Volume 5, Issue 3
June 16, 2009

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.

June 2009 Issue:

• WHREN-LILA Activities
• FIU-CIARA Activities
• AtlanticWave Activities
• CENIC Activities
• Pacific Wave Activities
• CUDI Activities
• CLARA Activities
• REUNA Activities
• RNP Activities

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

WHREN-LILA Activities

On May 25 th and 26 th, 2009, Julio Ibarra attended the 10 th Workshop of RNP, held in Recife , Brazil . The main theme of the workshop was the Future RNP. Julio Ibarra gave a presentation on the AtlanticWave project, which included an overview of the AtlanticWave project, its relationship to the NSF IRNC WHREN-LILA project, achievements of the AtlanticWave project, and near term activities and events. Near-term activities and events descriptions included the upgrading of the LILA-East link to two 10G links; the emergence of the Southern Light (SoL) exchange point, and the NSF IRNC Solicitation 2. Information about the Future RNP workshop can be found at http://indico.rnp.br/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=51. Slides presented by Julio Ibarra can be found at http://www.ciara.fiu.edu/~julio/PPTs/AtlanticWave_RNP-Recife2009s.pdf

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

FIU-CIARA Activities

On June 30 – July 2, 2009, Florida International University’s (FIU’s) Center for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment (CIARA) in collaboration with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) will host The Global CyberBridges (GCB) - GreenLight Project workshop on the University of California, San Diego campus. The workshop focus is to bring FIU GCB graduate students studying domain sciences and engineering together with the GreenLight researchers and students to share their research plans. The workshop seeks to build connections between the two cyberinfrastructure projects.

Florida International University is the largest Hispanic Minority Serving Institute (HIS) in the continental United States. This workshop is the first of several that are planned to increase minority participation in the GCB and GreenLight projects. In addition to inviting the GCB fellows from FIU, CIARA outreach efforts included contacting several FIU societies including Computer Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI), Haitian Student Organization, and Women’s Studies Center. Leaders from other HIS’s in California, Puerto Rico, and New Mexico has been invited to participate in the workshop to plan for 2010. The workshop agenda can be found at http://cyberbridges.net/calit2announcement.html

For more information about Global CyberBridges please visit www.cyberbridges.net
For more information on FIU-CIARA, visit their website at http://ciara.fiu.edu/

AtlanticWave Activities

Julio Ibarra, Principal Investigator of the WHREN-LILA and AtlanticWave projects, was invited to participate in the Coordinating Committee on Intercontinental Research Networking (CCIRN) meeting on April 28-29, 2009 , and to inform the CCIRN of the achievements of the AtlanticWave project and its current activities. It was an excellent opportunity to inform the participants of CCIRN committee of the contribution the AtlanticWave is making on the interconnectivity of the IRNC award for Latin America (WHREN-LILA) to enhance science research and education information exchange between Latin America and the U.S. , as well as interconnection to Europe through Translight/Starlight link from Chicago to Amsterdam . The presentation mentioned the achievement of the NSF IRNC program to enhance communication and coordination among exchange points in North America . The presentation slides are available at http://www.ciara.fiu.edu/events.html. North American exchanges have organized themselves as a sub-chapter of the GLIF called GLIF North America (GLIF-NA). Minutes from the two GLIF-NA meeting can be found at http://www.glif.is/working-groups/glif-na/.

CCIRN provides a forum for members to agree and progress a set of activities to achieve inter-operable networking services between participating international entities to support open research and scholarly pursuit. More information about the CCIRN can be found at http://www.ccirn.org/

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

CENIC Activities

During the the 2009 Annual Conference for CISOA, the California Community College's Chief Information Systems Officers Association, CENIC Project Manager Ed Smith co-presented a breakout session together with Catherine McKenzie, Lead Specialist in Information Systems and Analysis at the California Community Colleges System Office (CCCCO).The session was entitled "Annual CENIC, CalREN, and TTIP Funding Update" and provided attendees with an update on network related activities in progress at CENIC, an update on the three CalREN networks, and a detailed update of the network related technology priorities and strategies the CCC System Office has for the colleges and their centers.  This presentation can be found online at the CENIC website. The conference schedule and presentations can also be found online.

