How Companies Can Share Joint Disaster Recovery Hot Sites
August 26, 2008

IT staff at Bowdoin College in Maine and Loyola Marymount University in California are building a joint disaster recovery facility, with each institution hosting a disaster recovery hot site for the other.

The CIOs at both schools, Bowdoin's Mitch Davis and LMU's Erin Griffin, say that their experience can be a model for other cooperative IT projects, even among business rivals.

...

Griffin describes the basic evolution of the project as an almost matter-of-fact process that competent IT professionals are well equipped to handle. "We started by laying out on the table ideas about potential technologies," she says. The team quickly decided to leverage the in-progress changes to both schools' network infrastructure, specifically major network upgrades, a high-bandwidth link to Internet2 and especially server virtualization based on VMware software and blade servers.

Read more: Computer World

HEC launches advanced Pakistan Education and Research Network
August 23, 2008

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has launched the advanced Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN) which has been connected to other global Research and Education Networks (RENs) which include the Internet2 of USA, Asia-Pacific Advanced Network of continents of Asia and Australia, and GEANT2 network of National RENs of European countries.

This link is a result of joint efforts of the HEC and the National Science Foundation of USA who equally co-funded a dedicated link from PERN to Internet2.

PERN now has a total R&E link capacity of 155 Mbps and it is now leading in South Asia being three times bigger than the linking capacity of India's Education & Research Network (ERNet) which is connected to global R&E network over a 45 Mbps link.

Read more: Associated Press of Pakistan

Internet2 Partners w/ 100x100 Clean Slate Project
August 20, 2008

Internet2 today announced that it has partnered with the 100x100 Clean Slate Project to provide dedicated nationwide network facilities that will enable researchers to re-examine the basic building blocks of the Internet. Utilizing this national testbed network designed by Rice University and Stanford University, project researchers will work to develop new networking technologies that aim to address the Internet's current challenges including scalability, security, and access.

Conceived in 2003 and funded by the National Science Foundation, the 100x100 Clean Slate Project is examining a new Internet architecture, by asking the question: "If we started over, with what we know today, how would we design the future Internet?" The project brings together economists, security and networking experts, network operators, and policy specialists to create blueprints for a network that goes beyond today's Internet. Drawing on technology trends and the experience of the past 30 years, these scientists are working to re-prioritize the fundamental principles that underlie network design to craft networks that will be ubiquitous in scale, revolutionary in bandwidth, economically self-sustaining, resistant to attack, and tractable to manage.

Read more: HPCwire

BroadbandCensus.com Joins with One Web Day: Learn About Your Internet Options and Take the Census
August 19, 2008

"BroadbandCensus.com is pleased to support One Web Day, and I am very happy to be an Ambassador for this effort.

"Most Americans who have high-speed internet can't imagine life without broadband. How could you connect to the Internet of today without it? In today’s world, broadband is as basic as running water and electricity. And yet the U.S. is falling behind globally.

"As a technology reporter, I’ve been writing about the battles over broadband and the Internet for more than a decade here in Washington. Yet there is one fact about which nearly everyone seems to be in agreement: if America wants better broadband, America needs better broadband data.

"That's why I've recently started a new venture to collect this broadband data, and to make this data freely available for all on the Web at http://BroadbandCensus.com.

"One Web Day presents an opportunity for all of us to take stock with the true state of broadband in this country. BroadbandCensus.com wants to work with each of you to help us 'crowdsource' the data we need to get a better handle on availability, competition, speeds, prices, and quality of service of local broadband."

Read more: BroadbandCensus.com

VSX Videoconferencing System demo!
August 13, 2008

Tomorrow, August 14th, at 2:00 pm, we will have a short demonstration of the new Polycom VSX 7000e system installed in the Academic Building A G005 Collaboratory! The VSX is a powerful and professional videoconferencing system for faculty, student group, and researcher use. We encourage any and all interested to attend this demo.

Read more: VSX Tutorial

A Virtual Teacher
August 11, 2008

Ever since the digital classroom has come online, teachers and students, thrilled over the prospect of accessing new and dynamic multimedia, clamored to computers. Only sometimes, it didn't deliver the promised "gee-whiz" technology.

Instead, time-consuming video downloads or overloaded school networks often led to a disappointing experience. "It is so important that it is now," says Nancy Thompson, a former third- grade teacher. "You can't tell kids, 'Let's wait and see if it's back up.' You've lost that teaching moment."

Thompson, an educational technology specialist with Louisiana Public Broadcasting, says the "now" and the "wow" factors are coming to the digital classroom.

