We wanted to take this opportunity to thank our fantastic community for your support and contributions over the last year. Working together, our collective efforts advanced networking for research and education across the country. We are excited about continuing our work together in 2016.
We look forward to seeing many of you in February at our Winter Meeting in La Jolla.
Again, thank you for what you do and your support. Happy Holidays to you and yours from The Quilt.
The Quilt held its Fall Member Meeting on Sept. 28-Oct. 1 at JW Marriott in Austin, Texas. It also coincided with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and ESnet Site Coordinators Committee meeting.
We’ve captured the sites and sounds from this year’s meeting…
Our 2015 Fall Member Meeting is next week.
At the invitation of Quilt member LEARN (Lonestar Education and Research Network), The Quilt will be holding its Fall Member Meeting on Sept. 28 through Oct. 1 at the JW Marriott in downtown Austin, Texas.
This year’s Fall Member Meeting also coincides with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and the ESnet Site Coordinators Committee (ESCC).
Over the last couple of weeks we have previewed some items on the agenda. Please see previous posts including features on Pacific Research Platform and the Science DMZ and Campus Cyberinfrastructure in Texas as well as Regional Networks & Support for Research, OneOklahoma Cyberinfrastructure and new Broadband Opportunity Council Report.
Today’s post highlights discussions on cybersecurity and risks.
Quilt Member Collaborations for Security Tools and Services will be presented by Steve Wallace of Indiana University.
Wallace leads IU’s Software-Defined Network (SDN) education and international collaboration initiatives. He has more than 25 years of experience in network design, research, and deployment – including 10 years leading IU’s engineering support for Abilene (Internet2’s first high-speed backbone) and directing the university’s Advanced Network Management Lab.
Heidi Wachs of Jenner & Block LLP also will present on Regional Network Security – Privacy, Data Security, and Risk.
Wachs is a member of the firm’s Privacy and Information Governance Practice. A nationally recognized leader in privacy, breach response and data security compliance, her wealth of experience includes serving as a privacy researcher and as chief privacy officer of a major university. Clients seek her counsel in data breach handling and recovery, information classification, information security and identity governance and administration.
Wachs also will moderate a panel discussion on Regional Network Risk Levels where Quilt members will share their plans and processes to assess privacy and data security, assess organizational risk, and strategies to mitigate organizational risk. Elwood Downing of Merit Network, Mike Hrybyk of BCNET, and Tim Lance from NYSERNet also will participate on the panel.
Finally, our meeting this fall will close with two briefings.
Dave Pokorney of Florida LambdaRail will provide an update on the Quilt Facilities Futures Working Group, and Mark Johnson from MCNC will give us the latest on Quilt InCommon Pilots and Business Model.
Thanks again to LEARN for hosting this year’s meeting.
You can follow the conversation throughout the meeting using #FMM15 or @TweettheQuilt.
Those interested in the NSF PI Workshop also can follow on Twitter with #CCPI2015.
We look forward to seeing you Austin!
We’re getting excited for our 2015 Fall Member Meeting is next week.
At the invitation of Quilt member LEARN (Lonestar Education and Research Network), The Quilt will be holding its Fall Member Meeting on Sept. 28 through Oct. 1 at the JW Marriott in downtown Austin, Texas. This year’s Fall Member Meeting also coincides with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and the ESnet Site Coordinators Committee (ESCC).
This will be one Texas-sized meeting with the best networking minds in the country gathered all in one place for some exciting discussions on how R&E networks are uniquely positioned to meet today’s infrastructure challenges.
Over the last couple of weeks we have previewed some items on the agenda. Please see previous posts including features on Pacific Research Platform and the Science DMZ and Campus Cyberinfrastructure in Texas as well as Regional Networks & Support for Research, OneOklahoma Cyberinfrastructure.
Today’s post highlights two engaging discussion on Thursday.
Laura Spining of the NTIA will present Thursday morning on the new Broadband Opportunity Council Report, which describes steps that 25 federal agencies will take over the next 18 months to eliminate barriers and promote broadband investment and adoption.
Over the past six years, the United States has expanded broadband access, bringing millions of people online and creating significant new economic, educational and social opportunities. Investments from the federal government have helped deploy or upgrade more than 110,000 miles of network infrastructure, and more than 45 million additional Americans have adopted broadband Internet. And as a country we’ve made high-speed wireless coverage available to 98 percent of Americans.
