Volume 3, Issue 5
September 28, 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.

September 2007 Issue:

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

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

WHREN-LILA Activities

Heidi Alvarez and Julio Ibarra attended the Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research Networking (CCIRN) 2007 meeting on August 27 in Xian, China. At this meeting, presentations were made on Next Generation Network projects, Optical Networking, High Performance Applications, Physical Diversity – Particularly on Trans-Oceanic Cables, the Continental Compendia of NRENs, Reviewing Regional Networking projects, and Intercontinental Assistance. For more information on this meeting or to view the presentations, visit https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/emergingren/

FIU-CIARA Activities

CIARA’s director, Heidi Alvarez Ph.D., made a presentation on the Global Cyberbridges project at the Chinese American Networking Symposium (CANS) in Xi’an, China on August 26th. Her topic was ColaborativeCollaborative CI Research and Education between CNIC of CAS and FIU CIARA. During her presentation, she announced that students and faculty from Sao Paulo, Brazil will join the project in 2008. Her presentation can be viewed at http://www.cyberbridges.net/meetings.htm.

The Cyberinfrastructure for International, Collaborative Biodiversity and Ecological Informatics Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute program’s deadline to submit proposals was September 21, 2007. The announcement of selected proposals will be on October 5, 2007, with the program dates tentatively set for December 3-14, 2007. For more information on this program, visit http://ciara.fiu.edu/eco/pdf/PASI_2007_Flyer.pdf

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

CENIC Activities

Pepperdine University Joins CalREN High-Performance Network for Research & Education

With a 50 Mb/s metro Ethernet connection between the university's West LA Graduate Campus to CalREN's LA hub site, Pepperdine students, faculty, and staff now have the ability to collaborate with colleagues throughout California and the world on cutting-edge research and education projects. The addition of this circuit increases Pepperdine's overall bandwidth capacity from 45 Mb/s to 95 Mb/s and also provides a critical redundant link to the Internet.

"Pepperdine University is well-known for its international programs as well as for its undergraduate and graduate programs offered in Malibu and at graduate campuses throughout southern California. The installation of this circuit at our West LA Graduate Campus marks the completion of the first phase of our wide-area-network upgrade. In subsequent phases, circuits to our graduate campuses will be upgraded, providing in some cases a 10x increase in bandwidth. Our London, UK center is also undergoing a network upgrade through a partnership with Imperial College that will provide access to the UK's advanced, high speed network known as JA.NET," said Dr. Timothy M. Chester, Chief Information Officer at Pepperdine.

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

Atlantic Wave Activities

AtlanticWave participated in the Global Lambda Integrated Facility - North America (GLIF-NA) meeting, which was held in conjunction with the GLIF 2007 meeting in Prague. The purpose of this meeting was to bring together representatives from U.S. exchanges points that have or are adopting the GLIF Open Lightpath Exchanges (GOLE) model, to discuss a variety of topics involving interoperability and services between U.S. exchanges and with exchanges in other countries.

This meeting was attended by U.S. exchange points.

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

Pacific Wave Activities

In August, Google completed installation of its third gigabit connection to Pacific Wave (Seattle) and UniNet/ThaiREN brought up a gigabit port in Los Angeles.

Jacqueline Brown and John Silvester participated in the CANS 2007 meeting in Xi'an, China August 25-16, 2007 where they were co-chairs of the Program Committee.  They also attended the APAN meeting, also held in Xi'an, August 27-31, 2007 where Jacqueline served as both the Program Committee Chair and the chair of the Global Collaborations sessions.

During both the CANS and APAN meetings in Xi'an, several "live" surgeries were performed and at least one of these used a Pacific Wave connection in the transmission of the video to the conference.