LPB is rolling out new digital television and interactive educational services as it begins to tap into the state's high- powered fiber optic network, LONI. Thousands of teachers across the state are including the services available through LPB Cyberport into their lesson plans, and Louisiana classrooms lead the nation in the number of downloads.

Also known as the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, the system is a fiber optic network that connects Louisiana research universities as well as the Internet, National LambdaRail and Internet2. It provides interconnection between several university- based supercomputer systems and a new supercomputer called Queen Bee [among the top 50 of its kind in the world], based in the state Information Systems building in downtown Baton Rouge, providing more than 85 tera flops of computational capacity [one teraflop equals a trillion floating point operations per second]. Three of LONI's goals are to use its infrastructure to form collaborative relationships with businesses, contribute to science and create jobs.

Read more: redOrbit

European Music Fests Coming to the Web
August 6, 2008

Of all European summer music festivals, the Bayreuth Festival may be the hardest ticket. Devoted to the operas of Richard Wagner, presented in the theater that he built, it receives so many requests for its two-month season that people wait for years to get in. Last Sunday saw the first performance this year of "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" in the 2007 production by Katharina Wagner, the composer's great-granddaughter.

Last year, it was the talk of the season among those who managed to see it. This year, it could be experienced live on your home computer.

For if you don't travel to Europe's festivals this summer, some of them will come to you. If the 49 euros (almost $80) that Bayreuth charged to log on to its first-ever live video transmission was too steep, you could go to the Web site Medici.tv, which this summer has featured live broadcasts from three festivals: Aix-en-Provence, Aspen and Verbier. That same afternoon, free of charge, it was offering a live webcast from Verbier of a chamber concert with violinist Julian Rachlin, cellist Mischa Maosky and pianists Piotr Anderszewski and Nikolai Lugansky, among others. (The last of the site's 27 live webcasts from Verbier - Valery Gergiev leading the festival orchestra and pianist Helene Grimaud - take place Sunday at midnight.)

Read more: ChicagoTribune.com

Media release: AARNet Accelerates Australian and International Innovation and Collaboration
August 1, 2008

AARNet, Australia's National Research and Education Network (NREN) has set another milestone today by launching a 10 Gigabit (Gbit) IP access product. Now for the first time Australian academics and researchers will be able to participate in local and international research projects that require high bandwidth applications to be run or large amounts of data to be exchanged.

The network upgrade was made with an investment of $1 million and it will improve AARNet members' access to the network from 1 Gbit to a 10 Gbit which will increase their access speed into AARNet's existing highly resilient IP backbone. The new 10 Gbit access product will allow Australian researchers to collaborate on international research projects in the areas of physics and astronomy. The upgraded access will also increase the adoption of OptiPortal, an ultra-resolution high definition video collaboration technology amongst Australia's research and education institutions.

Read more: CIO

Total Solar Eclipse: Live from China Webcast Event in Second Life August 1st, 2008
July 30, 2008

The Exploratorium is bringing it's live webcast of the total solar eclipse on August 1st into Second Life. Please join us on Exploratorium island for a webcast viewing party along with interactive about eclipses and the solar system, and regional music and field recordings from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The event begins at 1:00 AM Pacific [4:00 AM Eastern], with the live webcast from 3:30 - 4:30 AM [6:30 - 7:30 AM Eastern].

Details including time help available on our Total Solar Eclipse: Live from China website where you can also view the webcast and follow dispatches from our crew of scientists and media developers in the path of totality in China.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/2008/index.html

Other viewing locations carrying the live webcast include: SciLands Skyditorium, Nanotechnology Skyditorium, Exploratorium Skyditorium, UK Future Focus Skyditorium, Sploland Pi Day Theater, Science School Theater, and the Spindrift Space Theater.

More information about educational programs and outreach events created by the Exploratorium and other museums in Second Life is available on the Museum Virtual Worlds site at: http://museumvirtualworlds.org

Read more: Exploratorium

Internet2 to Provide Dedicated 10Gbps to GENI Effort
July 30, 2008

Internet2, the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium, and BBN Technologies (BBN) announced today that Internet2 will donate dedicated bandwidth on its national backbone to support the GENI Project Office (GPO), located at BBN, and its subcontractors as they build and test prototypes of the GENI system.

