Tag Archives: technology

The Quilt again shines collaborative light on future of R&E Networking

The Quilt, a consortium of regional Research and Education (R&E) Networks throughout the United States, hosted its annual Fall Member Meeting virtually on Sept. 29 and Sept. 30. More than 100 registered attendees and stakeholders gathered online for two days to collectively advance networking for research and education throughout the United States.

The program included several plenary and breakout sessions particularly relevant to the R&E networking community.

R&E partnerships with state leaders to facilitate internet access solutions for unserved and underserved communities topped the list of hot topics and “aha moments” from this year’s meeting.

The meeting opened with a “Fireside Chat” with CENIC’s Louis Fox outlining California’s new statewide middle-mile broadband initiative. The Fireside Chat led into a panel discussion moderated by Louis and included panelists from the Ohio, Oregon, and Nevada R&E networks as well as included the R&E state broadband leader partners from the State of Ohio’s broadband office called BroadbandOhio as well as a state representative from Oregon who is a champion of affordable broadband access in the state. The panel discussion focused on the important role of R&E networks in state broadband strategies.

Another presentation by Sun Corridor Network (SCN) and the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) focused on the collaborative efforts between the two organizations with the goal of delivering affordable broadband access to the unserved and underserved in the stae. Derek Masseth with Sun Corridor noted that it has been a great partnership, and SCN very much appreciates ADOT’s willingness to partner!

Additional comments shared in the virtual chat during the presentation included …This year attendees also took deep dives into areas such as disaster recovery, network facilities management, mapping, and cybersecurity. MCNC Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer Chris Beal talked on the emergence of new R&E cybersecurity solutions to help protect community anchor institutions as well as the North Carolina organization’s new managed services cybersecurity practice called Vital Cyber.“No one is safe from hackers today. There have been far too many headlines recently involving phishing or ransomware attacks affecting big companies and industries. But what you don’t hear much about is how cyber criminals hit our schools, our hospitals, our libraries, and other community anchor institutions,” explained Beal. “These important pillars in our local towns need more protections from today’s growing cyber threats. That why Vital Cyber was created to develop and activate a full suite of managed security services to protect North Carolina’s critical cyber infrastructure; marrying a proven and tested combination of tools, services, and consulting without any extra hardware or staff.”

Additional sessions focused on budget planning, cloud, business continuity, fiber IRU renewals and inter-exchange points, observations from the most-recent NSF CC* PI Workshop, and much more.

The two-day event closed out with a fascinating presentation from Eli Dart, Lauren Rotman, and Jason Zurawski on ESnet’s High Energy Physics requirements and R&E network preparedness for next Large Hadron Collider (LHC) run.

“Identifying new opportunities for Quilt members to leverage one another’s resources and expertise is the hallmark of Quilt events,” said Jen Leasure, President and CEO of The Quilt. “Although we all would like to get together in person, the level of conversation even virtually is of such a great benefit to all of our members as well as our collective mission.”

The Quilt is the national coalition of non-profit U.S. regional research and education networks representing 40 networks across the country. Members of The Quilt provide advanced network services and applications to over 900 universities and tens of thousands of other educational and community anchor institutions. Together, we promote consistent, reliable, inter-operable and efficient advanced networking services that extend to the broadest possible community and represent common interests in the development and delivery of advanced cyberinfrastructure that enables innovation through our education and research mission.

The next member meeting for The Quilt is scheduled for early February 2021.

 

R&E networks could help better identify national broadband gaps

Consumer sourcing and leveraging R&E networks to become Collaborative Networked Organizations, or CNOs, to manage the collection of broadband availability data could improve the quality and accuracy of the information, according to comments submitted to the NTIA this summer.

NTIA, on behalf of the U.S. Department of Commerce, requested comments on actions to improve broadband availability data, particularly in rural areas, as part of the national activities directed by the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018. Comments were due on July 16, 2018.

In total, 52 individuals and organizations submitted official comments this summer. The Quilt had the pleasure to work our member Merit, Michigan’s R&E network, and the Quello Center at Michigan State University, to craft a joint comment on how to enhance indicators of broadband access.

Much of America has enjoyed the benefits of broadband for years, but there are still areas of the country that don’t have the level of connectivity needed to keep up with modern society. According to the FCC, more than 30 percent of rural Americans currently live in areas that lack availability of broadband, which since early 2015 has been defined by the FCC as 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up.

