CENIC Today: Volume 10, Issue 5

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

CENIC News:

President's Message: The Year in Review

One of the rewards at this time of the year is the satisfaction resulting from looking back on a year of accomplishment on behalf of one of the most vibrant and innovative R&E communities in the world. Let me review the 2006-07 fiscal year and share with you some of its highlights I've reflected on.

This year, CENIC was pleased to welcome the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute along with both the University of San Diego and the University of San Francisco to CalREN, and all three institutions currently enjoy high-bandwidth connectivity to the CalREN backbone.

A great deal of activity has also taken place over the entire CalREN-DC network, which supports the day-to-day educational activities of 9.5 million students, faculty, and instructional staff throughout the state. Plans for a statewide refresh of the DC network were approved by the Board last year, resulting in the issuance and award of an RFP late in 2006. Nearly all the upgrade equipment has shipped, and collocation facilities are being upgraded to house the new equipment, the first of which will be installed during the next month. Final implementation will extend until late this calendar year. With its completion, the CalREN-DC network's current 2.5 Gb/s backbone speed will be increased to 10 Gb/s and a significant portion of our underlying optical infrastructure will have been replaced with the latest equipment. On the heels of the DC network refresh, plans are being finalized for the HPR network upgrade, with issuance of an RFP expected by the end of the first quarter of the new year, putting the HPR refresh on a schedule about a year behind the DC Network upgrade.

At the end of the last fiscal year, CENIC and the Imperial County Office of Education worked together to plan needed circuit upgrades to K-12 county offices of education around the state. In total, nine county offices of education's circuits to the CalREN backbone were upgraded to Gigabit connectivity. In addition, the Ventura County Office of Education received a second DS-3 connection to CalREN to provide bandwidth in anticipation of a Gigabit connection during the upcoming fiscal year.

Improved connectivity between community colleges and the CalREN backbone also occurred. Two community college districts were designated for circuit upgrades to Gigabit speeds: the Coast and San Diego Community College Districts. The San Ramon Valley campus of Diablo Valley College received a DS-3 connection to CalREN, and Vista College became Berkeley City College upon moving to a new location in downtown Berkeley; the campus's DS-3 connection was moved as well. The San Bernardino Valley College received Gigabit connectivity to CalREN, which will enable the campus to move forward with its rich-media distance education project EduStream.org, an Innovations in Networking award-winner at this year's CENIC annual conference in La Jolla. The West Hills College Lemoore site was upgraded to full campus status, and the CCC Chancellor's Office authorized a DS-3 for the site.

Last year, I was delighted to report the expansion of the CalREN backbone with the addition of a 400-mile fiber path through the Coachella Valley, thanks to a grant from the H. N. and Frances C. Berger Foundation. The beginning of the 2006-07 fiscal year saw Gigabit connectivity to CalREN for the College of the Desert, the area's largest higher education institution with an enrollment of over 10,000.

The CSU's Campus Access Infrastructure Initiative (CAI) seeks to provide all Cal State University campuses with dual, diverse Gigabit connectivity to the CalREN backbone. At the end of this fiscal year, I'm delighted to report that Sacramento State, San Diego State, and San Jose State Universities, the California Maritime Academy, CSU East Bay, and CSU Monterey Bay now all enjoy the dual, diverse Gigabit connectivity to CalREN that the CAI aims to provide.

The CSU Chancellor's Office obtained Gigabit connectivity to the Los Angeles node site to supplement its DS-3 connectivity to the Tustin node, and CSU Channel Islands received the first of its dual, diverse Gigabit connections to CalREN. Moss Landing Marine Laboratories obtained improved service via a shared Gigabit circuit with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. In addition, fiber installation projects are underway at Cal Poly Pomona and Cal State Los Angeles.

This fiscal year was a year of continued progress for the University of California in terms of network connectivity to the CalREN backbone, with multiple projects in various stages of development to enhance UC connectivity. A second fiber path to the CalREN backbone was approved for UC Santa Barbara, the planning to provide fiber connectivity to UC Santa Cruz has been completed, and implementation of a fiber path to the Medical Center at UC San Diego is nearing completion. The UC system also began a migration to CalREN Video Services for their videoconference needs, and CENIC is working together with the UC system to study the uses of high-performance networking to address telemedicine and e-health concerns throughout the state, particularly in rural areas.

Connectivity to the Naval Postgraduate School was enhanced with the replacement of a managed-service Gigabit connection to the CalREN backbone with a fiber connection, capable of providing even higher speed connectivity than the campus currently enjoys.

The R&E network and commodity peering initiatives, Pacific Wave and TransitRail respectively, have also made significant progress. The collection of South American research and education networks redCLARA is now connected to the Pacific Wave peering facility, a joint project between CENIC and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) in collaboration with the University of Southern California and the University of Washington. A 10-Gigabit connection was also established between Translight/Pacific Wave and Translight/StarLight.

