Volume 3, Issue 6
November 30, 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.

November 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, one of WHREN-LILA’s PI’s, gave a presentation on CHEPREO and WHREN at the International ICFA Workshop on Digital Divide Issues for Global e-Science in Mexico City on Thursday, October 25, 2007. The International Committee on Future Accelerators Standing Committee on Interregional Connectivity’s (IFCA-SCIC) mission is to monitor and review interregional connectivity, high energy physics requirements and make recommendations for network improvements. One of the goals of this workshop was to exchange information and promote awareness of inter-regional connectivity issues in various regions, focusing on the Asia Pacific, Latin America, Russia and Africa.

The presentation can be found at http://ciara.fiu.edu/~heidi/ICFADD-WHREN-CHEPREO-ha.ppt.

Julio Ibarra, PI of WHREN-LILA, joined Kevin Thompson, Program Director of the IRNC program at the NSF, and Alan Blatecky of the Renaissance Computing Institute, and chair of the IRNC futures workshop, to participate in the CLARA Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure Applications in Latin America, in Panama City, Panama, November 19, 2007. This workshop provided the NSF with an opportunity to discuss with investigators and practitioners from Latin America current and future needs for international high-performance network connections between the U.S. and Latin America. The NSF previously had organized corresponding meetings for the European and Asia-Pacific regions.

FIU-CIARA Activities

Heidi Alvarez and all of the CyberBridges Ph.D. fellows presented in the SDSC / EVL booth at SC07. Each of the students gave a presentation on their area of research. The 2007 fellows are Sachin Joshi, Diego J. Lopez, Khalid Saleem, David Villegas and Masoud Sadja. The Global Cyberbridges project is a U.S. implementation of multinational efforts to improve the technology training for a new generation of scientists, and to increase the rate of discovery for all domains.

The presentations can be found at http://www.cyberbridges.net/news.htm

For more information on Global Cyberbridges, visit the website at http://www.cyberbridges.net/index.htm

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

CENIC Activities

CENIC Heads WAN Transport Group to Create SCinet Super Network for Supercomputing Conference in Reno, NV

A significant part of the effort to build the SCinet network has been spearheaded by the SCinet Wide-Area Network Transport Group (WTG), responsible for the 27 circuits worth of WAN connectivity that make up the bandwidth being used by the presenters and attendees. The WTG itself is composed of volunteers from Florida LambdaRail, Internet2, National LambdaRail (NLR), the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE), Texas A&M University, the University of Wisconsin, Ciena, Cisco Systems, Infinera, Level 3, and Nortel, and is led by CENIC

Since SC07 was slated to take place in Reno, CENIC, together with the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE), was the natural choice to head up the WTG effort, and prior to last year's SuperComputing conference, held in Tampa, FL, CENIC Core Engineer Chris Costa and Project Manager Edwin Smith were tapped to function as WTG co-chairs. With twenty years of logistical and networking experience between them, Costa and Smith bring immense knowledge and experience to the task.

"Locations are picked three to five years in advance, so the SCinet committee can start planning immediately for the next SC conference when each one is over," explains Smith. "As soon as it was announced that the '07 conference would be held in Reno, we knew that CENIC and the NSHE would be asked to take the lead."

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

Atlantic Wave Activities

Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP), has been connected to the AtlanticWave international transit service. Using the WHREN-LILA-East link, RNP is now directly peering with Internet2 and NLR across AtlanticWave. They are able to establish direct peering relationships with R&E networks that connect to AtlanticWave exchange points: AMPATH, SoX, MAX and MANLAN.

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

Pacific Wave Activities

A joint PacificWave/AARnet/APAC Workshop "Driving e-Research Collaboration across the Pacific" was held October 11-12, 2007 as part of the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC07) meeting held in Perth, Australia. The organizing committee included Jacqueline Brown (UW and PacificWave), Maxine Brown (TransLight/Starlight), Chris Hancock (AARnet), Lindsay Hood (APAC), George McLaughlin (consultant to PacificWave), John O'Callaghan (APAC),  John Silvester (USC and TransLight/PacificWave), Dane Skow (Teragrid), and Robin Stanton (ANU). Ron Johnson (UW) and Thom Dunning (NCSA) gave the keynote talks.

The workshop aimed to drive collaboration between research groups in Australia and the United States through innovative applications using the advanced cyberinfrastructure involving the Translight/Pacific Wave exchange facility, the SXTransport network, the AARNet national network and the nationwide grids in Australia and the United States.