Through this request, the NTIA seeks input from a broad range of stakeholders on ways to improve the nation’s ability to analyze broadband availability, with the intention of identifying gaps in broadband availability that can be used to improve policymaking and inform public investments.

In May, David J. Redl, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator, said the NTIA knows these gaps exist, but what isn’t known is precisely which areas of the country have insufficient broadband capacity. Added Redl, “that makes it difficult to ensure that public investments in infrastructure are efficient and effective.”

According to Bill Dutton, Director of the Quello Center, the comments provided on behalf of Merit and Quello offer an innovative approach to consumer sourcing of broadband availability data that builds off the FCC’s initiatives with crowd sourcing. It also leverages the strategic advantages of Merit, and the possibility of extending to other R&E networks that are members and affiliates of The Quilt.

“If successful, this approach has the potential to be scaled nationally,” Dutton explained in his blog. “The comment provides an overview of current approaches, the potential of consumer-sourced data, and an outline of their approach.”

R&E networks ready for Winter Member Meeting in La Jolla

The Quilt will be returning to the La Jolla Shores Hotel and La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club in California on Feb. 6-8 for its 2018 Winter Member Meeting.

Overview

The Quilt will be holding its annual Winter Member Meeting at our traditional venue in La Jolla. We are looking forward to this in-person gathering of our national Quilt community and stakeholders to learn and share with one another in order to collectively advance networking for research and education.

We have many exciting conversations and topics planned for you this year. We also have provided time between sessions for working lunch meetings and other networking opportunities. View Agenda.

Highlights & Opportunities

This year’s event kicks off with in-person meetings of our Quilt working groups as well as our Quilt Board of Directors. We’ll wrap up the day with a networking event.

On Day 2, we start the day with various breakfast opportunities including our general breakfast gathering, our Quilt newcomers breakfast, the Carahsoft-sponsored breakfast for the Quilt VMware Program, and our Global NOC Users Group breakfast. The meeting’s general session begins at 8:30 a.m. with a highlight of the meeting which is our plenary panel on “Networks — Human and Telecommunications — in the CENIC Context: Perspectives from CENIC Charter Associates.” Other highlights include an Overview of Middle and Last Mile Wireless Access Solutions – Feasibility and Policy Considerations; Quilt Member Lightning Talks; National Broadband Policy Update; REN Network Security Briefs; Briefings from our R&E Networking Colleagues to the North (BCnet and Cybera); E-Rate and Other National Policies and Programs Discussion; and our Advanced Networking Sampler. At 5:30 p.m., our Quilt meeting reception begins on the Garden Patio at the Shores Hotel.

Our dynamic program wraps up on Thursday with the NOAA N-Wave and RON Partner Breakfast followed by a round table discussion on friction-free networking for scientific research, a confluence of Quilt forums and a meeting of the InCommon Steward Program participants.

Questions?

We look forward to this week together every year in La Jolla. If you need further information about this year’s Winter Member Meeting, please contact Jennifer Griffin.

Social Media

Follow all conversations on social media using #QuiltinSoCal.

#QuiltinABQ Recap: Trending conversations from 2017 Fall Member Meeting

Thank you for joining us in Albuquerque for the 2017 Fall Member Meeting. Building on the success of the colocation of Fall 2015 and 2016 events, this year’s Fall Member Meeting also coincided with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure and Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and the ESnet Site Coordinators Committee Fall Meeting (ESCC).

Some of the best networking minds in the country gathered in the southwest desert for some exciting discussions on how R&E networks are uniquely positioned to meet today’s infrastructure challenges to support researchers in their scientific discovery. Thank you once again to Quilt Member, the University of New Mexico Albuquerque GigaPoP, or UNM-ABQG for inviting us to New Mexico.

This was one of our most dynamic programs to date! The meeting started off with an impressive plenary from Dr. Raymond Newell of Los Alamos National Laboratory on cybercryptography followed by excellent regional cyberinfrastructure collaborations panels from Texas and New Mexico to support scientific discovery. Additional highlights include plenaries from Jack Brassil of the National Science Foundation and Louis Fox from CENIC, and panel discussions showcasing our R&E networking communities collaborative approach to cyberinfrastructure workforce development, connecting public libraries, and others.

Below we have captured and curated many of the social media conversations that were happening throughout the event. We hope you enjoy this recap and the information provided, and we’ll see you again on Feb. 6–8, 2018 for our 2018 Winter Member Meeting in La Jolla, Calif.