The council made four broad recommendations in the report:
Laura Spining also will moderate a Quilt Member Panel Discussion on Regional Networks and Community Broadband – What is the Next Frontier? This panel will focus on the regional networks’ roles in working with communities and municipalities to increase the availability of broadband; strategies for convening and connecting community area networks; and the role of regional networking organizations in local and state economic development efforts.
The panel includes Jean Davis of MCNC, John Gillispie of MOREnet, Scott Taylor of CEN and Jack Smith of WVNET.
Thanks again to LEARN for hosting this year’s meeting.
You can follow the conversation throughout the meeting using #FMM15 or @TweettheQuilt.
We look forward to seeing you Austin!
Our 2015 Fall Member Meeting is next week, and we have an extraordinary line-up of speakers and special guests scheduled to participate.
At the invitation of Quilt member LEARN (Lonestar Education and Research Network), The Quilt will be holding its Fall Member Meeting on Sept. 28 through Oct. 1 at the JW Marriott in downtown Austin, Texas. This year’s Fall Member Meeting also coincides with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and the ESnet Site Coordinators Committee (ESCC).
This will be one Texas-sized meeting with the best networking minds in the country gathered all in one place for some exciting discussions on how R&E networks are uniquely positioned to meet today’s infrastructure challenges.
Over the last couple of weeks we have previewed some items on the agenda. Please see previous posts including features on Pacific Research Platform and the Science DMZ and Campus Cyberinfrastructure in Texas.
Today’s post highlights two engaging discussions on Wednesday afternoon.
First, will be a presentation on Regional Networks and Support for Research. In this discussion we will feature an overview of The Quilt’s 2015 goals and activities in this area, explore The Quilt’s Regional Collaboration Projects Working Group, the Regional Role in National Computation Infrastructure Workshop, and Regional Networks and NSF Big Data Innovation Hub Program. Presenters include Quilt President and CEO Jen Leasure, KINBER President and CEO Wendy Huntoon, and Greg Monaco, Director for Research & Cyberinfrastructure Initiatives for the Great Plains Network.
Immediately following this discussion will be a special presentation on the OneOklahoma Cyberinfrastructure Initiative.
Henry Neeman of the University of Oklahoma will talk about this initiative and how it is designed to deliver improved network reliability, robustness, availability and bandwidth to Oklahoma’s researchers (and probably some fun meteorology aspects as well). Funded by a National Science Foundation grant, the Oklahoma Optical Initiative benefits the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, OneNet (Oklahoma’s education, research and government network), the University of Tulsa, Langston University, the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation and a variety of other institutions across the state.
The OneOklahoma Cyberinfrastructure Initiative has already reached a total of 97 institutions and organizations: 50 academic and 47 non-academic.
Finally, the first day’s activities will close with our Member Meeting Event with Bat Cruise and Dinner.
Thanks again to LEARN for hosting this year’s meeting.
You can follow the conversation now and during the meeting using #FMM15 or @TweettheQuilt.
We look forward to seeing you Austin!
For the last three years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a series of competitive grants to more than 100 universities to upgrade their campus network capacity for greatly enhanced science data access.
NSF is now building on that distributed investment by funding a $5 million, five-year award to UC San Diego and UC Berkeley to establish a Pacific Research Platform (PRP), a science-driven high-capacity data-centric “freeway system” on a large regional scale.
Within a few years, the PRP will give participating universities and other research institutions the ability to move data 1,000 times faster compared to speeds on today’s inter-campus shared Internet.
At our 2015 Fall Member Meeting joint program day with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and the ESnet Site Coordinators Committee on Wednesday, Sept. 30, we are excited to welcome Larry Smarr, UC San Diego computer science and engineering professor, principal investigator of the PRP, and director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), to share his insight on the project.
“To accelerate the rate of scientific discovery, researchers must get the data they need, where they need it, and when they need it,” said Smarr. “This requires a high-performance data freeway system in which we use optical lightpaths to connect data generators and users of that data.”
Separately, NSF has awarded funds to hold a PRP design workshop at UC San Diego, now scheduled for October, entitled: ‘Building an Interoperable Regional Science DMZ.” This workshop will bring together the PRP application driver researchers with the distributed computer architects, the network engineers, and the multi-institutional IT/Telecom administrators to further refine the PRP implementation.
Also on our joint program day in Austin, we will discuss some of the future directions of Science DMZ. The discussion features Eli Dart, Network Engineer at ESnet, and the security in a Science DMZ with Robin Sommer, senior researcher in the Networking and Security Group at the International Computer Science Institute and Berkeley National Lab.
