Tag Archives: networking

UEN, Quilt Members converge in Utah for SC16 Conference

Every November, thousands of researchers and industry representatives in high-performance computing and related fields, such as advanced networking, data storage, and data analysis, meet for the annual Supercomputing Conference (SC16) to learn about HPC and scientific applications and innovations from around the world.

This year’s conference, with the theme “HPC Matters,” took place Nov. 13-18 in Salt Lake City, Utah. This annual event previously was held in Salt Lake City in 2012.

Quilt Members once again were an integral part of the annual event through demonstrations, booths, presentations and building SCinet. Quilt members joined many from the international supercomputing community, essentially a gathering of scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators and developers that is unequaled in the world.

The internationally-recognized technical program included presentations, papers, informative tutorials, timely research posters and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. A 515,000 square-foot exhibition hall featured the latest technologies and accomplishments from the world’s leading vendors, research organizations and universities, offering the first opportunity for attendees to learn about the technologies that will shape the future of large-scale technical computing and data-driven science.

The Salt Palace Convention Center during the event also turned into the home to the fastest, most innovative computer network in the world during SC16 conference. SCinet, the high-performance, experimental network built specifically for the conference, offers an unprecedented amount of bandwidth within the conference exhibit hall and connecting the convention center to the broader Internet.

Partnering with Quilt Member Utah Education Network (UEN) and CenturyLink, SCinet provided more than 5 Tbps of internal network bandwidth, along with tens of 100 Gbps Ethernet circuits to bring 3.15 Tbps of Wide Area Network bandwidth to the convention center. UEN guided this collaboration with national and international research and education networks and commodity Internet providers. More than 12,000 conference exhibitors and attendees relied on SCinet during SC16.

Listen to the UEN podcast on how Corby Schmitz and Gyongyi Horvath prepare for SC16.

If you or others from Quilt Member Institutions attended SC16, we would like to hear from you and your experience for a future blog. Please contact us or Tweet us @TweetTheQuilt.

NSF cyberinfrastructure report aims to awaken potential of ‘sleeping middle’

The final report on the Role of Regional Organizations in Advancing the Computational Infrastructure has been submitted to the National Science Foundation with the goal to developing recommendations to assist regional organizations to leverage their work for the benefit of the research community as well as understand what actions, if any, are needed to achieve a radical shift across a diverse set of organizations to improve coordination of, access to and utilization of the national computational infrastructure.

There are many cyberinfrastructure organizations in the space between campuses and nationally-shared cyberinfrastructure facilities that enable use of advanced cyberinfrastructure in research. According to the contributors of this report (which included staff and several members of The Quilt), now is the time to harness the collective energies of these organizations and focus them on innovating CI infrastructure and expertise while also sharing those solutions on an intra- and inter-regional basis.

“The recommendations provided in this report are aimed at awakening the potential of the ‘sleeping middle’ of regional network/CI organizations to develop and enrich the national CI ecology,” as noted in the summary.

Download a copy of the full report.

The Role of Regional Organizations in Improving Access to the National Computational Infrastructure conference was held in Kansas City, Missouri, in October 2015. A total of 36 white papers were submitted in advance, and 39 individuals were in attendance. The majority of the participants were from academic institutions, and many also represented a state, regional or national organization with significant interest in improving access to the national computational infrastructure. Contributions by white paper authors and conference attendees are grouped into key thematic areas as presented in the report in addition to two sets of recommendations – core recommendations and recommendations for actions within specific communities.

The purpose of this project was to gain input from relevant organizations and to develop a set of recommendations to reinvigorate the state of advanced cyberinfrastructure and to lay the groundwork for a vibrant, healthy national computational cyberinfrastructure that brings together all the relevant players and is flexible enough to accommodate new developments. By carefully considering the information and choosing to implement the recommendations from this 34-page report, it may be possible to accomplish broad scale change across the cyberinfrastructure landscape in support of future computational and data-intensive science in the United States and beyond.

This work was funded by National Science Foundation Award No. 1543655 to Kansas State University. Gregory E. Monaco, Ph.D. Department of Psychological Sciences, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, and the Great Plains Network. This replaces the Draft Report submitted in March 2016.

Workshop reports available for Looking Beyond the Internet

Workshop reports for three “Looking Beyond the Internet” workshops that took place a month ago are now available.

Applications and Services in the Year 2021
Future Wireless Cities
Software Defined Infrastructure / Software Defined Exchanges

All three workshops and their reports are here.

The “Looking Beyond the Internet” effort is intended to discuss new research opportunities in the broad areas of future wireless, networks and clouds. The goal is to engage the research community to identify potentially transformative network architectures, enabling technologies and applications in three broad categories: software-defined infrastructure, community-scale wireless networks and future applications and services.

Special thanks to Suman Bannerjee, Prasad Calyam, Nick Feamster, Ray Raychaudhuri, Glenn Ricart, and Rob Ricci for organizing and running these workshops, and for quickly writing up three great reports.

For more information about this effort, visit this webpage.

Social Recap: Advanced Networking & Science DMZs in Austin

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…

Spotlight: Examine new Broadband Opportunity Council Report at FMM15

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.

LauraSpining 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:

Modernize Federal programs to expand program support for broadband investments.
Empower communities with tools and resources to attract broadband investment and promote meaningful use.
Promote increased broadband deployment and competition through expanded access to Federal assets.
Improve data collection, analysis and research on broadband.