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

Pacific Wave Activities

On April 23, 2009 , NTT Research did a demonstration on "Networking-wide packet latency monitoring using 10Gbps NIC with hardware time-stamp function" using the GEMNET Seattle Pacific Wave link. This is a follow-on to the work demonstrated at SC08 where a very versatile 10Gbps network monitoring platform to measure precise packet transmission delays was constructed using this 10 Gpbs network interface card (NIC) and a general purpose PC. The technology they demonstrated can be applicable to other network monitoring purposes requiring very precise latency information at very high rates. Understanding the microscopic behavior of the network will not only allow better control of the network but also could open up a new approach to network resource management.

The Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) will be adding a gigabit port to Pacific Wave in Los Angeles .

Celeste Anderson, Jim Dolgonas , Ron Johnson, Dave Reese , and John Silvester participated in the Internet2 Spring member meeting in Arlington , VA.

CENIC is actively investigating extensions of Pacific Wave facilities into the Portland Convention Center showfloor for Supercomputing 2009. The deadline for submitting WAN circuit requirements to the SC09 WAN planning group closed on May 29, 2009 .

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

CUDI Activities

During the CUDI Reunion 2009, there were three optical networking workshops, open source tools to support the NOC and WiMax and six workshops on applications related to managing collections of electronic publishing, semantic collaborative environments, mobile learning, educational applications of emerging and shared laboratories. The workshop “Bringing the Universe to your school” had nearly 300 children in attendance and in six remote rooms. This showed a model of how to introduce science in a fun way to children, using the CUDI network. In these workshops, there was broad participation and the high level of collaboration between member institutions of CUDI was emphasized.

As in past events, there were also concurrent sessions that focused especially on issues related to Internet 2. There were fifteen presentations related to state education networks, next generation networks, and trends in optical networking and technology. Regarding applications, there were forty presentations related to education, digital libraries, earth sciences, ecology, shared laboratories, astronomy, mathematics, health and supercomputing grids. A huge thank you goes out to the coordinators of these sessions.

CUDI invites you to mark your calendars for the "CUDI Meeting of Fall 2009" to be held in the city of Toluca, Estado de Mexico, October 21-23 this year, with the support of the University of State of Mexico.

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

CLARA Activities

The GÉANT2 and RedCLARA networks, and the EGEE and EELA2 projects supported an innovative application that performs sounds from the seismic data that allowed a modern dance company to perform with music generated from seismic data.

For the first time ever, a modern dance company has performed to music generated from seismic data, recorded from four volcanoes across three continents. This unique event was facilitated by DANTE, the provider of high speed research and education networks, the two distributed computing projects, Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) and E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America (EELA), as well as CityDance Ensemble, a prestigious company based in Washington , DC .

Research and education data communications networks, GÉANT2 in Europe and TEIN3 in Asia-Pacific, both operated by DANTE, as well as Latin America 's RedCLARA operated by CLARA, underpin the immense computing power provided by EGEE in Europe and EELA in Latin America . The complex sonification algorithms harness the power of the grids, enabling the seismic data to be converted into sound melodies, a process that would be impossible using standard bandwidth networks or computing resources.

"High bandwidth research and education internet networks together with grid computing power have played a vital part in making this project a reality," said Paul Gordon Emerson, CityDance Ensemble choreographer and Carbon curator. "It proves that if we can create a musical score from the earth's natural sounds with the help of a global computer infrastructure, then we can find the innovation needed to improve the planet. The fact that this work uses the voices of the earth from three continents is a very powerful metaphor for Carbon as a project and as a concept.