TransitRail is a national commodity peering program also deployed and operated by CENIC and PNWGP. The full TransitRail national footprint is comprised of five nodes in Seattle, Sunnyvale, Los Angeles, Ashburn, and Chicago, enabling research and education institutions to take advantage of low-cost network peering on a national scale. The Ashburn node was announced by both CENIC and PNWGP in March 2007, with the final node in Chicago becoming active in June. With the Chicago node active and the national footprint in place, even greater interest is anticipated, and the next phase of growth for the program will involve a new round of peering points driven by partnership opportunities. TransitRail reduces the cost of commodity (non R&E traffic) to CENIC's member institutions.

Looking back on this list of achievements, it's easy to take pride in them as examples of what CENIC has accomplished to serve California's R&E community, but that's not the real story. It's important for each and every one of our Associates, our corporate partners, and the members of our committees and councils as well as our staff to remember that CENIC itself is composed of all of you. Therefore, this list of achievements should be a source of pride for all of you as well because in a very real sense, you are CENIC.

Therefore, as much pleasure as I take in these achievements, I take even greater pleasure in congratulating all of you on them, and in looking forward to what is sure to be an even more impressive list at the end of the 2007-08 fiscal year.

-- Jim Dolgonas, CENIC

CalREN Update: Network Projects and Activities

CalREN-DC-Refresh Project:
The current CalREN-DC backbone speed is 2.5 Gb/s, and CENIC is currently undertaking an upgrade/refresh of the entire CalREN-DC network that will increase this speed to 10 Gb/s as well as upgrading and replacing vital equipment. This project is called the CalREN-DC Refresh Project. One of the main activities for CENIC's engineering staff while moving forward on the CalREN-DC Refresh continues to be the considerable evaluation, documentation, and planning work needed in preparation for deployment of all the hardware needed to upgrade. Where needed, additional space and power is being installed, and Cisco has begun to ship the new hardware. Stay tuned to CENIC Today during the coming months for further updates on this project.

CSU Updates:
Several fiber builds to serve four Southern California CSU campuses are well underway. While specific completion dates are not yet available, CENIC is targeting late summer for CSU San Bernardino and late fall to early winter for Cal State LA, Cal Poly Pomona, and CSU San Marcos. With the completion of these projects, all four campuses will enjoy enhanced Gigabit connectivity to the CalREN backbone. We look forward to providing you with updates and announcements of the completions of these fiber builds, as well as keeping you informed on the campuses' achievements thanks to their enhanced connectivity to one another and the world.

CCC Updates:
CENIC has been working with the California Community College Chancellor's Office on bandwidth utilization assessments and identifying sites in need of additional bandwidth. This is an ongoing process and although not yet complete, several large districts have already been identified as being eligible for upgrades to Gigabit connections. Orders for these upgrades are in the process of being placed. Columbia College, one of the most recent CCC sites to receive its own connection, successfully tested its H.323 videoconferencing equipment with the CENIC Network Operations Center and is now ready to take advantage of CalREN Video Services.

K12 Updates:
The K12 High-Speed Network (K12HSN) has identified nearly a dozen K12 node sites eligible for upgraded connections to Gigabit circuits. Updated site and facilities information is being collected, and it is expected that the orders for these circuits will be placed within the next thirty days.

-- Ed Smith, CENIC

TransitRail on the Move: National Peering Program Footprint Expands with Turn-Up of Chicago Node

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) announced on July 3, 2007 the expansion of the TransitRail commodity peering program's national footprint with the activation of a connection point in Chicago, IL.

With the Chicago node now active and the national footprint in place, TransitRail members have more TransitRail connection points to choose from, allowing groups to engineer both service redundancy and improvement of network performance through reduced transit times.

TransitRail's US footprint is connected by 10Gbps waves provided by National LambdaRail (NLR). Each TransitRail node will be connected to, and accessible at, NLR points of presence throughout the United States, enabling NLR participants to leverage their membership in that organization even further through participation a national-level peering program.

In addition, the completion of the new node solidifies TransitRail's role within the widely-respected community of Tier-1 national and international peering networks.

For more information about TransitRail, please contact info@transitrail.net.

To read the rest of this release, please visit http://www.cenic.org/pressroom/releases/2007/07032007.html.

-- Janis Cortese, CENIC

Geographic Information Systems: Better with Broadband

The first known use of geographic information systems (GIS) -- analyzing data geographically to solve problems -- occurred in 1855 when John Snow built a map of the Soho area of London that permitted him to pinpoint the source of an outbreak of cholera by referencing reported cases of what was at that time a common disease. When viewed in this fashion, the data revealed the source of the outbreak clearly: an infected water pump at the center of town. However, Snow's map was drawn over a year after the outbreak itself, making his conclusions useful only in hindsight.

