[Whren-today] May 2007 WHREN-LILA Newsletter

[WHREN-LILA News]

WHREN-LILA Report
Volume 3, Issue 3
May 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 São Paulo (ANSP) award Projeto Fapesp no. 04/14414-2.

May 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

Two undergraduate students will be selected to participate in the NSF
Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.  It is a win-win
opportunity for the students, the WHREN-LILA project, and the IRNC
program.  Students will have the opportunity to work on a research
problem with a practical solution, enriching their research experience
by working in a collaborative fashion with a geographically dispersed
team of researchers and practitioners.  The outcome of this project will
benefit the project by developing a tool to improve understanding of the
traffic patterns across the WHREN-LILA links in a coordinated fashion.

2. FIU-CIARA ACTIVITIES

Global CyberBridges (GCB, NSF CI-TEAM Award #OCI-0636031) has been
awarded one summer REU student position from the NSF’s Office of
Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) CI-TEAM program.  This student will work with
Calit2 Co-PI Peter Arzberger and Sr. Personnel Network Engineer
Rajvikram Singh as well as CIARA’s network engineers Ernesto Rubi, Diego
Oubina, and Micha Niskin to create end-user oriented SAGE Tile Display
Wall documentation.  The position will post next week.

The CyberBridges (NSF CI-TEAM Award #OCI-0537464)IEEE CCGRID publication
and presentation was well received in Rio de Janeiro last week.  PhD
Candidate and 2006 CyberBridges Fellow, Ronald Gutierrez, presented the
paper.  Ronald said,” After the presentation some inquires about the
implementation of CyberBridges in different countries gave me confidence
about the message I was trying to deliver. After the presentation that
night, I met some PhD students that were interested in the Fellowship
program and wanted to know if I could present this collaboration program
(CyberBridges) in another conference (CLCAR-07, Santa Marta, Colombia).

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

3. CENIC ACTIVITIES

On March 26, CENIC and Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) announced the
expansion of the TransitRail national commodity peering program with the
activation of a connection point in Ashburn, VA. The first TransitRail
node to be activated east of the Mississippi, the Ashburn node has been
put into service ahead of schedule and will soon be joined by a fifth
node in Chicago, IL.

Together with the current nodes in Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Los Angeles,
these two new connection points will give the TransitRail peering
program a national footprint and enable research and education
institutions to take advantage of low-cost network peering on a national
scale. Already, the addition of the Ashburn node has enhanced the
significant benefits available through participation in TransitRail.

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

4. ATLANTIC WAVE ACTIVITIES

No new activities to report.

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

5. PACIFIC WAVE ACTIVITIES

Installation of the three gigabit Google connections in Seattle,
Sunnyvale and Los Angeles is currently underway.

The National University of Singapore relocated its Pacific Wave
connection from Seattle to Los Angeles in April.

The Asahi Broadcasting Company used NTT Research equipment and the
GEMNET2 network to do live uncompressed HD of a popular Japanese major
league player (Boston Red Sox) at Fenway Stadium, broadcasting this in
Japan during the Internet2 Spring Member meeting in Arlington, VA. The
feed came from Boston to Seattle over Abilene/Newnet and then from
Seattle to Japan over GEMNET2.  GEMNET2 peers with Abilene at Pacific
Wave, Seattle.

Jacqueline Brown and Celeste Anderson attended the Planning Meeting on
Enhancing Research and Education Connectivity to and within South Asia
at the Spring Internet2 meeting mentioned above.  They, along with John
Silvester also attended the Internet2 International Task Force meetings.

Progress on the Southern Translight/Pacific Wave connection from
Australia to Southern California via Hawaii included the delivery of
additional boxes (Junipers) for the Big Island connections, which are
being unpacked, tested and prepared for installation.  We are
coordinating an installation trip likely around the end of May 2007 to
get the boxes installed and operational; possibly, we will need a
follow-up trip to complete lighting the cross-island connections to
Waimea and Hilo.

For more on these and other efforts, visit the Pacific Wave website at
http://www.pacificwave.net/

6. CUDI ACTIVITIES

On May 3, CUDI announced an IPTV partnership with the Open Student
Television Network (OSTN). CUDI will offer OSTN’s educational, foreign
language, news, and entertainment IPTV content through CUDI’s backbone
data network for research and education to its nearly 190 members,
public and private universities, colleges, community colleges, and
technical schools throughout Mexico’s 32 states, representing nearly two
million students, staff, and faculty subscribers.

OSTN IPTV content delivered over CUDI’s high speed network will include
the OSTN student channel, educational channels such as NASA TV, C-SPAN,
University of California Television (UCTV) and the Florida Educational
Channel, news channels such as MSNBC and Fox News, entertainment
channels such as Sci-Fi and USA Networks, foreign language channels such
as CCTV (Chinese), TV5 (French), and RAI (Italian).

The partnership will additionally serve as an opportunity for the two
organizations to collaborate on conducting IPTV research and development
in the areas of multicast and IPv6. OSTN and CUDI will also collaborate
on developing an OSTN Channel for Spanish speaking universities.

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

7. CLARA ACTIVITIES

EU Agreement Extends Latin American Research Through 2008

Collaboration between scientists and researchers in Latin America and
their peers across the globe is to be continued through funding and
network expansion. Co-funding from the European Union for the ALICE
project, which is responsible for the RedCLARA network, has been
extended until 2008. Additionally, regional not-for-profit organization
CLARA is expanding its role by increasing staff and taking greater
responsibility for the running and administration of the network.

Since its creation in 2004, RedCLARA has become fundamental to Latin
American research and education, now linking 12 countries and 750
universities across the continent at speeds of up to 622 Mbps. It has
provided Latin American scientists and researchers with the ability to
collaborate both regionally and as part of the global research
community, through links to the European GÉANT2 and U.S. Internet2
research and education networks.

For the complete GRID Today article, visit
http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/1548338.html

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

8. ANSP ACTIVITIES

The FAPESP approved a new model of financing of the ANSP network
(Academic Network at São Paulo), that included the support of the São
Paulo state research institutions, with the objective of partially
financing access to the internet.

The institutions’ telecommunications infrastructure support will be
implemented by means of an Institutional Technical Backup for
Connectivity to the Net ANSP, whose norms for utilization were approved
by the Technical-Administrative Advice of the FAPESP, at a May 2, 2007
meeting.

To find out more about ANSP, visit http://www.nara.org.br/

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