The Quilt Board of Directors recently completed its annual election for The Quilt Executive Committee. The Quilt is pleased to announce three new members will join the Committee in 2013 for two-year terms: Jeff Custard, Network Engineering Manager, University Center for Atmospheric Research and Front Range GigaPoP; Tim Lance, president and Chair, NYSERNet; and Dave Reese, vice president and Chief Technology Officer, CENIC. The nine-member Executive Committee provides ongoing oversight of Quilt affairs as delegated by the full Board.
The Board also completed its officer elections for 2013. Don Welch, president and CEO of Merit Network, was elected to the office of Vice Chairman for 2013. In accordance with Quilt bylaws, the 2012 Vice Chairman, Claude Garelik, Systems IT Security Officer for the South Dakota Board of Regents and Chairman of the Board for the Great Plains Network, was elected to the Chair position for this year. Claude replaces Wendy Huntoon, Director of Networking at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and Executive Director of the Three Rivers Optical Exchange.
“As a member-powered organization, The Quilt is very fortunate to not only have a tremendous breadth of talent among our members but also the strong commitment of these individuals who are remarkable in their leadership contributions to advanced regional networking in support of research and education,” said Jen Leasure, Quilt president and CEO. “I congratulate the new Executive Committee members on their election and look forward to continuing our work together for another highly productive year for the organization.”
About The Quilt
The Quilt is the national coalition of advanced regional networks for research and education, representing 31 networks across the country. Participants in The Quilt provide advanced network services and applications to over 250 universities and thousands of other educational institutions.
Five vendors identified to partner with research and education community on OpenFlow-based solutions and initiatives
Seattle, October 24, 2012 – The Quilt, the national coalition of advanced regional research and education (R&E) networks, announces that five equipment providers have been selected as OpenFlow Switch Authorized Quilt Providers (AQP’s): Brocade; HP via reseller partner Matrix Integration; IBM; NEC Corporation of America; and Pica8.
One of the missions of the R&E community is to engage with its many partners, including industry, to design, develop and support experimental, leading-edge technologies in order to drive advancements in academic networking and research. To help support this mission of the community it serves, The Quilt released its National Request for Proposal (RFP) for OpenFlow-Enabled Network Switches in May with the objectives of:
- defining a preferred set of configurations for OpenFlow-enabled equipment for the research and education community
- providing a sensible set of switch options for regional and campus networks to purchase OpenFlow-enabled equipment
- promoting and enabling software-defined networking capabilities to scale to more regional and campus networks by leveraging the R&E community’s collective experience and interest in software-defined networking
- identifying and partnering with equipment providers who are creating a new development platform around the ideas of OpenFlow
Jen Leasure, president and CEO of The Quilt, stated, “OpenFlow and more generally software-defined networking offer important new sets of choices for Quilt members and their Authorized Buyers to consider, as they seek to more efficiently and flexibly deliver advanced network services and applications to diverse and growing constituencies within their states and regions. By qualifying the AQP’s we are announcing today, The Quilt seeks to make it easier for our members to identify and, if in the interests of their stakeholders, to adopt OpenFlow technologies optimized for R&E environments.”
Each of the AQP’s met the current set of preferred features and configurations as outlined in the RFP. Each demonstrated a willingness to partner with the R&E community to create a new development platform around the ideas of OpenFlow and also provides a unique set of capabilities to contribute to a suite of switch options for regional and campus networks. A willingness to perform third-party interoperability testing with other OpenFlow-enabled switches was also a key selection criterion.
Effective immediately the AQP’s are authorized to sell to Quilt member networks and their Authorized Quilt Buyers under a Quilt Pricing Agreement initially valid for 12 months with option for renewal if mutually agreeable to The Quilt and the AQP.
About The Quilt
The Quilt is the national coalition of advanced regional networks for research and education, representing 31 networks across the country. Participants in The Quilt provide advanced network services and applications to over 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions. For more information, visit www.thequilt.net.
Read More...October 15, 2012
The National Science Foundation (NSF) dedicated the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC), its first facility in decades in Wyoming and one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, as part of dedication ceremonies held in Cheyenne today.
“The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center will offer researchers the opportunity to develop, access and share complex models and data at incredibly powerful speeds,” said NSF Director Subra Suresh. “This is the latest example of NSF’s unique ability to identify challenges early and make sure that the best tools are in place to support the science and engineering research communities.”
The NWSC will be managed by NSF’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The supercomputer, known as “Yellowstone,” has the ability to work at 1.5 petaflops–equal to 1.5 quadrillion (a million billion) mathematical operations per second. Its speed is comparable to 7 billion people (the world population) each simultaneously conducting 200,000 calculations a second.
Yellowstone’s capabilities will improve scientific understanding of climate change, severe weather, air quality, and other atmospheric and geosciences research. It allows researchers to address research challenges with software, data storage and management, and data analysis and visualization.
Based in Cheyenne, the NWSC is located on a 24-acre site. It houses high-performance computers, mass storage (data archival) systems, and required mechanical and electrical infrastructure. It is a LEED-certified building, showcasing sustainable technologies as well as energy-efficient design and operation. A main component is a public visitor center that illustrates the types of computational science research that will be carried out by scientists across the nation and explains the impact of that research.
Wyoming is part of NSF’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), which allows the agency to strengthen research and education in science and engineering throughout the United States and improve R&D capacity and competitiveness.
In addition to NSF Director Suresh, the dedication ceremony included Wyoming Governor Matt Mead, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research President Thomas Bogdan, NCAR Director Roger Wakimoto, University of Wyoming Vice President for Research Bill Gern and NSF’s Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences Division Director Michael Morgan.
The NWSC, funded by NSF with additional support from the state of Wyoming and a broad public-private consortium, will be a mainstay of U.S. geoscience computing for decades to come. Its extraordinary computing power will enable scientists to capture many aspects of our planet’s workings in unprecedented detail. The results will improve forecasting of hurricanes, tornadoes, and other severe storms; map critical supplies of water; boost predictions of wildfire behavior; help protect society from solar disruptions; and address many other concerns.
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