GENI is envisioned as a national data communications laboratory, supporting experiments on a wide variety of advanced research in communications, networking, distributed systems, cyber-security, networked services, and applications. It is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Through support from its Board of Trustees, Internet2 will contribute a 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) dedicated circuit throughout its entire nationwide network. GENI subcontractors and developers will be able to access the circuit at every connection point on the network to enable nationwide collaboration on GENI prototypes. BBN is currently negotiating with potential subcontractors who responded to the GPO’s solicitation earlier this year and expects to announce the subcontracts shortly.

Read more: Business Wire

Project to Rebuild Internet Gets $12M, Bandwidth
July 30, 2008

A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations.

Many researchers want to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, saying a "clean-slate" approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet's birth in 1969.

On behalf of the government, BBN Technologies Inc. is overseeing the planning and design of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, a network on which researchers will be able to test new ideas without damaging the current Internet.

Read more: Associated Press

FairPoint Building $56 Million Broadband Network in Northern New England
July 29, 2008

FairPoint Communications will invest more than $56 million in the next five years to build a broadband network reaching nearly every corner of the state.

As a result of this investment, FairPoint will make high-speed Internet service available to approximately 95 percent of its access lines in New Hampshire, and businesses will have expanded access to ultra high-speed, customized, secure transport of voice, video and data services across the region. This investment will enable the company to offer enhanced services on the existing fiber-to-the-premise network in southern New Hampshire and expand high-speed Internet service to approximately 75 percent of its New Hampshire access lines by September 2009.

The new backbone network is designed, equipment has been ordered, and construction is under way.

Read more: SeacoastOnline.com

Broadband Network Continues to Move Forward
July 24, 2008

The CBN Connect broadband network has taken another step forward with the selection of an engineering design firm.

Adesta LLC, based in Omaha, Neb., has been chosen to create the detailed engineering design of the project's first phase.

The fiber-optic core ring will first connect to the members of the Adirondack Champlain Telemedicine Information Network (ACTION) and to Internet2, the next generation of the global computer network.

Read more: PressRepublican.com

The New Age of 911
July 24, 2008

The evolution of 911 service ultimately will allow callers to bypass traditional land lines and cell phones and instead use text messaging and even video phones to report emergencies, a Texas A&M University researcher announced Wednesday.

The projection is the result of Next Generation 911, a two-year and nearly $3 million study funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation, said project Director Walt Magnussen, who also serves as the director of the Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center at A&M.

Read more: Bryan/College Station Eagle

BroadbandCensus.com’s Experience Using the Network Diagnostic Tool as a Beta Speed Test
July 24, 2008

BroadbandCensus.com is a new Web service that provides the public with free information on local broadband availability, competition, speeds and service. By participating in an anonymous online census questionnaire, users can greatly contribute to the knowledge and understanding about the state of the nation’s broadband competition and services - particularly as federal lawmakers consider issues in the development of a national broadband policy.

Read more: BroadbandCensus.com

Work Begins on CBN Connect Broadband Network
July 23, 2008

The Technical Assistance Center at SUNY Plattsburgh announced today that implementation of the first phase of CBN Connect, an open-access broadband fiber and wireless network has begun. This network will provide broadband service to areas in the North Country that are currently without service and that would be likely remain unserved because of the low profitability of laying the necessary cable.

Read more: readMedia Newswire

Internet2 Deploys Experimental Phoebus Service
July 22, 2008

Internet2 today announced it is deploying the Phoebus framework on its network as an experimental research and development prototype that aims to provide significant performance improvements for long distance, high-capacity data transfers like those critical to large-scale research projects like the Large Hadron Collider.

Conceived and under active development by computer science researchers at the University of Delaware, the Phoebus platform embeds greater "intelligence" in the network, enabling it to automatically off-load large data flows from the IP network onto dedicated links on the Internet2 Dynamic Circuit Network (DCN). By transparently moving high-demand applications onto dedicated paths, the project hopes to help users benefit from the improved performance and precise quality of service that characterize circuit networking while at the same time placing far less strain on the shared IP infrastructure.

Read more: Internet2 News

ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs Workshop Hosts IPv6 Challenge
July 21, 2008

The Internet2 IPv6 Working Group today announced it will begin a broad outreach program to help promote the adoption of the IPv6 protocol among the research and education community and beyond. As a first step, the working group has created an IPv6 accessibility challenge for attendees of the ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs meeting hosted this week by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, July 20-24.

IPv6 is the next version of the Internet Protocol, the data packaging and routing standard on which the Internet is based. IPv6 offers several improvements over IPv4. Most importantly, IPv6 vastly increases the number of addresses available from about 4 billion to approximately 340 trillion trillion trillion. According to the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which manages the distribution of Internet number resources (IPv4 and IPv6 address space and Autonomous System Numbers) in Canada, many Caribbean and North Atlantic islands, and the United States, only 19% of IPv4 address space remains available and is depleting quickly.