At the invitation of Quilt member LEARN (Lonestar Education and Research Network), The Quilt will be holding its Fall Member Meeting on Sept. 28 through Oct. 1 at the JW Marriott in downtown Austin, Texas. This year’s Fall Member Meeting also coincides with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and the ESnet Site Coordinators Committee (ESCC).
This will be one Texas-sized meeting with the best networking minds in the country gathered all in one place for some exciting discussions on how R&E networks are uniquely positioned to meet today’s infrastructure challenges.
Thanks again to LEARN for hosting this year’s meeting. If you have not registered, online registration is still available.
You can follow the conversation now and throughout the meeting using #FMM15 or @TweettheQuilt.
We look forward to seeing you Austin!
Our 2015 Fall Member Meeting is coming up at the end of the month, and we have an extraordinary line-up of keynote speakers and guests scheduled to participate.
At the invitation of Quilt member LEARN (Lonestar Education and Research Network), The Quilt will be holding its Fall Member Meeting on Sept. 28 through Oct. 1 at the JW Marriott in downtown Austin, Texas. This year’s Fall Member Meeting also coincides with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and the ESnet Site Coordinators Committee (ESCC).
This will be one Texas-sized meeting with the best networking minds in the country gathered all in one place for some exciting discussions on how R&E networks are uniquely positioned to meet today’s infrastructure challenges.
Over the next couple of weeks we will preview several items on the agenda and spotlight some of our special guests and speakers participating at this year’s meeting. One example is the discussion on cyberinfrastructure in Texas.
LEARN President and CEO Mike Phillips and current chairman of The Quilt will be hosting an engaging panel on Campus Cyberinfrastructure in Texas. Additional panel participants include Deniz Gurkan, of the University of Houston, and Kaushik De, of Stephen F. Austin State University.
The NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure program provides new capabilities that advance current and future research efforts. A number of awards were made under this program to Texas institutions and this panel will showcase the impact of campus infrastructure investments for two universities and with LEARN providing a statewide view of the impact of the program across the region.
Thanks again to LEARN for hosting this year’s meeting. If you have not registered, online registration is still available.
You can follow the conversation now and throughout the meeting using #FMM15 or @TweettheQuilt.
We look forward to seeing you Austin!
The 2015 Internet2 Global Summit is being held through Thursday at the Renaissance Washington D.C. Downtown Hotel. Building on the success of the 2014 event, the theme for this year is “Community: Leading the way.”
The Quilt will lead a panel discussion on Wednesday geared towards R&E networks on Advanced Networking: Regional Collaboration Through its Campus Cyberinfrastructure – Infrastructure, Innovation and Engineering (CC*IIE) program.
The National Science Foundation funded five R&E networks for regional collaboration projects. These projects will disseminate information regarding advanced networking techniques, build bridges to distributed science communities, and share insights into technology options that can be tailored to solve advanced networking challenges faced by science collaborators and projects.
This session scheduled from 3 to 4 p.m. EDT in The Grand Ballroom will be available live online via Netcast.
Regional network representatives will showcase several of these innovative projects to demonstrate the key role of the regional networks in fostering collaboration among member institutions. Followed by this overview, the group will turn to a specific example of how the long history of collaboration and innovation among Ohio’s regional network community fostered by OARnet has been an engine in the success of several of its members receiving NSF CC*NIE/CC*IIE awards.
The scheduled panelists to be featured include Paul Schopis from Quilt Member OARnet; Marla Meehl UCAR / NCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research); James von Oehsen of Clemson University; Thomas Skill of the University of Dayton; Roger Bielefeld Case Western Reserve University; Bruce Burton of the University of Cincinnati; Claude Garelik from the South Dakota Board of Regents; and Patricia Campbell from Quilt Member KINBER. The panel will be moderated by The Quilt President and CEO Jen Leasure.
“These awards were achieved through mutual support among constituents and the collaborative spirit of our R&E networking community. I’m looking forward to the discussion on Wednesday as we examine these projects more closely,” said Leasure.
The Global Summit is Internet2’s annual meeting that showcases how the R&E community is transforming the way networking is conceived and conducted. The 2015 meeting will focus on the advancement of research and education capabilities through collaborative innovations in IT infrastructure and applications and will feature keynote addresses from top R&E leaders, presentations from noted experts, and sessions focused on partnerships and advanced technologies. Internet2 Network Services also will give updates on efforts related to operational excellence, planning for the next iteration of the Internet2 Network, and a new security effort.
Most, if not all, plenary sessions will be available through live streaming online.
President Obama on Monday signed a Presidential Memorandum formally creating a Broadband Opportunity Council, to be co-chaired by representatives from the U.S. Department of Commerce and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The Broadband Opportunity Council includes 25 federal agencies and departments that will engage with industry and other stakeholders to understand ways the government can better support the needs of communities seeking broadband investment. It also will help identify regulatory barriers impeding broadband deployment or competition, and take steps to remove such barriers.
Secretary Vilsack will represent the USDA. Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling has been appointed by Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker to serve as Commerce’s representative on the council.
The NTIA has been a major force in helping to bring broadband to areas of the country where service was either limited or non-existent through the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, funded initially by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and now through the new BroadandUSA initiative.
“At NTIA, we have seen firsthand how essential broadband is to schools, public safety, health care, businesses and most other sectors of society,” said Strickling. “The interagency effort the council is undertaking will help marshal the resources of multiple federal agencies to promote opportunities to advance broadband deployment and adoption across the country.”
The council will report back to the president within 150 days with the steps each agency will take to advance these aforementioned goals, including specific regulatory actions or budget proposals.
Resource: White House Fact Sheet (Next Steps in Delivering Fast, Affordable Broadband)
In January, the president traveled to Cedar Falls, Iowa to announce his plan to promote “Broadband that Works,” a public-private effort to help more Americans, in more communities around the country, get access to fast and affordable broadband. Making good on the vision outlined in his State of the Union Address means promoting investment and rewarding competition while trying to reaching the national goal of providing 98 percent of Americans with access to high-Speed, mobile Broadband.
To carry forward the momentum, help communities leaders learn from one another, and report out the progress of recent broadband initiatives, the White House will in June host the Community Broadband Summit. Details will follow soon at WhiteHouse.gov.
Several of our Quilt members will be hosting networking events for their member communities across the country this spring, and we’ve highlighted a few that may be of interest. If you know of others or have an upcoming spring event that you want to share, please contact us.
Hundreds of Pennsylvania’s leaders in education, health care, economic development, libraries, public media and technology will share ideas and success stories about using next generation networks at the 2015 KINBER Annual Conference on April 15-16 at the Hilton Harrisburg. The event will host dozens of panels and speaker-led workshops as well as keynote speakers and professional development opportunities.
View the conference schedule here. Registration is now open.
The BCNET Annual Conference on April 27-29 in Vancouver is the leading opportunity to network with more than 600 higher education IT, network, enterprise systems, and education technology professionals. Learn and share ideas on insights, experiences, strategies, real-life solutions and more. The program is derived from their higher education IT member community and is hosted by Quilt Member BCNET, a not-for-profit shared information technology services organization serving British Columbia’s higher education and research institutions.
View the agenda and/or register to attend.
The WiscNet Future Technologies Conference on May 11-12 is an annual gathering of the WiscNet membership held at the Monona Terrace in Madison, Wisconsin. Each year, several thought-provoking keynote speakers participate in addition to several breakout sessions featuring the great things going on across the membership.
WiscNet has 24 great sessions lined up for 2015. Registration currently is open.
The 2015 Merit Member Conference (MMC) is set for May 13-14 at the Ann Arbor Marriott Ypsilanti at Eagle Crest in Michigan. The MMC is a community gathering on the state-of-the-art in IT for organizations, with a focus both on technology and on the many related policy, financial and social considerations of providing information services. Registration for the Merit Member Conference is open only to Merit Members, potential Members from higher education, K-12, libraries, government, health care and non-profits, and event sponsors. Merit Members who register for the full conference have the limited-time opportunity to register a colleague to attend the conference at no extra charge.
The full schedule is now available. Click here for more information and to register.
2015 marks the 3rd Annual Member Conference hosted by the Connecticut Education Network (CEN). More than 350 participants came out last year to network with their peers and to learn about the future of CEN and technology trends. CEN anticipates a wide range of participants drawn from educators (K-12 and higher ed), municipalities, libraries, local businesses and State of Connecticut agencies. This conference will draw together key stakeholders in the high-speed, fiber optical network from both hardware and end user perspectives.
Online registration is now open.
I-Light continues to make an impact in communities across Indiana every day with many great stories to be heard from throughout their community. That is what the I-Light and Indiana GigaPOP Members Meeting is for on June 11-12 inside Wrubel Commons, Cyberinfrastructure Building at IU Bloomington,
Registration and other details coming soon. In the meantime, check out last year’s archive.
OSHEAN’s Annual Member Forum is scheduled for Friday, June 12, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the New England Institute of Technology, East Greenwich campus. The program agenda for this year’s event is still being finalized … more details to come. To register, click here.