Three years ago this week, President Obama signed into law our nation’s Recovery Act. Today, The White House recognized 11 community leaders from around the country who are engaged in Recovery Act funded projects to improve their communities and put Americans back to work. We are pleased that two leaders from our Quilt community who are focused on implementing Department of Commerce BTOP funded broadband infrastructure projects were included among those leaders honored today.

Joe Freddoso, President and CEO of MCNC, and Donald Welch, President and CEO of Merit Network Inc, were honored at the White House today as "Champions of Change". Don, Joe and their respective organizations embody the spirit of the BTOP program through the deployment advanced fiber optic network infrastructure in their states to better serve community anchor institutions with improved broadband connectivity through the projects’ successful public/private partnerships. They have also been extraordinary ambassadors for our research and education networking community to those involved in the management of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program.

Congratulations to Don and Joe on their well-deserved recognition at today’s White House ceremony.

For more information about today’s event see: http://www.whitehouse.gov/champions

The Quilt and StateNets are hosting another joint winter member meeting February 6-8, 2012 at the La Jolla Shores Hotel in La Jolla CA again this year. We will follow a similar format as last year where there will be a Quilt Board meeting and other working group meetings the afternoon of Monday, February 6^th starting at 1:00 pm PT. The main member meeting will program begin on Tuesday morning, February 7^th and run through 12:00 pm ET on Wednesday, February 8^th. Look for logistic information about the meeting to be posted soon to both The Quilt and StateNets websites.

This year, there is no charge for the first two registrants for The Quilt and StateNets Members.

To register for this event and view a DRAFT agenda for the program - click here

We are looking forward to another informative and productive member meeting program and seeing you in February in sunny southern California!

Congratulations to our colleagues at ESnet on 25 successful years of advanced networking leadership.  Beginning in 1986, ESnet was created to provide high performance networking computing for DOE science researchers.  ESnet enables scientists from 40 DOE sites around the country to connect and collaborate with one another and with research locations around the world to advance scientific discovery.  Because of ESnet and its peers, the development of major science research facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider is made possible. The network supports research in the areas of fusion energy, climate, combustion, genomics and astrophysics by facilitating communications among on-going experiments and transmission of data to the front-line application scientists around the world. In 2011, the network carried 7 petabytes of data per month.  By 2015 it is expected that it will carry more than 100 petabytes of data per month.  To accommodate this data growth, ESnet is developing world’s first 100Gbps nationwide network dedicated to science.  For more on ESnet’s 25^th anniversary and live demonstrations of its 100Gbps network at SC11 see http://www.es.net/news-and-publications/esnet-news/2011/esnet-celebrates-25th-anniversary-at-sc11/.    

Our sights are set on SC11 happening in Seattle November 12-18, 2011.  For this year’s event, SCinet will boast capacity reaching more than 450 gigabits per second using multiple brand new 100G connections to the major national research networks. This bandwidth provides never before seen network capability to support the extreme demonstrations of the HPC community. Over 8 projects are anticipated to use the 100G capabilities exclusively because of the high capacity demands of their demo applications.  The Quilt is excited to report that several of these demos are running over the 100G facilities of our members such as the Metropolitan Research and Education Network and the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads. 

If you are planning to attend, don’t miss our members’ booths which include Indiana University (2239), Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (1123), Pacific Wave (6106), Ohio Supercomputing Center (2713), the University of Utah (123) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (2705) among others.  

For those of you who are familiar with The Quilt website, you’ve likely already noticed the new improvements to the format and content of our site. Our goal with these improvements is to use the website as a vehicle to more prominently highlight Quilt members and their many contributions. We are excited that this new format allows us the opportunity to showcase Quilt members and their activities through two new features.

The Quilt Member Stream is a real-time social media feed from members' Twitter and Facebook accounts, and the Member Spotlight which highlights a specific Quilt member and their support for research and education in greater depth. We are always looking for ways for The Quilt to improve on its member communications so if you have any comments or suggestions for the new site, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .