Volume 2, Issue 5
September 30, 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.

September 2006 Issue:

• WHREN-LILA Activities
• FIU-AMPATH Activities
• CENIC Activities
• Pacific Wave Activities
• AtlanticWave Activities
• CLARA Activities
• CUDI Activities

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

WHREN-LILA Activities

The second WHREN meeting took place in September in Santiago. Full meeting notes will be published on the web site by October 7th.

Heidi Alvarez, a co-PI for WHREN-LILA, presented at the Optical Network Testbeds Workshop 3 which took place on September 7 & 8 in Tokyo, Japan. Her presentation, “Western Hemisphere International Exchange Points”, includes information on the WHREN-LILA exchange points, along with updates on the Atlantic Wave project.

The full presentation is available at http://www.ciara.fiu.edu/whren/pubs/ONT3_alvarez7.pdf.

FIU-CIARA Activities

CYBERBRIDGES:
Heidi Alvarez, PI of the CyberBridges project, will chair a BOF session at SC06. The session is titled “CyberBridges: A Model Collaboration Infrastructure for e-Science” and is scheduled on Wednesday, November 15 at 12:15pm. For more information, visit the SC06 website (http://sc06.supercomp.org/schedule/event_detail.php?evid=5191)

For more information on the CyberBridges project, visit http://www.cyberbridges.net/

For more information on CIARA, visit their website at http://ciara.fiu.edu/

CENIC Activities

Both California State University's Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (MLML) and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) are now connected to the Digital California tier of the California Research & Education Network (CalREN-DC). The two research institutions are linked to the CalREN-DC node in Soledad, CA at Gigabit speeds via AT&T's GigaMAN (Ethernet private line) service. CENIC contracts with AT&T to provide similar connectivity to many research and education entities throughout California.

As two of the premiere marine research institutions in the US and the world, MLML and MBARI will use their connection to CalREN to further their research programs and collaborations with other researchers worldwide and to enable complex ventures such as MBARI's Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS), which will allow scientists to perform long-term and real-time experiments 900 meters below the surface of Monterey Bay and will serve as an engineering, science, and education test bed for even larger regional ocean observatories. The Institute's connection to CalREN will play a crucial role in making the data gathered by the MARS system available for MBARI researchers and others in the research community with a collaborative interest.

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

Pacific Wave Activities

Jacqueline Brown chaired the Global Collaboration Workshop at the APAN meeting held in Singapore July 17-21, 2006.

In August, Pacific Wave added two new participants. NASA's Research and Education Network (NREN) joined Pacific Wave in Sunnyvale, California with a 10 gigabit port and New Zealand's KAREN/REANNZ network joined Pacific Wave in Seattle, Washington with a gigabit port.

The webcast of the KAREN network launch can be reviewed at http://www.r2.co.nz/20060831/.

Work is underway to add the CLARA and CUDI networks to Pacific Wave in the fall.

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

RNP ACTIVITIES

RNP increases its traffic capacity with foreign countries. Access to sites from other countries will be faster

On October 2, there was an increase in the international traffic capacity of the institutions using Ipê Network – the multigigabit infrastructure kept by the National Education and Research Network (Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa - RNP). The link hired from Global Crossing enabled 700 Mbps traffic to occur, starting from Ipê Network’s point of presence in São Paulo. This capacity, added to the potential of PoP-RJ’s international link (155 Mbps), elevates the traffic capacity between RNP and the commercial Internet abroad to 855 Mbps.

This increase was already predicted by contract. RNP’s analysts had detected that the traffic with the commercial Internet was close to saturation, reaching about 80% of the previous capacity of the link.

RNP relies on four international channels: the links hired for the PoPs RJ and SP and the connections with Clara Network (155 Mbps) and with WHREN-LILA (1.24 Gbps). The connections with Clara (Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks) and with WHREN-LILA (Western Hemisphere Research and Education Networks/Links Interconnecting Latin America) are exclusively academic. The link with WHREN-LILA is shared with Clara and with the academic network of the state of São Paulo, ANSP, and it only serves some specific projects of RNP’s clients. The connections with Clara and WHREN-LILA enable the exchange of information with two academic networks: the European Géant and the American Internet2.

For more information on this, visit http://www.rnp.br/en/news/2006/not-060825.html

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

ANSP ACTIVITIES

ANSP activated a 200 Mbps trunk between the routers at the Palace and Prodesp.

A 200 Mbps trunk was activated with the router at the Prodesp and the router at the Government Palace. The former 100 Mbps link that connected them to the ANSP router were saturated.

This change was made with one switch with two links UTP, the first a FastEthernet interface to the Prodesp router installed in the Fapesp and the second to the ANSP router, a NetIron 400.

For more information on ANSP, visit their website at http://www.nara.org.br/

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.