engineers, the following percentage of respondents reported that the engineer that they worked with was:

95% Courteous
92% Knowledgeable
97% Understood my problem
93% Helpful
94% Handled my problem with an appropriate level of urgency
91% Thorough

However, just as CENIC is always eager to build further on the current CalREN infrastructure to enable our Associates to meet the needs of their faculty, staff, and students in even greater ways, we also view these high levels of satisfaction as a challenge to ourselves to find new and creative ways to deliver enhanced customer care to CENIC and CalREN Associates.

As the new calendar year begins, we look forward to finding even more ways to provide California's K-20 education and research communities with advanced, cutting-edge networking and equally advanced customer care.

-- Cindy Abercrombie, CENIC

CENIC and Open Student Television Network (OSTN) Announce Partnership

On February 1, 2007, CENIC announced its partnership with Open Student Television Network (OSTN) to deliver IPTV via the California Research & Education Network (CalREN) to 9.5 million end users. CalREN connects 10 University of California campuses; 23 California State University campuses; all California community colleges; the California K-12 system; the Naval Postgraduate School; and many of California's independent universities such as Caltech, University of Southern California (USC), Stanford University, University of San Diego (USD), and University of San Francisco (USF).

OSTN is the leading provider of educational and foreign language IPTV content and student-produced programming. CENIC is a nonprofit corporation that owns, operates, and manages CalREN on behalf of California's K-20 research and education community.

OSTN launched in 2005 with the only 24-hour, seven-day global channel exclusively devoted to student-produced programming. In 2006, OSTN added CableTV, which delivers educational and foreign language TV channels to colleges and universities via CENIC and other networks. OSTN now is delivered to 41 million users at 4,500 university member campuses and 36 countries around the globe.

If your institution would like to learn more, please visit http://www.cenic.org/OSTN/ to view OSTN programming, learn how to join, and learn how your students can develop and submit programming to the network. CENIC and CalREN Associates can become members by contacting Anthony Davis, OSTN's Vice President of Membership Development, at anthony_davis@ostn.tv or (216) 973-7564.

You can also read the complete release at http://www.cenic.org/pressroom/releases/2007/02012007.html.

-- Janis Cortese, CENIC

Chinese Delegation Visits US to Examine CalREN Infrastructure and Applications

From December 6-8, 2006, the Chinese American Network Symposium (CANS) 2006 meeting was held in Chicago, IL to allow networking experts from China and the United States to discuss new ideas and advancements in networking technologies. On Wednesday December 13, 2006, several of the Chinese network researchers from the Chinese Education and Research Network (CERNET) and the Chinese Scientific and Technology Network (CSTNET) who had attended the CANS 2006 meeting visited the Los Angeles area. CENIC was delighted to host them and provide them with a tour of our Los Angeles facility, followed by a tour of the California Institute of Technology, where Caltech network engineer Yang Xia was able to demonstrate some of the advanced research uses to which Caltech has put its broadband connectivity to CalREN.

The China Education and Research Network (CERNET) is the first nationwide education and research computer network in China. The CERNET project is funded by the Chinese government and directly managed by the Chinese Ministry of Education. It is constructed and operated by Tsinghua University and other leading universities in China. You can learn more about CERNET at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cernet.

Managed by the Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CNIC, CAS), the Chinese Scientific and Technology Network (CSTNET) is renowned for its pioneering role in Chinese Mainland's Internet industry and is the nation's leading scientific research network. It is the earliest Internet-connected network in China and provides service to the nation's scientific and technical community, relevant government departments and hi-tech enterprises, and most provinces, cities and autonomous regions across the country

With its numerous international connections throughout North America and the Pacific Rim, as well as connectivity to the National LambdaRail and Internet2's Abilene backbone, CalREN enables California's K-20 community to collaborate with colleagues all over the world, and as such, international dialogues and cooperation is of paramount importance to CENIC. We look forward to working together with representatives from leading network researchers worldwide!

-- Janis Cortese, CENIC

CENIC `07: Making Waves -- Register Now and Pay at the Conference, Keynotes Confirmed, Hotel Info

CENIC's annual conference, Making Waves will be held from March 12-14, 2007 at:

The San Diego La Jolla Marriott Hotel
4240 La Jolla Village Drive
La Jolla, CA 92037
(858) 587-1414

including an evening reception on Sunday, March 11, 2007.

