[Whren-today] November 2007 WHREN-LILA Newsletter

[WHREN-LILA News]

WHREN-LILA Report
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:

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
8. RNP Activities
9. ANSP/NARA Activities

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

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NEWS
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1. 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.

2. FIU-CIARA ACTIVITIES

Heidi Alvarez and all of the CyberBridges Ph.D. fellows presented in the
National LambdaRail booth at SC06.  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/

3. 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/.

4. 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/

5. PacificWave 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/

6. 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

7. 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/

8. 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

9. 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/

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