Technology has come quite a bit father since Snow's hand-drawn ex post facto map. Researchers are able to switch at a whim to multiple views of the same data, to cross-reference varied sources of data, and to watch data evolve live over time. Disciplines as widely divergent as disaster response, real estate, agriculture, climate change, epidemiology, and other areas of knowledge intimately related to geography and human presence have benefited tremendously from GIS. And GIS technology has positioned itself at the cutting edge of those which can benefit most from broadband networking. Data must not only be sent back and forth quickly around the world, but the data itself must be harvested from disparate sources including satellites, hospitals and police stations, schools, ground stations, and other sources. In situations such as earthquakes, fires, and other fast-acting natural disasters, the data must be made available with lightning speed and great precision.

Of course the California research community and CalREN Associates are among the premiere researchers in the world in the arena of GIS. One of those Associate bodies is the San Diego State University's Visualization Center, which played a crucial role at making geospatial data available worldwide to researchers and responders in the hours following the Indonesian tsunami and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. With the amounts of data necessary to make GIS as useful as it must be in these dire situations, broadband is sine qua non for optimum performance. "All the data that sits on my servers is free," says senior research scientist John Graham, "and there's terabytes of it. To get this data to the people who need it in a timely fashion, fiber networks like CalREN are essential."

GIS also illustrates clearly the importance of a well-developed broadband infrastructure that penetrates into multiple types of institutions. With interconnection into fire and police departments, such networks can gather and process fire and crime data in real-time. Hospitals can make properly secured case data available, enabling responders to view and adjust to infection or disaster as such events develop. With networks like CalREN, John Snow's 1855 map of a year-old cholera outbreak could be made useful during the outbreak itself, telling us not only where we have been before, but where we are headed and how best to get there.

Visit the SDSU Visualization Center online to learn more about it.

-- Janis Cortese, CENIC

National Networking News:

Australia Announces $AUS 2 billion National Broadband Plan

On June 18, 2007 Australian Prime Minister John Howard announced a 2.0 billion dollar (1.68 billion US) plan to provide fast and affordable Internet access across the vast country.

Howard said Optus, the Australian offshoot of Singapore telco Singtel, had been awarded a 958-million-dollar contract to build a broadband network in the bush with rural finance company Elders.

The joint venture, known as OPEL, would contribute a further 900 million US dollars to provide broadband of at least 12 Megabits per second by June 2009.

"What we have announced today is a plan that will deliver to 99 percent of the Australian population very fast and affordable broadband in just two years' time," Howard said.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

JANET(UK) Partners with OSTN to Launch IPTV to Universities in the United Kingdom

On July 2, 2007, JANET(UK) announced an IPTV partnership with the Open Student Television Network (OSTN). JANET(UK) will offer OSTN's educational, foreign language, news, and entertainment IPTV content to all of its connected sites, representing a user base of up to eighteen million users which includes all colleges, universities and the majority of schools in the UK.

JANET is the UK's national network for research and education and connects a wide range of education and research institutions across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. From schools, FE Colleges and Universities to large research institutions, JANET provides a reliable and resilient network, enhanced through a program of leading-edge developments and services.

Available on personal computers within the UK, OSTN is the leading global provider of educational, foreign language, news, and entertainment IPTV content and services, and features the only 24/7 worldwide channel exclusively devoted to student-produced programming, airing content from over 50 higher education institutions.

".OSTN creates possibilities for student collaboration on a scale unimaginable only several years ago,' said Randy Winchester, Team Leader for MIT Cable Television at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I am anticipating that OSTN will cause a huge revival in video and film in the UK as it did here in Cambridge."

Source: Open Student Television Network

SDSC to Help Build ORION Cyberinfrastructure for Ocean Observatories

The world's oceans have traditionally been only sparsely observed from a handful of expensive, moving ships. To expand knowledge of the oceans on a planetary scale for fields from climate change to marine genomics and fisheries management, oceanographers will deploy a global network of moored buoys or observatories, whose multiple instruments will provide continuous data to fill in vital knowledge gaps.

Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and Calit2 at UCSD, leveraging the cyberinfrastructure expertise of SDSC, will design and build the Cyberinfrastructure portion of the project. The initial $29 million award is for six years, with total funding up to $42 million over the 11-year project. The cyberinfrastructure will transport real-time data streams from a variety of ocean-dwelling sensors and instruments. The data will be made available in real time to every researcher, teacher and citizen. The "virtual" infrastructure will also underpin the physical infrastructure of two related projects, a regional, cabled network in the Northeast Pacific Ocean, and expanded coastal observing facilities.