Read more: Internet2 News

ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs Workshop Plenary Sessions Netcast for Worldwide Viewing
July 18, 2008

The ESnet Site Coordinating Committee (ESCC) and Internet2 Joint Techs Workshop will hold their summer session next week, July 20 - 24, in Lincoln, Nebraska. Hosted by the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, the conference brings together thought leaders in the research and education community to explore and discuss important technology issues and the latest advancements in next-generation networking.

The main plenary sessions held from July 20 - 23 will be netcast for worldwide viewing. IPv6-enabled netcast streams are also planned to be made available. For access to live streams, additional information, as well as archived sessions, visit: http://jointtechs.es.net/nebraska2008/netcast.html

Read more: Internet2 News

Consortium Outlines Goals for Advanced, User-friendly Internet2 Infrastructure
July 11, 2008

The Internet2 consortium has adopted a new five-year strategic plan focused on keeping the national research and education network at the cutting edge of performance while making it easier for nonexperts to use.

"It's a natural leap, focusing not on the bits but on how the bits are used," said Peter Siegel, chief information officer at the University of California, Davis, and chairman of the Internet2 Steering Committee’s Research Advisory Council.

The Internet2 community also wants to encourage a national telecommunications policy to support an infrastructure for new communications needs, such as telemedicine.

Read more: Government Computer News

FairPoint Expanding High-speed Services
July 10, 2008

FairPoint Communications is expanding its high-speed Internet service to 26 communities in Vermont.

FairPoint announced Wednesday that its plan is on target to increase access to high-speed Internet service to 75 percent of its lines by the end of the year. It means FairPoint will offer for the first time or expand existing service in 90 Vermont communities in all 14 counties, including many sparsely populated areas that previously had no access to broadband service.

Read more: Times Argus Online

University of Michigan Fiber Optic Cable-link Deal Lifts Researchers' Data Sharing
July 10, 2008

A powerful fiber-optic connection secured about four years ago is expected to play a greater role in facilitating collaboration between the state's universities.

The connection got stronger in June as the University of Michigan Board of Regents approved a licensing agreement that allows the Michigan Information Technology Center Foundation to link into the university's fiber-optic cable connection to the rest of the state.

The agreement facilitates improved communication among the state's research universities and is expected to improve data connections for research projects at other universities, said John King, U-M's vice president for academic information.

The MITC Foundation is a legal entity that essentially consists of Ann Arbor nonprofits Internet2 and Merit Network. They provide critical data transportation and communication services to other universities as well, such as Eastern Michigan.

Read more: mlive.com

NIU offers high-speed network to Hoffman, Naperville
July 9, 2008

Northern Illinois University is offering communities like Hoffman Estates and Schaumburg what's touted as a rare opportunity.

It's to join NIUnet, a next-generation high-speed computer network that's touted as leaving DSL and cable modems in the digital dust.

...

NIUnet is a high-speed network that's driven by researchers and referred to as Internet2. The Web's growing popularity has led to increased use and slower connection speeds, which is a problem for researchers whose projects go beyond surfing the Web.

Read more: Daily Herald

Announcement - ESCC Joint Techs Workshop, 20-24 July, Nebraska
July 2, 2008

Registration is open for the ESnet Site Coordinating Committee (ESCC) and Internet2 Summer Joint Techs Workshop on 20-24 July, hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Read more: International Science Grid This Week

The Next Generation of the Internet - Third Installment
June 30, 2008

One thing that easy to forget is that we actually have the next version of the Internet in operation at the moment. It is called the Internet2, and is a very clear picture as to where the commodity Internet we all use will go. If you are not aware of the Internet2, it is a completely new set of infrastructure, standards, and protocols that adds up to a new backbone for carrying Internet traffic at dramatically higher speeds. The consortium operating the Internet2 includes 212 universities, 70 corporations, and 45 affiliate members. This does not include the various government entities that normally like to go invisible as to their capabilities.

So how much faster is the Internet 2? Check out the chart at the right to see where we are. Just so you can understand this, most organizations are currently at the 1988 speeds on the chart. The bottom line is that the next generation of the Internet will be MUCH faster than what we currently use. It is now an appropriate time to ask the "so what" question. Good question, and let's address it...