And now, we're happy to make it even easier for you to register to attend this premiere networking event by enabling you to register online and pay later at the conference via check or major credit card!

You can register to attend and reserve your room to take part in Making Waves by visiting the CENIC `07: Making Waves website at http://cenic07.cenic.org/ or clicking on the following:

http://marriott.com/property/propertypage/SANLJ?groupCode=cencena&app=resvlink

Register before February 12, 2007 to reserve your room at the special conference rate.

CENIC is also proud to announce the keynote speakers for Making Waves. We are delighted to welcome:

• Sunne Wright McPeak, President and CEO of the California Emerging Technology Fund
• John R. Delaney, Professor of Oceanography, University of Washington and Director, NEPTUNE Program
• Cherri M. Pancake, Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Intel Faculty Fellow at Oregon State University

CENIC would also like to thank Titanium Level Sponsor Cisco Systems, Platinum Level Sponsor AT&T, Gold Level Sponsor Force10 Networks, and Silver Level Sponsors Verizon, Juniper Networks, ADVA Optical Networking, Cdigix, Qwest, and Vega Business Technologies for their generous assistance in making CENIC `07: Making Waves possible. Looking forward to seeing you in La Jolla in March 2007!

-- Sherilyn Evans, CENIC

National Networking News:

Physicists Set New Record for Network Data Transfer

An international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology, CERN, and the University of Michigan and partners at the University of Florida and Vanderbilt, as well as participants from Brazil (Rio de Janeiro State University, UERJ, and the State Universities of São Paulo, USP and UNESP) and Korea (Kyungpook National University, KISTI) joined forces to set new records for sustained data transfer between storage systems during the SuperComputing 2006 (SC06) Bandwidth Challenge (BWC).

The high-energy physics team's demonstration of "High Speed Data Gathering, Distribution and Analysis for Physics Discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider" achieved a peak throughput of 17.77 Gigabits per second between clusters of servers at the show floor and at Caltech. Following the rules set for the SC06 Bandwidth Challenge, the team used a single 10-Gbps link provided by National Lambda Rail (www.nlr.net) that carried data in both directions. Sustained throughput throughout the night prior to the bandwidth challenge xceeded 16 Gbps (or two gigabytes per second) using just 10 pairs of small servers sending data at nine Gbps to Caltech from Tampa, and eight pairs of servers sending seven Gbps of data in the reverse direction.

One of the key advances in this demonstration was Fast Data Transport (FDT; http://monalisa.cern.ch/FDT), a Java application developed by Iosif Legrand of Caltech that runs on all major platforms.

In March of Last Year, the MonALISA team was honored at CENIC's 2006 Annual Conference as winners of the Innovations in Networking Award for High-Performance Applications.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news85246030.html

More Universities Switching to Google Mail

According to CA*net's Bill St. Arnaud, Google Mail and its accompanying calendaring services are presenting a tempting pictures to many major universities. As an example, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada has opted to begin using Google Mail. Now fully operational on Gmail, Lakehead still has some work to do on other aspects of the conversion. The university will be converting from an ageing in-house calendaring system to the Web calendaring facility included in Google Apps.

The suite also includes a Web chat capability, and the company will probably add other features, Gogh said. "Our goal with Google Apps for Education is to provide a very rich set of communication tools." The suite has been available free of charge under a beta program since late summer, he said, and universities and colleges that adopt it during that beta period will never have to pay.

As is Google's practice, the company has not said when the beta period will end, but Gogh said the company is working on a "premium version" of Google Apps for Education for which there will be a charge.

Source: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2007/01/more-universities-switch-to-google-mail.html

UCLA Adopts Open-Source Moodle as Campus CMS

The UCLA Faculty Committee on Educational Technology decided that UCLA should converge on Moodle as the single open source platform for its common collaboration and learning environment (CCLE). The decision includes a commitment to remain engaged with the higher education community as it builds solutions for interoperability and cross-system collaboration. UCLA intends to continue as a Sakai Foundation member and, as capacity is available, to work with others in the Sakai, Moodle, and IMS communities who are interested in working on data, tool, and language interoperability solutions.

The decision to converge on common solution is a response to faculty leadership in the articulation of a vision for improving the student learning and the faculty teaching and research collaboration experience. The selection process was accomplished through the significant effort of many staff and faculty who worked on the CCLE Technical and Functional Sponsor Groups and the CCLE Assessment Taskforce. This decision will now be carried through UCLA's IT governance process in order to build even broader campus consensus and to define a campus implementation strategy.

