Volume 3, Issue 4
July 31, 2007

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.

May 2007 Issue:

• WHREN-LILA Activities
• FIU-CIARA Activities
• CENIC Activities
• Atlantic Wave Activities
• Pacific Wave Activities
• CUDI Activities
• CLARA Activities
• ANSP Activities

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

WHREN-LILA Activities

High Energy physics remains a highly vocal community about the empowerment WHREN-LILA has brought to them. At the review of the Center for High-Energy Physics Research and Educational Outreach (CHEPREO) program, a consensus expressed the necessity of keeping the link at 2.5 Gb/s. In order to do this, it was proposed that IRNC funds be advanced 90 days and a supplement of less than a half-million dollars be awarded to maintain this critical infrastructure at higher than originally proposed levels. WHREN-LILA is sighted as a key component of the nation of Brazil’s decision to create a $10 million data center in Sao Paulo in order to participate in and contribute to U.S. based research projects.

Florida International University (FIU), in collaboration with partners at Florida State University (FSU), the University of Florida (UF), the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), along with the Brazilian high energy physics community, are operating an inter-regional Grid-enabled Center for High-Energy Physics Research and Educational Outreach (CHEPREO) at FIU, encompassing an integrated program of research, cyberinfrastructure, and education and outreach at one of the largest minority schools in the US.

FIU-CIARA Activities

SAGE Tile Display Wall Workshop @ Calit2: Global CyberBridges held a 2 day technical workshop hosted by Co-PI Peter Arzberger and Network Engineer Rajvikram Singh which walked participants through the history of the Scaleable Adjustable Graphics Environment (SAGE) as a product of the NSF funded Optiputer project. The curriculum and presentations developed for this workshop will be made available to other groups interested in applying SAGE technology to enhance their people to people and visual research analysis capabilities. GCB partners in Sao Paulo are planning to install a SAGE Tile Display Wall to support a new cohort of Ph.D. fellows in 2008. For more information see http://www.cyberbridges.net/meetings.htm

CI-TEAM Workshop, Washington D.C. July 9-11, 2007: CIARA’s PI and Co-PI for Global CyberBridges participated in this NSF hosted workshop where results from CI-TEAM pilot and implementation projects were presented to other awardees and hopeful proposers to the CI-TEAM 2007 solicitation. The recordings of the plenary sessions, accessible from the agenda at http://www.eotepic.org/.../agenda.html. Information about viewing the recordings is posted at http://www.eotepic.org/.../requirements.html. The slides from the presentation are being posted on the wiki, which is accessible from the main page. CyberBridges Pilot received praise for its novel approach to assessment of results as well as the preliminary outcomes where Ph.D. fellows were selected for competitive internships and had several publications accepted at prestigious conferences and journals, such as CCGRID ’07 in Rio de Janeiro.

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

CENIC Activities

CENIC and Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) announced 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 on CENIC, visit their website at http://www.cenic.org/.

Atlantic Wave Activities

The Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks (RedCLARA), and the U.S. Energy and Sciences Network (ESNet) established a much anticipated peering relationship this week. Spanning from Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Miami, Florida, then Washington, D.C. in the U.S., a layer 2 transport service was established in order to facilitate both IPv4 and IPv6 peering between these two research networks. AtlanticWave engineers coordinated the VLAN handoff with both the CLARA NOC and ESNet NOC and ensured successful end-to-end connectivity before declaring the VLANs ready for full production. This successful peering further advances international research network collaboration and enables traffic to flow over AtlanticWave's 10Gbps backbone.

For more information on Atlantic Wave, visit their website at http://atlanticwave.net/

Pacific Wave Activities

As part of the NSF-IRNC project TransLight/PacificWave (TLPW), John Silvester and Jacqueline Brown organized a workshop (titled PacificWave Applications Meeting) in association with GRIDASIA (June 5-8, 2007) in Singapore.  Several leading US researchers including Daniel Reed (RENCI), Joel Mambretti (NWU), Jonathon Silverstein (U. Chicago), Kayo Arima (UCSD) were invited participants at the workshop.

John Silvester organized a meeting of US R&E Exchange Point operators (US-REX) on June 18th in Denver, Colorado.  All the US R&E Exchanges were represented (Pacific Wave, Starlight, Atlantic Wave, and MANLAN).  René Hatem from Canarie also participated as there is such close interaction between the US and Canada.   The objective of the meeting was to share ideas and plan for better interoperability between the US exchange points and increase North American participation in GLIF.  The working name of GLIF-NA was adopted for these efforts.  It was decided to hold a follow on meeting at the upcoming GLIF meeting in Prague in September to discuss future directions and possibilities. This meeting was also sponsored by TLPW.

