[Whren-today] July 2007 WHREN-LILA Newsletter

[WHREN-LILA News]

WHREN-LILA Report
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 Sao Paulo (ANSP) award Projeto Fapesp no. 04/14414-2.

July 2007 Issue:

1. WHREN-LILA Activities
2. FIU-CIARA Activities
3. CENIC Activities
4. Atlantic Wave Activities
5. Pacific Wave Activities
6. CUDI Activities
7. CLARA Activities

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

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NEWS
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1. 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.

2. 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/page.php?file=citeam/agenda.html.  Information
about viewing the recordings is posted at
http://www.eotepic.org/page.php?file=citeam/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/

3. 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/.

4. 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 the website at
http://atlanticwave.net/

5. 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/

6. 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
accede to questionnaires of the surveys it visits: the page
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/index.html

7. 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/

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