2017 Fall Member Meeting sets sights on ABQ

Our 2017 Fall Member Meeting is only a few weeks away, and we have a great program lined up for Quilt members, affiliates and guests inside the Hyatt Regency – Downtown Albuquerque on Oct. 3-5 in New Mexico.

At the invitation of our Quilt member, the University of New Mexico Albuquerque GigaPoP, or UNM-ABQG, The Quilt is very excited to have our community gather in the desert southwest to learn, share, and collectively advance networking for research and education. Building on the success of the colocation of Fall 2015 and 2016 events, this year’s Fall Member Meeting also coincides with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure and Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and the ESnet Site Coordinators Committee Fall Meeting (ESCC).

Some of the best networking minds in the country will be gathered all in one place for some exciting discussions on how R&E networks are uniquely positioned to meet today’s infrastructure challenges to support researchers in their scientific discovery.

The draft program agenda for The Quilt Fall Member Meeting is available here. Highlights include a joint networking reception, plenaries on Quantum Cryptography, cyberinfrastructure investments, discussions on regional research platforms and scaling a national research platform with additional highlights from the first NRP Workshop in Montana this summer, US UCAN and Quilt member collaborations on the Institute of Museum and Library Science (IMLS) Grant and Toolkit, advanced networking and big data, Science DMZs, lightning talks, cybersecurity, and more.

This is one of our most dynamic programs to date! We are looking forward to the opportunity to bring all these groups together, and thank you once again to our Quilt member UNM-ABQG for inviting us to Albuquerque.

For workshop logistics and registration, please contact Tracey Norris at tracey@thequilt.net
You can follow the conversation now and throughout the meeting using #QuiltinABQ or @TweettheQuilt.

We look forward to seeing you ABQ!

MCNC’s Mark Johnson joins FCC’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee Working Group

The Quilt, a national coalition of advanced U.S. regional networks for research and education (R&E), and MCNC, the non-profit owner and operator of the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN), today announced that MCNC Chief Technology Strategist Mark Johnson will represent the national R&E networking community on a new Working Group within the Federal Communication Commission’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC).

In January, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced the formation of this new federal advisory committee that will provide advice and recommendations for the commission on how to accelerate the deployment of high-speed Internet access. The BDAC is intended to provide a means for stakeholders with interests in this area to exchange ideas and develop recommendations to enhance the FCC’s ability to carry out its responsibility to encourage broadband deployment to all Americans.

The FCC announced two BDAC Working Groups this week, and Chairman Pai appointed Johnson to serve as a member of the Removing State and Local Regulatory Barriers Working Group, which is a 25-member group chaired by Robert DeBroux, Director of Public Policy and Federal Regulatory Affairs at TDS Telecom and full member of the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee. The other BDAC Working Group announced this week will focus on Competitive Access to Broadband Infrastructure. Another two BDAC Working Groups were announced earlier this month.

“I’m honored to represent The Quilt and MCNC with this appointment, and I look forward to working with my fellow group members to find ways to best deploy connectivity solutions and advanced broadband Internet into rural areas,” Johnson said. “I’m delighted that the R&E networking community will have a voice on this critical issue, and I look forward to getting to work.”

The full BDAC held its first public committee meeting on Friday, April 21.

The schedule for the new BDAC Working Groups has yet to be determined.

Johnson’s career encompasses 30 years of leadership experience in the management, engineering, and operations of Internet technologies. During his tenure at MCNC he has been responsible for operating a private microwave network and for a variety of fiber network technologies as a customer and constructor. North Carolina’s varied geography and mix of urban and rural communities means he has encountered all types of technical and regulatory obstacles in broadband technology deployment. And, Johnson has successfully worked with all types of entities in the broadband technology landscape to address these obstacles. He also is a founding board member of The Quilt, a former board chairman, and currently serves as its vice chair.

The Quilt offers guidance on NSF cyberinfrastructure future plans

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made cyberinfrastructure a central theme in its plans for developing and delivering tools to enhance scientific discovery.

This year, between January and April, the NSF sought input from the research community on science challenges and associated cyberinfrastructure needs over the next decade and beyond. The federal agency was looking for bold, forward-looking ideas to help advance the frontiers of science and engineering over the next decade and beyond (NSF CI 2030). This activity also recognized that researchers in varying disciplines may need different resources; may have differing priorities for access, interoperability, and continuity; and may require external expertise to address the most critical problems in their specific disciplines.