Pacific Wave held a meeting on the topic of measurements on June 25, 2007 at CENIC headquarters in Cypress, California.  Representatives from Internet2, PNWGP, CENIC and TLPW met to discuss issues and ideas surrounding various internet measurements and in particular what can be done during the upcoming SC07 conference in Reno, Nevada. Several ideas were discussed and will be further explored.

A 1 Gbps lightpath from AARNet southern SXTransPORT link for the Australian National Telescope Facility (CSIRO ATNF) through to JIVE in the Netherlands has been constructed through Pacific Wave.  The path goes from ATNF, through AARNet, Translight/PacificWave, CANARIE, StarLight, and SURFnet to JIVE and will be used to transfer eVLBI data from three Australian telescopes to the correlator at JIVE.  Testing of the lightpath is underway.

TLPW also co-sponsored the New Zealand Research and Education Network (KAREN) meeting held in Auckland, New Zealand 2 July - 4 July, 2007.  TLPW arranged for participation of several cyberinfrastructure leaders in the workshop, either in person and by high-definition video conferencing over the 1G link from New Zealand to Pacific Wave in Seattle. Participants from the US included Larry Smarr (Calit2), Ron Johnson (UW), Rick Stevens (ANL, U. Chicago), Jacqueline Brown (UW, PacificWave), Jim Mullins (UW), Laurin Herr(CineGRID), Ian Foster (ANL, U. Chicago), and John Silvester (USC, PacificWave).

Part of the TLPW project is to enhance connectivity to the observatories on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and to connect them to the AARNet SX-Transport Southern Cross links.  The cross island GigE connections are now active and the first Gigabit link to the telescopes has been turned over by the carrier and is ready for testing.  This link goes to the ring that connects the observatories at the top of the mountain and is a shared connection.  There will be additional links lit later and they will be dedicated links to specific telescopes or projects. We are close to passing traffic from the summit to Australia, to the West and to a variety of locations through PacificWave in the East.

Google has established two of its three gigabit connections to Pacific Wave, one in Los Angeles and one in Sunnyvale.  The Seattle connection is in process and should be completed in August.

Plans are underway for the extension of Pacific Wave to Reno, Nevada to support the SC07 conference that will be held there in November, 2007.

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

CUDI Activities

Project VALUE, co-financed by the European Commission, is surveying the relationship between European and Latin American Universities . Project VALUE is supported by the European Commission and its goal is to strengthen the ties between European and Latin American universities. The VALUE mission consists of promoting the cooperation, through long-term partnership for the mutual benefit between both regions. In order to attain its goals, VALUE has two surveys, one directed to students and Latin American investigators and another one to Latin American and European decision makers. The first survey is centered on innovating forms of cooperation for higher education between Europe and Latin America . The second survey is focused on the creation of the Common Area in Higher Education between Latin America , the Caribbean and the European Union (ALCUE - http://www.alcue.net/uealc/portal/main/Home.do?lng=en). VALUE wants to invite all students, investigators, researchers and decision makers to participate in the survey. For more information on VALUE and/or to access questionnaires of the surveys visits www.value-project.eu.

CUDI’s application committee recognizes the importance of its communities and announces the call for coordinator of the CUDI community with OSTN (Open Student Television Network). OSTN is available 7x24and uses multicast technology as the base technology on the academic networks associated with Internet2.

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

CLARA Activities

On July 17 at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2007 in Redmond , Washington , Florencio Utreras gave an overview of the Latin America Research and Academic Network, RedCLARA, as well as the organization behind it (CLARA). The focus was on RedCLARA's present and planned infrastructure as well as current activities in favor of a more collaborative and stronger research in the region. The talk also included a summary of two important collaboration efforts being carried out in the field of grid computing and instrumentation.

The Ecuadorian Consortium for Advance Internet Development (Consorcio Ecuatoriano para el Desarrollo de Internet Avanzado or CEDIA) is working on upgrading the capacity of their network to 45 Mbps, and to upgrade the last mile connections to 2 Mbps. They hope to have 2 new members for 2007. They are also looking for the cooperation of Ecuadorian government for the international connection to RedCLARA.

To find out more about CLARA, visit http://www.redclara.net/

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.