[Whren-today] September 2007 WHREN-LILA Newsletter

[WHREN-LILA News]

WHREN-LILA Report
Volume 3, Issue 5
September 28, 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.

September 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 and Julio Ibarra attended the Coordinating Committee for
Intercontinental Research Networking (CCIRN) 2007 meeting on August 27
in Xian, China.  At this meeting, presentations were made on Next
Generation Network projects, Optical Networking, High Performance
Applications, Physical Diversity – Particularly on Trans-Oceanic Cables,
the Continental Compendia of NRENs, Reviewing Regional Networking
projects, and Intercontinental Assistance.  For more information on this
meeting or to view the presentations, visit
https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/emergingren/Unofficial+Notes+from+CCIRN+2007+Meeting,+Xi'an+China,+Sunday+August+27.

2. FIU-CIARA ACTIVITIES

CIARA’s director, Heidi Alvarez Ph.D., made a presentation on the Global
Cyberbridges project at the Chinese American Networking Symposium (CANS)
in Xi’an, China on August 26th.  Her topic was Collaborative CI Research
and Education between CNIC of CAS and FIU CIARA.  During her
presentation, she announced that students and faculty from Sao Paulo,
Brazil will join the project in 2008.  Her presentation can be viewed at
http://www.cyberbridges.net/meetings.htm.

The Cyberinfrastructure for International, Collaborative Biodiversity
and Ecological Informatics Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute
program’s deadline to submit proposals was September 21, 2007.  The
announcement of selected proposals will be on October 5, 2007, with the
program dates tentatively set for December 3-14, 2007.  For more
information on this program, visit
http://ciara.fiu.edu/eco/pdf/PASI_2007_Flyer.pdf

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

3. CENIC ACTIVITIES

Pepperdine University Joins CalREN High-Performance Network for Research
& Education

With a 50 Mb/s metro Ethernet connection between the university's West
LA Graduate Campus to CalREN's LA hub site, Pepperdine students,
faculty, and staff now have the ability to collaborate with colleagues
throughout California and the world on cutting-edge research and
education projects. The addition of this circuit increases Pepperdine's
overall bandwidth capacity from 45 Mb/s to 95 Mb/s and also provides a
critical redundant link to the Internet.

"Pepperdine University is well-known for its international programs as
well as for its undergraduate and graduate programs offered in Malibu
and at graduate campuses throughout southern California. The
installation of this circuit at our West LA Graduate Campus marks the
completion of the first phase of our wide-area-network upgrade. In
subsequent phases, circuits to our graduate campuses will be upgraded,
providing in some cases a 10x increase in bandwidth. Our London, UK
center is also undergoing a network upgrade through a partnership with
Imperial College that will provide access to the UK's advanced, high
speed network known as JA.NET," said Dr. Timothy M. Chester, Chief
Information Officer at Pepperdine.

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

4. ATLANTIC WAVE ACTIVITIES

AtlanticWave participated in the Global Lambda Integrated Facility -
North America (GLIF-NA) meeting, which was held in conjunction with the
GLIF 2007 meeting in Prague. The purpose of this meeting was to bring
together representatives from U.S. exchanges points that have or are
adopting the GLIF Open Lightpath Exchanges (GOLE) model, to discuss a
variety of topics involving interoperability and services between U.S.
exchanges and with exchanges in other countries.

This meeting was attended by U.S. exchange points.
For more information on Atlantic Wave, visit the website at
http://atlanticwave.net/

5. PACIFIC WAVE ACTIVITIES

In August, Google completed installation of its third gigabit connection
to Pacific Wave (Seattle) and UniNet/ThaiREN brought up a gigabit port
in Los Angeles.

Jacqueline Brown and John Silvester participated in the CANS 2007
meeting in Xi'an, China August 25-16, 2007 where they were co-chairs of
the Program Committee.  They also attended the APAN meeting, also held
in Xi'an, August 27-31, 2007 where Jacqueline served as both the Program
Committee Chair and the chair of the Global Collaborations sessions.

During both the CANS and APAN meetings in Xi'an, several "live"
surgeries were performed and at least one of these used a Pacific Wave
connection in the transmission of the video to the conference.

