Volume 4, Issue 5
December 12, 2008

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.

December 2008 Issue:

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

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

WHREN-LILA Activities

The WHREN-LILA project, with support from ANSP and RNP, enabled the distributed Tier2 in Brazil, of the CMS LHC experiment, to participate in the Super Computing 2008 (SC08) Bandwidth Challenge event.  SPRACE, the Tier2 in Sao Paulo, and HEPGRID, the Tier2 in Rio de Janeiro, each were able to connect to the SC08 network at layer2 using Ethernet.  The capability to extend Brazil's Tier2s to SC08 was made possible through the use of the Cisco Research Wave (C-Wave).  Currently, SPRACE is connected to the ANSP network using a 1 GigE port, and HEPGRID, likewise connects to the RNP network using a 1 GigE port.  SPRACE achieved a maximum link utilization of 890 Mbps, and HEPGRID was very close to achieving a maximum link utilization of 600 Mbps, over a shared LILA East link.

For more information about WHREN-LILA, visit http://www.ciara.fiu.edu/whren

FIU-CIARA Activities

The Ultralight / PLaNetS Tutorial Workshop was held on December 2, 2008 and hosted by Florida International University. The purpose of the tutorial in Education and Outreach was to disseminate the capabilities and use of the PLaNetS services to support LHC data analysis and other applications. See http://www.ciara.fiu.edu/ultralight/ to view presentations from the workshop.

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

AMPATH Activities

In collaboration with Cisco and Florida LambdaRail (FLR), a connection to the Cisco Research Wave (C-Wave) is being established at the AMPATH International Exchange Point.  CiscoWave is a project developed in partnership with National LambdaRail (NLR), its regional members, Cisco and the broader R&E community. The project helps to promote and enable collaborative projects within the R&E community, including experimental networking research, development and testing of innovative network services, and early deployment of advanced applications.  The collaboration between AMPATH, Cisco and FLR will provide a 10G ethernet port at the exchange point to the C-Wave.  Coupled with the WHREN-LILA link, the C-Wave aims to enhance network research and enable prototype application experimentation activities between the U.S. and the emerging NRENs of Latin America. 

For more information about AMPATH, please visit: http://www.ampath.net/

AtlanticWave Activities

Julio Ibarra presented on the AtlanticWave project at the 8th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop, in Seattle.  His talk introduced the AtlanticWave (A-Wave), describing the project goals, governance structure and architecture.  He explained how A-Wave has enhanced NREN-to-NREN peering through the use of a distributed exchange point fabric.  The presentation highlights the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector and the e-VLBI communities' use of A-Wave to enhance performance and international science collaborations.  The A-Wave presentation is available at http://www.glif.is/meetings/2008/plenary/ibarra-atlanticwave.pdf

For more information about AtlanticWave, visit http://www.atlanticwave.net

CENIC Activities

From November 15-21, 2008, booth 568 at the Austin Convention Center was humming with activity as the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Calit2 and its guest the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) from the University of Illinois at Chicago and CENIC gave talks and demonstrations illustrating the work being done by all to advance global sustainability and green computing at SC08, the 20th anniversary of the first Supercomputing conference.

The conference opened with a welcome address by SDSC Director Francine Berman wherein she highlighted the work being done at the Center to accelerate green computing and networking – including its new "green" facility. Other luminaries such as Calit2's Tom DeFanti's and the SDSC's Allan Snavely also discussed other green computing projects taking place, including the GreenLight project, to improve data center and computational energy efficiency. Other presentations focused on high-performance analytics at the SDSC, the EVL's Global Visualcasting, the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring and Cancer Center projects at the SDSC, measuring TeraGrid performance, and more. CENIC Publicity and Communications Manager Janis Cortese also gave two presentations available at the CENIC website on the CalREN Network and CENIC itself, as well as the CalREN-XD/HPR Workshop held at Calit2@UCSD last September.

For more information about CENIC, visit http://www.cenic.org

Pacific Wave Activities

During the recent Supercomputing 2008 (SC08) conference held in Austin, Texas November 16-20, 2008 , Pacific Wave provided a 10 gigabit circuit from Los Angeles, CA to Austin, Texas using NLR resources. Pacific Wave participants used this connection to participate in bandwidth challenge activities and provide demonstrations of technology.

Pacific Wave SC08 participants included the following:

The University of Tokyo showcased two demonstrations: "Parallel TCP streams with stream harmonization" and "Single TCP stream to challenge 10GBASE-LANPHY max";

A JGN2Plus connection supported the National Center for Data Mining's (NCDM) demonstrations on storage services for astronomy, cyberdefense and bioinformatics;

NTT GEMNET and Osaka University's HDTV demonstration showcased NTT's i-Visto system including the interoperation between i-Visto and the University of Washington's iHD1500 system; in a separate project, a new 10-Gbps network interface card with high-accuracy traffic-measurement capabilities including precise latency measurement was demonstrated;

KISTI demonstrated both Global Visualcasting and the OptIPuter/OptIPortal projects.

