Volume 2, Issue 2
March 31, 2006

The Western Hemisphere Research and Education Networks (WHREN)-Links Interconnecting Latin America (LILA) Report summarizes activities from participating networks. The WHREN-LILA Report is published under National Science Foundation (NSF) Award # 0441095 and Academic Network at São Paulo (ANSP) award Projeto Fapesp no. 04/14414-2.

March 2006 Issue:

• WHREN-LILA Activities
• CENIC Activities
• Pacific Wave Activities
• CLARA Activities
• RNP Activities
• CUDI Activities

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

WHREN-LILA Activities

The LILA link between San Diego and Mexico was successfully used during the FirstMile.US Spring 2006 Conference held in March on the UCSD campus.

There were two presentations made by speakers at remote locations, in the United States, Mexico and South America. The first was medical demonstrations coordinated by Ed Johansen, an attorney involved in education. The second was a discussion of the Americas moderated by Carmen Carpio of the World Bank. During both, participants from the remote locations joined the discussion via network link in addition to participation by the on-site attendees.

In addition, Julio Ibarra, WHREN-LILA PI, gave a short presentation at the conference. His presentation can be found at http://www.firstmile.us/events/conf/spr06/presentations/firstMile_OpenMic_032206.pdf.

For more information on the FirstMile.US agenda, visit http://www.firstmile.us/events/conf/spr06/agenda.php

CENIC Activities

The LILA link between San Diego and Tijuana, which includes the ability to add additional Gigabit capacity at very modest costs, has begun to bring about just the types of innovations that the NSF hoped for in terms of joint research collaborations. Additionally, it has provided capabilities to improve education across the border.

In March, the University of California’s UCCP program hosted an Online Learning Summit in Mexico City with funding from the Hewlett Foundation. The two-day event addressed curriculum sharing via CENIC’s network connection to CUDI (the LILA link). An agreement was signed creating a bi-national high school to enable students to continue their education more easily as they cross the border. This innovative educational offering is exactly the type of activity that can only occur with the installation of capacity in advance of knowing exactly how it will be used.

For more information on CENIC, visit their website at http://www.cenic.org/.

Pacific Wave Activities

Caltech is one of the major participants in the CMS collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). They are participating in the GLORIAD link bandwidth challenge sponsored by Ultralight partner KISTI. Through the use of Pacific Wave, Caltech intends to demonstrate high speed transfers of physics data sets between Caltech to KISTI in Korea. During the challenge they aim to maximize the utilization of the Pacific Wave connection to and from the Caltech CACR data center. End hosts involve a pair of quad AMD Opteron Newisys systems and Neterion 10G NICs. The traffic consists of a realistic mixture of streams: those due to the transfer of the TeraByte event datasets, and a set of background flows of varied character absorbing the remaining capacity. The intention is to simulate the environment in which distributed physics analysis will be carried out at the LHC. Preliminary tests in February 2006 showed sustained usage of 6.67 gigabits per second over the Pacific Wave connection.

In March 2006, John Silvester gave a general session presentation entitled "International Networks (and Networking)" at the CENIC 2006 Annual Conference.

Other talks given at the CENIC 2006 Annual conference include:

• "Connecting the World - Pacific Wave and International Peering".  Dave McGaugh. 13 March 2006
• "CENIC Participation in Pacific Wave". Chris Costa. 13 March 2006.

To download these presentations, go to http://www.cenic.org/events/cenic2006/monday.htm

Also in March, Microsoft (connected in Seattle) completed their upgrade to 10 gigabit connection with jumbo frames enabled.

For more on these and other efforts, visit the Pacific Wave website at http://www.pacificwave.net/.

CLARA Activities

Two more countries were connected to the RedClara network. On March 20, Nicaragua received a 10Mbps link to the RedCLARA PoP in Tijuana, Mexico and on March 24, Colombia connected to the RedCLARA PoP in Panama at 10 Mbps.

With these latest two additions to RedCLARA, the network now interconnects the NRENs of 14 Latin American countries.

For more information on CLARA, visit http://www.redclara.net/en/03/01.htm.

RNP Activities

An initiative to create a National Virtual Disk (NVD) for the Brazilian research and education community is among the projects announced last November by the Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP), Brazil's research networking organization. Under the project, the Network Storage Working Group (NSWG) will deploy distributed storage infrastructure that integrates seamlessly with Brazil's high-performance research network and helps users to solve the daunting logistical problems associated with moving, staging and caching of massive amounts of scientific data and digital media content. Building on storage technology already widely deployed in the United States (Internet2, ESNet) and Europe (CESNET), the Brazilian NVD aims to facilitate the exchange and publication of bulk data both inside the country and internationally.

For more information on RNP, visit their website at http://www.rnp.br/en/index.php.

CUDI Activities

The IPv6 working committee is finishing the latest versions of the documents “draft-cudi-ipv6-direccionamiento-2006-v1”, that will ultimately become RFCMX and “New Addressing IPv6 for the Backbone of the network Internet2 of Mexico (RedCUDI)”, in which the address structure for the connections to the backbone is detailed, with the Academic Associates.

The Network Development Committee (CDR) establishes the routing policies and IPv6 address assignments, and will develop a document that contains the features and procedures that will govern the use of the new block of addresses in the CUDI network.

For more information on CUDI, visit their website at http://www.cudi.edu.mx/.

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

The WHREN-LILA newsletter is intended to provide useful, up-to-date information about WHREN-LILA through short articles with web links and email addresses. Newsletters will be posted on the WHREN-LILA website (www.ciara.fiu.edu/whren). If you have colleagues who would like to subscribe to this monthly newsletter, send them to: http://www.ampath.net/mailman/listinfo/whren-today.

If you would like to be removed from the WHREN Monthly Report mail list, you may unsubscribe at: http://www.ampath.net/mailman/listinfo/whren-today.