Volume 3, Issue 3
May 31, 2007

The Western Hemisphere Research and Education Networks (WHREN)-Links Interconnecting Latin America (LILA) Report summarizes activities from participating networks. The WHREN-LILA Report is published under National Science Foundation (NSF) Award # 0441095 and Academic Network at São Paulo (ANSP) award Projeto Fapesp no. 04/14414-2.

May 2007 Issue:

• WHREN-LILA Activities
• FIU-CIARA Activities
• CENIC Activities
• Atlantic Wave Activities
• Pacific Wave Activities
• CUDI Activities
• CLARA Activities
• ANSP Activities

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

WHREN-LILA Activities

Two undergraduate students will be selected to participate in the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. It is a win-win opportunity for the students, the WHREN-LILA project, and the IRNC program. Students will have the opportunity to work on a research problem with a practical solution, enriching their research experience by working in a collaborative fashion with a geographically dispersed team of researchers and practitioners. The outcome of this project will benefit the project by developing a tool to improve understanding of the traffic patterns across the WHREN-LILA links in a coordinated fashion.

FIU-CIARA Activities

Global CyberBridges (GCB, NSF CI-TEAM Award #OCI- 0636031) has been awarded one summer REU student position from the NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) CI-TEAM program. This student will work with Calit2 Co-PI Peter Arzberger and Sr. Personnel Network Engineer Rajvikram Singh as well as CIARA’s network engineers Ernesto Rubi, Diego Oubina, and Micha Niskin to create end-user oriented SAGE Tile Display Wall documentation. The position will post next week.

The CyberBridges (NSF CI-TEAM Award #OCI-0537464)IEEE CCGRID publication and presentation was well received in Rio de Janeiro last week. PhD Candidate and 2006 CyberBridges Fellow, Ronald Gutierrez, presented the paper. Ronald said,” After the presentation some inquires about the implementation of CyberBridges in different countries gave me confidence about the message I was trying to deliver. After the presentation that night, I met some PhD students that were interested in the Fellowship program and wanted to know if I could present this collaboration program (CyberBridges) in another conference (CLCAR-07, Santa Marta, Colombia).

For more information on CIARA, visit their website at http://ciara.fiu.edu/

CENIC Activities

On March 26, CENIC and Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) announced the expansion of the TransitRail national commodity peering program with the activation of a connection point in Ashburn , VA. The first TransitRail node to be activated east of the Mississippi, the Ashburn node has been put into service ahead of schedule and will soon be joined by a fifth node in Chicago, IL.

Together with the current nodes in Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Los Angeles, these two new connection points will give the TransitRail peering program a national footprint and enable research and education institutions to take advantage of low-cost network peering on a national scale. Already, the addition of the Ashburn node has enhanced the significant benefits available through participation in TransitRail.

For more information on CENIC, visit their website at http://www.cenic.org/.

Atlantic Wave Activities

No new activities to report.

For more information on Atlantic Wave, visit their website at http://atlanticwave.net/

Pacific Wave Activities

Installation of the three gigabit Google connections in Seattle, Sunnyvale and Los Angeles is currently underway.  

The National University of Singapore relocated its Pacific Wave connection from Seattle to Los Angeles in April.  

The Asahi Broadcasting Company used NTT Research equipment and the GEMNET2 network to do live uncompressed HD of a popular Japanese major league player (Boston Red Sox) at Fenway Stadium, broadcasting this in Japan during the Internet2 Spring Member meeting in Arlington, VA. The feed came from Boston to Seattle over Abilene/Newnet and then from Seattle to Japan over GEMNET2. GEMNET2 peers with Abilene at Pacific Wave, Seattle.

Jacqueline Brown and Celeste Anderson attended the Planning Meeting on Enhancing Research and Education Connectivity to and within South Asia at the Spring Internet2 meeting mentioned above. They, along with John Silvester also attended the Internet2 International Task Force meetings.

Progress on the Southern Translight/Pacific Wave connection from Australia to Southern California via Hawaii included the delivery of additional boxes(Junipers) for the Big Island connections, which are being unpacked, tested and prepared for installation. We are coordinating an installation trip likely around the end of May 2007 to get the boxes installed and operational; possibly, we will need a follow-up trip to complete lighting the cross-island connections to Waimea and Hilo.

For more on these and other efforts, visit the Pacific Wave website at http://www.pacificwave.net/

CUDI Activities

On May 3, CUDI announced an IPTV partnership with the Open Student Television Network (OSTN). CUDI will offer OSTN’s educational, foreign language, news, and entertainment IPTV content through CUDI’s backbone data network for research and education to its nearly 190 members, public and private universities, colleges, community colleges, and technical schools throughout Mexico’s 32 states, representing nearly two million students, staff, and faculty subscribers.

OSTN IPTV content delivered over CUDI’s high speed network will include the OSTN student channel, educational channels such as NASA TV, C-SPAN, University of California Television (UCTV) and the Florida Educational Channel, news channels such as MSNBC and Fox News, entertainment channels such as Sci-Fi and USA Networks, foreign language channels such as CCTV (Chinese), TV5 (French), and RAI (Italian).

The partnership will additionally serve as an opportunity for the two organizations to collaborate on conducting IPTV research and development in the areas of multicast and IPv6. OSTN and CUDI will also collaborate on developing an OSTN Channel for Spanish speaking universities.

For more information on CUDI, visit their website at http://www.cudi.edu.mx

CLARA Activities

EU Agreement Extends Latin American Research Through 2008

Collaboration between scientists and researchers in Latin America and their peers across the globe is to be continued through funding and network expansion. Co-funding from the European Union for the ALICE project, which is responsible for the RedCLARA network, has been extended until 2008. Additionally, regional not-for-profit organization CLARA is expanding its role by increasing staff and taking greater responsibility for the running and administration of the network.

Since its creation in 2004, RedCLARA has become fundamental to Latin American research and education, now linking 12 countries and 750 universities across the continent at speeds of up to 622 Mbps. It has provided Latin American scientists and researchers with the ability to collaborate both regionally and as part of the global research community, through links to the European GÉANT2 and U.S. Internet2 research and education networks.

For the complete GRID Today article, visit http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/1548338.html

To find out more about CLARA, visit http://www.redclara.net/

ANSP Activities

The FAPESP approved a new model of financing of the ANSP network (Academic Network at São Paulo), that included the support of the São Paulo state research institutions, with the objective of partially financing access to the internet.

The institutions’ telecommunications infrastructure support will be implemented by means of an Institutional Technical Backup for Connectivity to the Net ANSP, whose norms for utilization were approved by the Technical-Administrative Advice of the FAPESP, at a May 2, 2007 meeting.

To find out more about ANSP, visit http://www.nara.org.br/

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

The WHREN-LILA newsletter is intended to provide useful, up-to-date information about WHREN-LILA through short articles with web links and email addresses. Newsletters will be posted on the WHREN-LILA website (www.ciara.fiu.edu/whren). If you have colleagues who would like to subscribe to this monthly newsletter, send them to: http://www.ampath.net/mailman/listinfo/whren-today.

If you would like to be removed from the WHREN Monthly Report mail list, you may unsubscribe at: http://www.ampath.net/mailman/listinfo/whren-today.