Please refer to Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) NSF 17-31 for full background information on this activity.

What is Cyberinfrastructure?

Cyberinfrastructure was first used by the NSF to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over high-speed networks beyond the scope of a single institution. It is classified as a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people to find that next great innovation or discovery.

In 2009, NSF undertook a community-informed analysis of cyberinfrastructure needs that led to the formulation of a vision, strategy, and set of initiatives entitled Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21). Since that analysis, many changes have taken place in terms of scientific challenges and opportunities as well as technological progress. To continue capitalizing on the potential provided by cyberinfrastructure to advance science and engineering research, the NSF is beginning to formulate an updated strategy in 2017 as well as concrete plans for future investments in this area.

The NSF Cyberinfrastructure Special Report offers more in-depth presentations on cyberinfrastructure.

The Quilt Contribution

The Quilt has provided a response to the NSF’s Request for Information on Future Needs for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to Support Science and Engineering Research (NSF CI 2030).

Regional research and education (R&E) networks play a critical role in providing the underpinning fabric that makes possible local, regional, national, and global collaborations using advanced cyberinfrastructure. As a non-profit consortium representing 36 regional R&E networks nationwide, The Quilt has a collective mission to support all science and engineering fields and their research challenges.

Decades of success since the initial funding of regional networks by the NSF have taught us that the geography of resources is a significant factor in supporting research pursuits and scientific discoveries. In several of its current cyberinfrastructure programs, NSF has recognized that coordination of specific cyberinfrastructure activities are most effectively coordinated at the regional level by organizations that are frequently best positioned to foster and enable collaboration across a number of boundaries and serve to maximize NSF investments for the greatest good.

These networks provide scientific researchers with the network paths and bandwidth they need to move data as well as access remote and virtualized advanced cyberinfrastructure. The networks are engineered to support high-quality services that are consistent to researchers independent of the field of study, the number of users on the network, or the number of collaborators and collaboration sites. These organizations provide a sophisticated level of network services.

The Quilt believes the following advancements in the development, deployment, and utilization of advanced cyberinfrastructure will be a key part of an ongoing national strategy to address scientific and engineering research challenges. In the RFI submission, The Quilt outlines and describes six specific technical advancements in cyberinfrastructure that must be addressed …

  1. Keeping pace with network capacity demands
  2. Distributed, federated computing with shared resource
  3. Hybrid commercial/private cloud services for research
  4. End-to-end performance of research flows
  5. Cyberinfrastructure security
  6. Development and sustainability of a diverse cyberinfrastructure workforce

*Download and view the PDF of The Quilt’s full RFI response issued out of the NSF website.

Investing in Cyberpractioners

Preliminary investments in programs that support development of “cyberpractitioner” roles at the campus and regional levels has had meaningful impact for those researchers fortunate enough to have access to these individuals. Nationally, we are just now gaining insights into the benefits of cyberpractioners on the research process with their ability to bring to bear additional research resources and tools for scientific discovery.

The Quilt affirms that the next area of focus should be the scalability and sustainability of these roles within the country’s advanced cyberinfrastructure ecosystem by creating opportunity for longer-term career paths. This will encourage these specialized individuals to remain in their field of work as they mature in these positions while also encouraging a new set of professionals to enter in these roles in the future.

Next Steps

NSF has supported advanced computing since its beginning and continues to expand access to these resources. This access helps tens of thousands of researchers each year – from high-school students to Nobel Prize winners – expand the frontiers of science and engineering, regardless of whether their institutions are large or small, or where they are located geographically. By combining superfast and secure networks, cutting-edge parallel computing and analytics, advanced scientific instruments and critical datasets across the country, the NSF’s cyber-ecosystem lets researchers investigate questions that can’t otherwise be explored.

According to NSF, the contributions and ideas collected across the country last quarter will be used this year to inform NSF’s updated strategy and plans for advanced cyberinfrastructure investments.

All submissions made to NSF will be made available on the following website: http://www.nsfci2030.org.

(Image credit: Visualization of 3-D Cerebellar Cortex model generated by researchers Angus Silver and Padraig Gleeson from University College London. The NeuroScience Gateway was used for simulations.)

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.

pdf-icon-1Download 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.