Also at the APAN meeting, the 1 Gbps lightpath from AARNet southern SXTransPORT link for the Australian National Telescope Facility (CSIRO ATNF) through Pacific Wave to JIVE in the Netherlands was used for the first successful real-time correlation of e-VLBI data from Australia-Europe, China-Europe, China-Australia.  For more, see the official press release at http://www.expres-eu.org/ShAuEu_fringes.html

John Silvester, Jacqueline Brown, Celeste Anderson, Dave Reese and Dave McGaugh attended the and GLIF meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, September 16-18 where they participated in sessions for the Technical, Applications, Control Plane, and Governance Working Groups.  Jacqueline Brown, Celeste Anderson and John Silvester participated in a North American R&E exchange operators meeting in advance of the GLIF workshop.  John Silvester gave an update on Pacific Wave at that meeting. Dave McGaugh gave a Pacific Wave GOLE update during one of the Technical Working Group sessions.  CINEGRID, a Pacific Wave participant, showcased several demonstrations of high definition video that were streamed from geographically dispersed sites including some on Pacific Wave (USC, CalIT2).

Internet2 is in the process of moving its Pacific Wave connection from one location in Los Angeles to another and AARnet is close to establishing a gigabit port in Los Angeles as a backup to their 10 gigabit Pacific Wave port in Seattle.

Pacific Wave is working on the extension of the exchange 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

Works presented by the Mexican Solar Virtual Observatory in the Latin-American Congress of Spatial Geophysics, financed by CUDI-CONACyT.

The Latin American Congress of Spatial Geophysics recently convened in Mérida, Yucatan. The topics covered during this meeting included solar activity, spatial climate, and geophysics. At the meeting, the Mexican Solar Virtual Observatory (OVSM) representatives presented three works related to the most recent advances of this project.

In the session, al Year Heliofísico International (IHY), Antonio Sánchez Ibarra of the Astronomy Department DIF-US did an oral presentation on the recently created Program of Virtual Solar Observers (PROSOL)

Also, the details of a program that will permit students of Ibero-America, from secondary level to university postgraduate course, to utilize the team of the Observatory "Carl Sagan" through @stro tv.

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

CLARA Activities

20th CCIRN anniversary yields plans for cooperation

More than twenty representatives from four continents attended the meeting, among them the Executive Director of CLARA, Florencio Utreras.

Concrete plans for collaboration have resulted from this year’s meeting of the Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research Networking (CCIRN), which took place in Xi’an, China, on Sunday 26 August.

The plans include a shared inventory of trans-oceanic research network connections, cooperation in knowledge transfer and training, and coordination of the production of regional compendia of national research and education networks (NRENs). Further collaboration in multi-domain network performance monitoring will also be investigated.

More than twenty representatives from four continents attended the meeting, which marked two decades of CCIRN activities. In recent years CCIRN has become the common forum of the continent-wide research networking organizations: TERENA (Europe), APAN (Asia-Pacific), CLARA (Latin America), and the combination of Internet2, NLR and CANARIE (North America).

In September, TERENA will publish the seventh edition of its annual compendium of European NRENs, while APAN produced a similar overview of the Asia-Pacific region for the first time in spring 2007, and CLARA is planning its first annual compendium for 2008.

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

RNP Activities

Last mile optical networks are the highlight of the Eighth RNP Workshop
Event was held for the first time in the Amazon region

The RNP Workshop RNP (WRNP) was held in the Amazon region the first time in history. The event, which gathered around 200 people, took place in Belém (PA) on the 28th and 29th of May, within the schedule of the Brazilian Symposium of Computer Networks(SBRC). The regional optical networks, which will take high development to the last mile, were the highlight of this year.

Furthermore, the schedule included lectures on communication infrastructure in the Amazon, e-science and public policies for information and communication technologies (TIC). Results of the research projects in innovation coordinated by RNP (GT-RNP Program) and scenarios of the evolution of the Brazilian advanced network infrastructure and of teaching and research metropolitan networks were presented.

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

ANSP/NARA Activities

Project Giga-2 is going to benefit networks in Brazil

The director of Innovation of the National Net of Education and Research (RNP) and coordinator of the Giga, Michael Stanton, announced that there was a meeting in the Department of the Communications to discuss the possibility of the Giga-2 project, succeeding the Giga project which will be completed at the end of 2007. For him, the continuation of the project of experimental networks is going to benefit the networks in Brazil: "That project represents a change of paradigms in technologies of nets and in experimental nets, in the validation of new models, without interfere in the conventional nets", he affirmed during the event.

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

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