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!

Regional Networks & Support for Research, OneOklahoma Cyberinfrastructure highlights Quilt Fall Member Meeting

Our 2015 Fall Member Meeting is next week, and we have an extraordinary line-up of speakers and special guests scheduled to participate.

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!

The Quilt to present on CC*IIE at Internet2 Global Summit

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.

Spring has sprung for Quilt member events

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.

2015 KINBER Annual Conference | April 15-16 (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania)

KINBER2015-web

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.

BCNET Annual Conference | April 27-29 (Vancouver, British Columbia)

BCNET2015-web

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.

WiscNet Future Technologies Conference | May 11-12 (Madison, Wisconsin)

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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.

2015 Merit Member Conference (MMC) | May 13-14 (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

MERIT2015-web

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.

3rd Annual CEN Member Conference | May 15 (Hartford, Connecticut)

CEN2015-web

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 / Indiana GigaPOP Members Meeting | June 11-12 (Bloomington, Indiana)

ILight2015-web

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.

2015 OSHEAN Member Forum | June 12 (New England Institute of Technology)

oshean2015-web

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.

Networking leaders connect at Quilt Winter Meeting

Some of the country’s best in networking met last week to discuss advancements in research and education networks at The Quilt 2015 Winter Member Meeting in California.

The Quilt, a national coalition of advanced regional networks for research and education representing nearly 40 networks across the country, hosted the event with almost 100 participants from Quilt member organizations, affiliates and guests from throughout the country and world.

kick-off-day1-02112015

Representatives from the federal level also joined and included the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The formal event got underway with an informative briefing/overview of CC*IIE Regional Collaboration Awards featuring KINBER, OARnet, GPN, and FRGP. Kevin Thompson of the National Science Foundation provided an update from the NSF Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure.

kevinthomson-web

Experts in cybersecurity from UEN, GPN, CENIC, Merit Network and MCNC organized a panel discussion to share insights into how their organizations are preparing for and responding to direct network attacks as well as attacks on member institutions.

And, finally, Jason Zurawski of ESnet gave a great presentation on understanding big data trends and the key role of regional networks in bridging needs and solutions. He added, “It’s not just infrastructure anymore, it’s an instrument.”

One of the more dynamic discussions featured a panel of representatives from the FCC who provided an overview of some of the commission’s broadband programs and opportunities available for research and education networks.

The Quilt President and CEO Jen Leasure said the organization’s bi-annual member meetings are designed to inform members on interesting topics for regional networks as well as provide a forum for members to leverage each other’s knowledge and expertise to collectively advance networking for research and education throughout the country.

“We saw excellent engagement among our members and our community partners at this year’s winter meeting,” she said.

Of course there was plenty of time to network as well as attend a number of member briefings and breakout sessions on topics such as advanced networking, network security, R&E networking community building and much more.

FCC chairman proposes $1.5 billion cap to boost E-Rate

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing a more direct way to boost funding to E-Rate.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said on Wednesday that he wants a 62 percent, or $1.5 billion, increase on the cap that the agency can spend to bring Internet to schools (from $2.4 billion to $3.9 billion).

The White House called the FCC proposal to raise the E-Rate cap an “essential step” in the ConnectED initiative.

There’s a cost to the FCC’s proposal, of course; consumers and businesses could pay up to an additional 16 cents per phone line per month as part of the Universal Service Fund fee on their phone bills. That cost currently is a monthly fee of 99 cents for each phone line.

In June 2013, President Barack Obama made a trip to North Carolina to formally announce ConnectED, which included calling on the FCC to spur high-speed connectivity to schools.

“Since that time, the FCC has taken steps to modernize the E-Rate program to support high-speed connectivity for America’s schools and libraries,” a White House spokesperson said this week, citing the FCC’s action in February of this year to begin the expansion a “$2 billion down payment on the President’s ConnectED goals.

The FCC adopted an order in July to make the program more efficient and transparent so that schools get the most “bang for their E-Rate buck.” At the same time, the FCC also is moving to close the Wi-Fi gap by targeting $1 billion annually to expand Wi-Fi connections in all the nation’s schools and libraries to support modern digital learning.

The Quilt submitted ex-parte comments last week and followed up with in-person meetings with FCC Commissioners and staff to discuss further action. Among the items in our submitted comments, we were pleased with several of the changes made in the July E-Rate Modernization Order, especially the decisions to make more funding available for internal connections (Wi-Fi equipment) and to promote consortia.

The Quilt has long pointed out that it is inefficient and ineffective to bring high-capacity broadband to the building if there is insufficient capacity within the classroom or library building. Now that the FCC has given greater priority to making funding available for Category 2 equipment inside the building, it is proper for the commission to focus its next decision on how to incentivize the build-out of additional broadband capacity to the building.

According to EducationSuperHighway, 63 percent of schools lack the proper Internet infrastructure to support digital learning. The Wireline Competition Bureau and Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis released an E-Rate Data Update this week summarizing the information the FCC has received since the July E-Rate Modernization Order.

This fact sheet also provides a succinct description of the Internet connectivity gaps and Chairman Wheeler’s proposal to adjust the spending cap to a level that will enable long-term E-Rate connectivity targets to be met. The order the chairman circulated this week also will propose a series of targeted rule changes designed to ensure that the nation’s students and life-long learners can get the 21st century education required to keep the nation globally competitive.

A vote on the proposal is expected by the commission on Dec. 11.

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