The two Bandwidth Challenge Finalists were:

University of Illinois at Chicago's (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), along with partner Sharp Laboratories of America "Global Visualcasting - Collaborative Remote Visualization Over High Speed Networks". Steams of 4K and Full High-Definition (HD) video, audio and visualizations were sent to three booths on the SC08 show floor in Austin from two Midwestern universities, and several research institutes in Korea, Japan, Australia, Russia and the Czech Republic, to create a sustained global teleconference. The University of Queensland, Australia used an SX-Transport link sponsored by Southern Cross and Pacific Wave facilities sponsored by the NSF IRNC project Translight/Pacific Wave to reach the show floor. During the conference, this connection saw a maximum of 1.7 gigabits per second traversing the SX Transport to Pacific Wave, but was running at 1 gigabit per second most of the time; and

Building on seven years of record-breaking developments, an international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology, with partners from Michigan, Florida, Tennessee, Fermilab, Brookhaven, CERN, Brazil, Korea and Estonia joined forces to set new records for sustained data transfer among storage systems during the SuperComputing 2008 (SC08) conference/ The record-setting demonstration entitled "High Speed Data Gathering, Distribution and Analysis using Next Generation Networks" was made possible through the use of twelve 10 Gbps wide area network links to SC08 provided by SCinet, National LambdaRail (6), Internet2 (3), ESnet, Pacific Wave, and the Cisco Research Wave, with onward connections provided by CENIC in California, SURFNet (Netherlands) and Canarie (Canada) to Amsterdam, as well as CENIC, Atlantic Wave and Florida LambdaRail to Gainesville and Miami, US Net to Chicago and Sunnyvale, Gloriad to Daegu i
n Korea, GEANT to Estonia, and the WHREN link co-operated by FIU and the Brazilian RNP and ANSP networks to reach the Tier2 centers in Rio and Sao Paulo.

Jacqueline Brown and John Silvester attended the Internet2 Member meeting in New Orleans, LA October 13-16, 2008 where John gave a talk entiled "Translight/Pacific Wave". During SC08, Celeste Anderson gave a presentation entitled "Los Nettos and Translight/Pacific Wave". Both presentations are now available on the Pacific Wave website www.pacificwave.net.

For more information, see the Pacific Wave website at www.pacificwave.net

CUDI Activities

On November 25, 2008, the CUDI hosted a virtual day which consisted of a talk by Juan Carlos de la Cruz of the Talent Network. He spoke about knowing the trends in terms of recruitment and selection of personnel in Mexico and throughout the World and identified areas of opportunity for universities to improve their performance in terms of the employability of its graduates.

The talk was intended for directors of universities in the areas of business contacts, relationships with industry, public relations, human resources, marketing, advertising and communications as well as managers in charge of measuring the performance of the university.

Read full article at: http://www.cudi.edu.mx/aplicaciones/dias_cudi/08_11_25/index.html

For more information about the meeting, and other CUDI activities, visit http://www.cudi.edu.mx/

CLARA Activities

From November 24th to 28th, the directors and technical representatives of the National Research and Education Networks that are members of CLARA and ALICE2, met in Rio de Janeiro to discuss the current on-going projects and future projects.

For more information about CLARA, visit http://www.redclara.net

RNP Activities

RNP lays the groundwork for Infrastructure Public Key for Education and Research

On November 13, at the headquarters of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MCT), a ceremony was performed to establish the pair of keys for the Infrastructure Public Key for Education and Research (ICPEDU), an experimental service National Network for Teaching and Research (RNP), responsible for Internet Brazilian academic. Among those attending the event were: the Minister of Science and Technology, Sergio Rezende, the director-president of the National Institute of Information Technology (ITI), Renato Martini, and the director general of the RNP, James Nelson.

ICPEDU's proposal is the establishment of an infrastructure to generate digital certificates and security keys initially turned to Federal Institutions of Higher Education (IFES) and Research Units (UPS). With the ICPEDU, organizations part of the infrastructure will issue digital certificates as they choose which act as electronic signatures personal and non-transferable, allowing its wide use.

A practical example of use of these licenses is in a university where teachers and students each have their own certificate. A teacher can send student grades over the Internet. As the value of the certificate has a signature recognized by the institution, the university can have the assurance that the sender was really teacher. And this applies not only to the launch of banknotes, but also the delivery of work and much of the administrative processes of the institution. This process will save time and paper as well as providing more security and more control of document delivery.

The ceremony on this day was a vital step for the ICPEDU, who has been in an experimental state since 2007, so that it can be put into operation in 2009. The establishment of this service was only possible thanks to studies of two Working Groups of RNP (GTs RNP), which created the management system of digital certificates ICPEDU (SCGI) and a hardware for the storage of private keys (Hardware Security Module -- HSM).

Read full article at http://www.rnp.br/noticias/2008/not-081113a.html

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

ANSP/NARA Activities

ANSP and RNP supported the WHREN-LILA project to enable the distributed Tier2 in Brazil, of the CMS LHC experiment, to participate in the SuperComputing 2008 (SC08) Bandwidth Challenge event.  The Brazilian RNP and ANSP networks were utilized to reach the Tier2 centers in Rio and Sao Paulo. The record-setting demonstration, entitled "High Speed Data Gathering, Distribution and Analysis using Next Generation Networks," was made up of an international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology, with partners from Michigan, Florida, Tennessee, Fermilab, Brookhaven, CERN, Brazil, Korea and Estonia joined forces to set new records for sustained data transfer among storage systems.

For more information about ANSP/NARA activities, visit 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.

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