Also at the APAN meeting, the 1 Gbps lightpath from AARNet southern
SXTransPORT link for the Australian National Telescope Facility (CSIRO
ATNF) through Pacific Wave to JIVE in the Netherlands was used for the
first successful real-time correlation of e-VLBI data from
Australia-Europe, China-Europe, China-Australia.  For more, see the
official press release at http://www.expres-eu.org/ShAuEu_fringes.html

John Silvester, Jacqueline Brown, Celeste Anderson, Dave Reese and Dave
McGaugh attended the and GLIF meeting in Prague, Czech Republic,
September 16-18 where they participated in sessions for the Technical,
Applications, Control Plane, and Governance Working Groups.  Jacqueline
Brown, Celeste Anderson and John Silvester participated in a North
American R&E exchange operators meeting in advance of the GLIF
workshop.  John Silvester gave an update on Pacific Wave at that
meeting. Dave McGaugh gave a Pacific Wave GOLE update during one of the
Technical Working Group sessions.  CINEGRID, a Pacific Wave participant,
showcased several demonstrations of high definition video that were
streamed from geographically dispersed sites including some on Pacific
Wave (USC, CalIT2).

Internet2 is in the process of moving its Pacific Wave connection from
one location in Los Angeles to another and AARnet is close to
establishing a gigabit port in Los Angeles as a backup to their 10
gigabit Pacific Wave port in Seattle.

Pacific Wave is working on the extension of the exchange 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

Works presented by the Mexican Solar Virtual Observatory in the
Latin-American Congress of Spatial Geophysics, financed by CUDI-CONACyT.

The Latin American Congress of Spatial Geophysics recently convened in
Mérida, Yucatan.  The topics covered during this meeting included solar
activity, spatial climate, and geophysics.  At the meeting, the Mexican
Solar Virtual Observatory (OVSM) representatives presented three works
related to the most recent advances of this project.

In the session, al Year Heliofísico International (IHY), Antonio Sánchez
Ibarra of the Astronomy Department DIF-US did an oral presentation on
the recently created Program of Virtual Solar Observers (PROSOL)

Also, the details of a program that will permit students of
Ibero-America, from secondary level to university postgraduate course,
to utilize the team of the Observatory "Carl Sagan" through @stro tv.

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

7. CLARA ACTIVITIES

20th CCIRN anniversary yields plans for cooperation

More than twenty representatives from four continents attended the
meeting, among them the Executive Director of CLARA, Florencio Utreras.

Concrete plans for collaboration have resulted from this year’s meeting
of the Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research Networking
(CCIRN), which took place in Xi’an, China, on Sunday 26 August.

The plans include a shared inventory of trans-oceanic research network
connections, cooperation in knowledge transfer and training, and
coordination of the production of regional compendia of national
research and education networks (NRENs). Further collaboration in
multi-domain network performance monitoring will also be investigated.

More than twenty representatives from four continents attended the
meeting, which marked two decades of CCIRN activities. In recent years
CCIRN has become the common forum of the continent-wide research
networking organizations: TERENA (Europe), APAN (Asia-Pacific), CLARA
(Latin America), and the combination of Internet2, NLR and CANARIE
(North America).

In September, TERENA will publish the seventh edition of its annual
compendium of European NRENs, while APAN produced a similar overview of
the Asia-Pacific region for the first time in spring 2007, and CLARA is
planning its first annual compendium for 2008.

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

8. RNP ACTIVITIES

Last mile optical networks are the highlight of the Eighth RNP Workshop
Event was held for the first time in the Amazon region

The RNP Workshop RNP (WRNP) was held in the Amazon region the first time
in history. The event, which gathered around 200 people, took place in
Belém (PA) on the 28th and 29th of May, within the schedule of the
Brazilian Symposium of Computer Networks(SBRC). The regional optical
networks, which will take high development to the last mile, were the
highlight of this year.

Furthermore, the schedule included lectures on communication
infrastructure in the Amazon, e-science and public policies for
information and communication technologies (TIC). Results of the
research projects in innovation coordinated by RNP (GT-RNP Program) and
scenarios of the evolution of the Brazilian advanced network
infrastructure and of teaching and research metropolitan networks were
presented.

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

9. ANSP/NARA ACTIVITIES

Project Giga-2 is going to benefit networks in Brazil

The director of Innovation of the National Net of Education and Research
(RNP) and coordinator of the Giga, Michael Stanton, announced that there
was a meeting in the Department of the Communications to discuss the
possibility of the Giga-2 project, succeeding the Giga project which
will be completed at the end of 2007.  For him, the continuation of the
project of experimental networks is going to benefit the networks in
Brazil:  "That project represents a change of paradigms in technologies
of nets and in experimental nets, in the validation of new models,
without interfere in the conventional nets", he affirmed during the event.

For more information on ANSP/NARA, visit their website at
http://www.nara.org.br/

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