To learn more, visit http://www.oit.ucla.edu/ccle/.

Source: http://campustechnology.com/news_article.asp?id=19924&typeid=150

Grid2007 — Call for Papers

The 8th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid 2007) will be held from September 19-21, 2007 in Austin, TX. Grid computing is evolving from the sharing of powerful computers for widely distributed applications to service orientation, open standards integration, collaboration, and virtualization. The ongoing development of the Grid as a service-oriented architecture for transparent and reliable distributed computing allows the reuse of existing components and information resources, and the assembly of these components in a flexible self-organizing manner. Hiding the complexity and technical details of the Grid from end users and application developers is going to play a crucial role in the future, for which issues related to security, provenance, automatic recovery, machine-interpretable metadata, QoS and SLA negotiation, etc. will have to be carefully addressed.

The Grid conference series is an annual international meeting with the objective to serve as both, the premier conference presenting best Grid research and as a forum for free exchange of ideas. Grid 2007 will feature invited talks and refereed paper presentations where new concepts are introduced and explored.

Previous events in this series have been successful in attracting high-quality papers and a wide international participation. This eighth event will be an independent conference, co-located with the Cluster 2007 conference with a one-day overlap.

To learn more about this event and how to submit a proposal, visit http://www.grid2007.org/.

Governor Launches National LambdaRail in New Mexico

Saying that "information is power and access to information is also power," Governor Bill Richardson today launched LambdaRail in New Mexico. National LambdaRail (NLR) is a nationwide networking infrastructure ­ a very, very high speed next generation of Internet access ­ that includes leading U.S. research universities and emerging private sector technology companies.

Gov. Richardson's launch of New Mexico's leg of LambdaRail took place at the University of New Mexico, one of the research university partners in National LambdaRail, along with New Mexico State University and New Mexico Tech.

"As a former Secretary of Energy, I understand how important it is for New Mexico to have high-speed access to the world," said Governor Richardson. "It makes us next-door partners with institutions not only in Colorado, Arizona, and Texas, but also with researchers throughout North America, the Far East, and Europe."

New Mexico's membership in National LambdaRail ensures that the network will traverse the state, from El Paso through Albuquerque to Denver, with a major point of presence (POP) located in downtown Albuquerque.

To learn more, visit http://www.unm.edu/~market/cgi-bin/archives/001653.html.

Internet2 Welcomes Jeffrey Lehman, Former President of Cornell University, as the New Chair of the Internet2 Board of Trustees

On January 17, 2007, Internet2 announced that Jeffrey Lehman, professor of law and former president of Cornell University, was elected chair of the Internet2 Board of Trustees, effective Monday, January 15, 2007. Lehman succeeds Larry Faulkner, the president of the Houston Endowment and former president of the University of Texas at Austin, who held the Board chair position since 2004. Faulkner's term expired in 2007.

Lehman has been a member of the Internet2 Board since 2004 and most recently served as vice chair of Internet2's Governance and Nominations Committee (GNC). Over the past six months, the GNC engaged Internet2 members in a broad review of Internet2's governance structure and crafted recommendations for consideration by the Board of Trustees. These recommendations were formally adopted by the Board this week.

Source: https://mail.internet2.edu/wws/arc/i2-news

E-rate Filing Window is Open -- Applications Must Be Received by February 7, 2007

The Federal Communications Commission recently revised items eligible for E-rate support. This year's Eligible Services List includes interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. Until this funding year, the service – which enables users to make phone calls via the Internet – was not eligible for E-rate discounts.

Interconnected VoIP is defined as a service that (1) enables real-time, two-way voice communications; (2) requires a broadband connection from the user's location; (3) requires Internet protocol-compatible customer premises equipment (CPE); and (4) permits users generally to receive calls that originate on the public switched telephone network and to terminate calls to the public switched telephone network.

Basic Internet access is eligible regardless of technology platform. Access technologies include but are not limited to:

Telephone dial-up
T-1 lines
Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)
Cable Modem
Wireless

To apply online, please visit http://www.sl.universalservice.org/menu.asp. To learn more about E-rate including tips to make your application a success, please visit http://www.e-ratecentral.com/.

About CENIC:

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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