"As a scientist it was my priority on this project to develop tools to help us predict eruptions and ultimately reduce the loss of lives," said DANTE engineer, Domenico Vicinanza. "As a musician and artist too, it was a natural step for me to take these seismic sonification sounds and apply them to the arts. I am delighted that the results, or songs of the earth, are being created into a dance performance that will help raise awareness of climate change."

Read the full article at: http://apc-clara.reuna.cl/canal1.shtml?http://apc-clara.reuna.cl/nuevoeng.shtml?AA_SL_Session=8ad64db6230c99f6ea3ed9149784ad48&x=13505

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

REUNA Activities

GridCafé, an award-winning website aimed at introducing the marvels of grid computing to a wider audience, has week launched a Spanish language version, making the website available to an estimated 300 million Spanish speakers around the world.
 

The expansion comes as part of a partnership between European Commission project GridTalk and REUNA, a non-profit collaboration of 15 Chilean universities, the AURA Observatory and the Chilean National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research.

"In REUNA we believe that by using innovative technologies we can help to make a better world. When we first saw GridCafé we fell in love with its great contents and the simple fashion in which they are explained; we felt we needed to share that with the Chilean education and research community, and also with the rest of Latin America," said Paola Arellano, REUNA Executive Director. "We are extremely satisfied with the great result of our collaboration with GridTalk and we are sure that the Spanish version of GridCafé will serve to trigger the development of new eScience initiatives".

One of the eScience initiatives that will benefit is the world's largest multi-science grid project Enabling Grids for EsciencE (EGEE). EGEE have been working closely with EELA (E-infrastructure shared between Europe and Latin America ) to increase the number of scientists within southern and central America using grid technology. This new translation of GridCafé into Spanish will help to increase grid awareness among the research community in Latin America .

The GridCafé website received nearly 300,000 visitors in the last year, viewing more than 600,000 pages. The site introduces the concepts behind grid computing - a technology that connects ordinary computers from around the world to create an extraordinary computing resource - as well as grid applications, challenges and ways to get involved.

"Grid computing is an essential and fascinating technology," said Dr Sarah Pearce, GridTalk project manager. "It allows scientists from all over the world to work together, sharing their data and resources for the greater good. We're thrilled that GridCafé can now reach an even wider audience."

Grid computing is the IT technology enabling worldwide scientific projects, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and powering global efforts to combat climate change, discover new medicines and map the skies.

Read the full article at: http://apc-clara.reuna.cl/canal1.shtml?http://apc-clara.reuna.cl/nuevoeng.shtml?AA_SL_Session=8ad64db6230c99f6ea3ed9149784ad48&x=13576

For more information about REUNA, please visit: http://www.reuna.cl/

RNP Activities

A meeting was held on May 24 that marked the first year of the RNP Future project. The project, coordinated by RNP, lays the groundwork for the next generation of the Brazilian academic network, which will have hybrid architecture.

Besides the team of Innovation, RNP participated in the meeting of representatives of international academic networks (NRENs) and researchers from all over Brazil, including those belonging to institutions that are partners of the RNP for this project: Center of Research and Development in Telecommunications (CPqD) in Campinas, the University of São Paulo (USP), University of Salvador (Unifacs), the State University of Ceará (UECE) and the Federal Universities of Rio de Janeiro (Unirii), Pará (UFPA), the Spirit Santo (Ufes), Fluminense (UFF), Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), of Santa Catarina (UFSC), and Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

The main objective of the event, which occurred on the eve of the 10th Annual Workshop of the RNP (WRNP), was for those involved in the project to meet and discuss the status of various studies being researched for the RNP Future project. The occasion also served as an opportunity to exchange experiences and plan the next steps in the scope of RNP Future.

The RNP Future project is divided into four study centers, responsible for generating the subsidies for the new design of the network: the User (1); Infrastructure (2), Architecture and Technology Network (3) Support for and Applications of Users (4). This meeting was focused on 24 studies of group 3, which searches the dynamic supply circuit (essential for hybrid networks) and other themes relate to the subject, such as network management and monitoring, and failure recovery, security, among others.

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

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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