Application topics covered were astronomy, bioinformatics, geosciences, linguistics, marine observation, earth systems, and high-energy physics. Other Speakers included John Orcutt (UCSD Center for Earth Observations and Applications), Craig Johnson (University of Tasmania), Tim Pugh (Bureau of Meteorology), Peter Fox (OpenDAP), Nathan Bindoff (TPAC, University of Tasmania), Glenn Maloney (University of Melbourne), Shawn McKee (University of Michigan), Peter Quinn (University of Western Australia), Colin Lonsdale (MIT Haystack Observatory), Rich McMullen (Indiana University), Peter Turner (University of Sydney), John Rundle (University of California, Davis), Dion Weatherley (University of Queensland), Rob Woodcock (CSIRO Exploration and Mining), Matt Bellgard (Murdoch University), John O'Callaghan (APAC) and Thom Dunning (National Center for Supercomputing Applications).

From November 10-16, 2007 in Reno, Nevada, Pacific Wave once again provided critical network infrastructure supporting some of the world's most advanced, high-bandwidth applications during SuperComputing 2007 (SC07). Pacific Wave deployed a 10Gbps connection from the convention center into its LA-Sunnyvale-Seattle infrastructure. With this connection, many Pacific Wave participants were able to bridge research networks and oceans to bring their demonstrations from around North America and the Pacific Rim to the showfloor in Reno. Some of the groups taking advantage of this connection included National LambdaRail, WIDE, NASA, TransPAC2, GEMNet2, ESNet, CANARIE, KISTI/KREONet, ResearchChannel, Caltech, AARNet, and TWAREN.

One example of the use of high speed networks was the ResearchChannel's n-Way HD Videoconferencing including tours of the Seattle Science Foundation; lectures by UW researchers; performances by bands sponsored by KEXP; and integrated presentations at the GEMNet2 Symposium in Tokyo and the Reno showfloor. Other examples included the University of Tokyo's GRAPE-DR project, a very high-speed simulation system; and NASA's new visualization tools, including analyses of current and future human spaceflight vehicle designs, climate modeling, and aviation safety alternatives.

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.

Recently, in Mérida, Yucatan, the Latin-American Congress of Spatial Geophysics held a workshop out where they discussed different areas related to the solar activity, the spatial climate and geophysics in general. At this meeting, the Mexican Solar Virtual Observatory, OVSM, presented three works that were well received by the scientific community; an oral exposition and two posters, related to the most recent advances of this project.

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

CLARA Activities

October 4-5: Regional Consultation Meeting in preparation for the 2nd Ministerial Conference on the Information Society in Latin America and the Caribbean

This meeting, held at the San Martín Palace (Buenos Aires, Argentina), home of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Commerce and Cult of the Argentinean Republic, in collaboration with the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean -ECLAC- had a technical and eminently political approach. Its objective was to determine the degree of progress of the implementation of the eLAC2007 Regional Action Plan for the Information Society, and to draw up new proposals for a new Regional Action Plan to be discussed in San Salvador.

The elements used in this meeting, where CLARA's Executive Director participated as guest, were the reports of the eLAC 2007 Work Groups, the Delphi study and the first structure plan for eLAC 2010.

CLARA, now officially integrated into eLAC, was invited to present the advances in the construction of RedCLARA.

The governmental representatives from the countries in the region unanimously indicated that a key element to ensure funding for RedCLARA was that governments send letters to the European Commission expressing their support to the work of DANTE and CLARA and the need to ensure RedCLARA's continuity. In fact, several representatives from Latin American governments informed that they are already working along these lines with the European Commission.

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

RNP Activities

Using RedCLARA's GÉANT2 connection, RNP and i2CAT Foundation took the Brazilian Golden Nica Winners to the prestigious Artfutura event in Barcelona

In order to ensure the best quality of videoconference service Brazilian engineers from networks in GÉANT (Europe), RedCLARA (Latin America), RNP (Brazil) and i2cat and RedIRIS (Spain) have worked hard on establishing a virtual private network point-to-point link (between Rio de Janeiro and Barcelona), by making use of MPLS, a commutation technology created to provide virtual circuits in IP networks (MPLS VPNs). It is important to highlight that this is the first time that this technology is used in coordination between RedCLARA and the different networks (domains) indicated.

To read the full press release, visit http://alice.dante.net/server/show/ConWebDoc.2613

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

ANSP/NARA Activities

Oscar Sala, president of the Higher Council of FAPESP in 1988, decided to create the first academic cooperative network of data from Brazil, the Network ANSP. The network was also the first institution to connect to the Internet, encouraging their growth in Brazil.

Two years later, all communication with networks in the United States was made by a 9600 bits per second link. There are plans to increase these connections respectively to 1.1 Gbps and 2.5 Gbps. An advance well planned, structured and implemented, which in 2006 lies in a reformulation to benefit the entities whose links receive support Project ANSP.

In order to strengthen the ties between these parties, a team of infrastructure project ANSP and NAP do Brasil invite the representatives of the entities / universities to participate in the event which marks the migration of the links that were in the Center for Data Processing of FAPESP for the NAP do Brasil, under the responsibility of the Technical Staff of Terremark of Brazil. From the point of view of logic architecture of the network, there is a preparation for the establishment of a "virtual peering" from the concept of standalone systems.

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

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

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