Source: Scripps Oceanography News

Astronomy Team Announces Discovery of 28 New Extrasolar Planets

The most prolific team of planet hunters, responsible for detecting over half of the exoplanets known to date, has announced the discovery of 28 new planets orbiting distant stars. The discovery represents the combined work of the California and Carnegie Planet Search team and the Anglo-Australian Planet Search team, and it brings the total number of known exoplanets to 236.

The news was announced last week by Jason T. Wright and John Asher Johnson of UC Berkeley at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) which took place in Honolulu.

The California and Carnegie Planet Search team is headed by Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley; Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University; and Steve Vogt, professor of astronomy at UC Santa Cruz. The Anglo-Australian Planet Search team is headed by Chris Tinney of the University of New South Wales and Hugh Jones of the University of Hertfordshire.

Source: The Planetary Society

UCLA Scholars and Students, International Team Resurrect Ancient Rome Digitally

Mayor of Rome Walter Veltroni officiated Monday at the first public viewing of "Rome Reborn 1.0," a 10-year project begun at UCLA and based at the University of Virginia that used advanced technology to digitally rebuild ancient Rome. The event took place at Rome's Palazzo Senatorio on Capitoline Hill, which overlooks the ruins of the ancient Forum.

An international team of archaeologists, architects and computer specialists from Italy, the United States, Britain and Germany employed the same high-tech tools used for simulating contemporary cities -- including laser scanners and virtual reality -- to construct the largest, most complete simulation of a historic city to date.

"Rome Reborn" encompasses nearly the entire ancient city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as it appeared in A.D. 320. At that time, Rome was the multicultural capital of the Western world and had reached the peak of its development, with an estimated population of 1 million.

The simulation is a true three-dimensional model that runs in real time and allows users to navigate the environment with complete freedom, moving in any direction at will. Viewers can enter such important public buildings as the Roman Senate House, the Colosseum, and the Temple of Venus and Rome, the ancient city's largest place of worship.

As new discoveries are made, "Rome Reborn 1.0" can be easily updated to reflect the latest knowledge about the ancient city. In future versions, the project will include other phases in the evolution of the city, from the late Bronze Age in the 10th century B.C. to the Gothic Wars in the 6th century. Video clips and still images can be viewed at www.romereborn.virginia.edu and at www.etc.ucla.edu.

Source: UCLA News

2007 Digital School Boards Survey Call for Entries

The National School Boards Association (NSBA), Center for Digital Education (Center) and Converge Online magazine are launching the nation's third annual Digital School Boards Survey. The purpose of the survey is to showcase exemplary school boards' use of technology to communicate with the public and govern the district.

Top-ranked school boards will receive the Digital School Boards Survey award and will be featured on the Center's and NSBA's Web sites and in Converge Online. Survey results will be compiled and sent to participants.

The Center is a national research and advisory institute providing education, government, and industry leaders with decision support, research and educational services to help them effectively incorporate new technologies in the 21st century.

Source: The Center for Digital Government

Going Mobile: Extending Grid to the Lower End

Think your cell phone has nothing to contribute to grid services? Think again.

Stavros Isaiadis of the University of Westminster is working on the so-called "lower end" of the grid performance spectrum, as part of CoreGRID, and the university's Distributed and Intelligent Systems Group, led by Vladimir Getov.

"Grid usually revolves around high performance computing," explains Isaiadis, "which means you need raw resources -- things like CPU and memory. Framed like this, mobile devices can only make a very limited contribution."

But, Isaiadis asks, what about flexibility, agility, mobility?

"Mobile devices can extend grids into areas where static grids can not go. You can leverage resources from many devices, like from WiFi hotspots or conference rooms, to create an ad hoc high performance facility. You don't have infrastructure, but you can provide instant facilities for collaboration."

Mobile devices have even more to offer to grid providers with unique functionality requirements, and can include multimedia equipment, Global Positioning Systems and context-awareness.

Source: International Science Grid This Week

7th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop in Prague, September 17-18, 2007

GLIF, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility, is an international virtual organization that promotes the paradigm of lambda networking. GLIF provides lambdas internationally as an integrated facility to support data-intensive scientific research, and supports middleware development for lambda networking. It brings together some of the world's premier networking engineers who are working together to develop an international infrastructure by identifying equipment, connection requirements, and necessary engineering functions and services.

The GLIF participants are National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), consortia and institutions working with lambdas. Administrative support is provided by TERENA with financial support from sponsoring GLIF participants.

The main purpose of the annual LambdaGrid workshops is to bring together interested people to share experiences and discuss developments and operational issues of optical networks. The workshop programme is relevant to managers, engineers, researchers and developers.

The major workshop topics are:

• design and implementation of international LambdaGrid infrastructure
• interfaces and protocols of LambdaGrid control planes
• scientific applications and users of the global optical network
• future objectives of next-generation networks and related policies

Visit the workshop website to learn more.

Source: GLIF.is

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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