Read more: TechnologyStory.com

Group Pushes for High-Speed Internet Access for All
June 24, 2008

A coalition of academics, information technology industry leaders and public-policy advocates will launch a campaign today to make "access to a fast, open and affordable Internet a basic right for all Americans."

Federal Communications Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein was among the scheduled speakers in New York on Tuesday at the Personal Democracy Forum to announce the creation of InternetforEveryone.org. Other participants in the news conference included Google chief technology evangelist and Internet patriarch Vinton Cerf, in addition to law professors and entrepreneurs.

...

Its membership roster includes 40 organizations and companies from the American Civil Liberties Union to Yale Information Society Project, industry leaders eBay.com and Google, and technology innovators such as Internet2.

Read more: Redmond

'Astronomy Without Borders' on Show in China
June 20, 2008

'We're now in the age of astronomy without borders,' said Dr Tasso Tzioumis of CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF). 'From a single operations centre we can make huge streams of precisely time-linked data flow simultaneously between several countries, at gigabits per second.'

The demonstration was made on Tuesday 17 June at Shanghai Observatory during the 7th annual international meeting on 'e-VLBI' or electronic very long baseline interferometry. E-VLBI is the technique of simultaneously using telescopes hundreds or thousands of kilometres apart to form a single coordinated system.

Dr Tzioumis, Dr Chris Phillips and Dr Shaun Amy, all from CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility, worked with their Chinese and Japanese colleagues to control the 25-m radio telescope of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, the 34-m telescope of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Kashima, Japan, and the CSIRO radio telescopes near Parkes, Coonabarabran and Narrabri in New South Wales.

Read more: Science Centric

OASIS Launches SAML XML.org Online Community
June 17, 2008

The OASIS international standards consortium today introduced a new XML.org online community web site dedicated to supporting the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). The site (http://saml.xml.org) will serve as the official information resource for the SAML OASIS Standard, which provides an XML-based framework for online partners to exchange user authentication, entitlement, and attribute information.

"SAML is recognized as the gold standard for federated identity," said Eve Maler, director of technology in Business Alliances at Sun Microsystems. "OASIS has created SAML XML.org as a way to enable users, developers, vendors, and other standards efforts from around the world to share information and learn from one another. Sun has taken an active role in SAML's spec development, product support, interoperability, and education since its earliest days, and we're delighted to see the launch of this new resource."

Read more: Business Wire

News from OECD Ministerial Meeting: The Internet Technical Community Issues Memorandum on the Future of the Internet in a Global Economy
June 16, 2008

The Internet technical community, including the Internet Society, RIPE NCC, APNIC and W3C, today issues a memorandum to Governments, civil society and the private sector to ensure that human capacities are enhanced or enabled through creativity, confidence and that the convergence of Internet technology is preserved.

Read more: StreetInsider.com

UNESP Announces Largest Cluster in Latin America
June 16, 2008

UNESP (São Paulo State University) has this semester begun to set up the largest computational cluster in Latin America, on seven different sites in the State of São Paulo. GridUNESP (Computational Capacity Integration at UNESP), powered by Sun Microsystems' technology, will allow research groups at the university access to the highest levels of data processing and storage capacity for particle physics, genetics, meteorology, medicine, and other areas of scientific investigation.

The central system, which will be installed at the new UNESP campus in Barra Funda, São Paulo, will have 2,048 processing cores and a performance capacity of about 23.2 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) for the whole cluster (a system with various linked processing nodes, which operate as if they were one single computer). The complex formed by the central cluster and another seven will reach 33.3 teraflops.

Read more: GRIDtoday

On Internet2, the Future is Fast-forward
June 16, 2008

The Energy Department’s Energy Sciences Network is growing with increased bandwidth demands. The latest generation of the network, ESnet4, is a 100 gigabits/sec optical network; the department has projected that it would require 200 gigabits/sec by 2014.

The ESnet backbone is provided by Internet2 and Level 3 Communications, and its bandwidth is achieved by aggregating 10 gigabits/ sec optical channels. Increasing the size of the common interface can easily increase available bandwidth on existing fiber optic cable.

"Before they use up their capacity, we will be ready with the next generation technology," said Randy Brogle, senior director of Level 3’s research and education division.

The next wave of interfaces will work at 40 gigabits/sec, and a number of commercial networks already are moving to that technology rather than bundling 10 gigabits/ sec channels.

Read more: Government Computer News

Internet2 Opens HOV Lanes
June 16, 2008

As Big Science gets bigger, demands on research networks to enable collaboration are growing exponentially. The Energy Department has seen traffic on its Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which links researchers at its major research labs and universities, increase tenfold every 47 months since 1990.

"To a certain extent, this is inevitable," said William Johnston, ESnet department head at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Scientific instruments follow Moore’s law," and more sensitive and powerful instruments are producing more data.

As a smaller number of larger, more sophisticated instruments are built, collaboration communities are growing and sharing more data. ESnet had an average steady-state load of 1.5 gigabits/sec on its New York-Chicago- San Francisco link in July 2006. This summer, the granddaddy of all scientific instruments, the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is expected to go online, promising a quantum leap in the amount of experimental data being shuttled among scientists worldwide.

"A bandwidth of 10 gigabits/sec site-to-site connectivity is needed now," according to a 2006 DOE assessment of the needs of ESnet, "and 100 gigabits/sec will be needed by 2010."

In fact, that capacity is already here. The bandwidth is being provided for ESnet through a 2006 partnership with Internet2, an advanced research and education network operated by a consortium of companies, universities and other organizations. The backbone is from Level 3 Communications, which finished the 13,500-mile optical fiber network for Internet2 in June 2007.

Read more: Government Computer News

XO to Demo 100 Gigabit Ethernet Service
June 12, 2008

XO Communications will team up with optical vendor Infinera next week to demonstrate how 100 Gigabit Ethernet traffic can be sent over 10 10Gbps wavelengths.

XO, a competitive local exchange carrier based in Herndon, Va., says that it will send a 100GbE signal on a loop from the NXTComm08 convention floor in Las Vegas over its long-haul Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) network to Los Angeles and back. To conduct this test, XO says it will reply on Infinera's DTN DWDM system to switch and transport the signal from the show floor to XO's DWDM network. Additionally, XO will use a test package developed by testing-equipment vendor Ixia to generate the 100GbE signal that will travel over the network.

The goal of the test is to show how 100GbE can be delivered using existing network infrastructures, XO CTO Randy Nicklas says. The key to sending and receiving 100GbE signals smoothly over multiple 10Gbps wavelengths is using Infinera's Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC)-enabled DTN system that is capable of integrating different optical components and sending them to be reassembled at their destination, he says.

Read more: Network World

Seven Telescopes Act as One
June 11, 2008

The huge Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico, operated by Cornell University in cooperation with the National Science Foundation, recently was networked with six other telescopes in Chile, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, South Africa and Sweden to create one of the largest virtual telescopes ever assembled.

The telescopes were linked via high-speed research and education networks serving North America and Europe using a combination of techniques to overcome the drawbacks of common networking protocols in sharing large volumes of data for immediate use. Using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the result was the equivalent of a single telescope nearly 11,000 kilometers in diameter making real-time observations of quasar 3C454.3.

The experiment was conducted by Express Production Real-time e-VLBI Service, a three-year project funded by the European Commission.

Internet2, the U.S. advanced research and education network, handled some of the transport of the real-time signals.

Read more: Government Computer News

Internet2 Board of Trustees
June 06, 2008

Internet2 recently named its board of trustees. The group has representatives in the academia, research and technology industries. The CEO representatives are Jean-Lou Chameau, California Institute of Technology; Jared Cohon, Carnegie Mellon University; Mary Sue Coleman, University of Michigan; and Michael Crow, Arizona State University. The trustees are Jeffrey Lehman, chairman, Cornell University; James Bottum, Clemson University; Molly Corbett Broad, UNC/ACE; Chameau; Cohon; Coleman, Crow; Raymond Ford, University of Montana; David Frohnmayer, University of Oregon; David E. Jent, I-Light; Timothy L. Lance, NYSERNet; Michael R. Nelson, Georgetown University; Larry L. Peterson, Princeton University; Edward Seidel, Louisiana State University; Peter Siegel, University of California, Davis; and Douglas E. Van Houweling, Internet2. Bottum is the CIO representative; Peterson is the network researcher representative. Seidel is the discipline researcher representative; Nelson is the industry representative.

Read more: mlive.com

Network Monitoring Tool Released by GÉANT2 to Boost Network Efficiency for Scientists & Researchers
June 02, 2008

GÉANT2, the high bandwidth, pan-European research and education network, has announced the release of the latest software bundle that is used to deliver the perfSONAR multi-domain monitoring (MDM) service across a number of key European National Research and Education Network (NREN) sites.

This release is the result of collaborative efforts from 11 different organisations around the world and forms the first stage of the full deployment of the perfSONAR MDM service across the whole GÉANT2 pan-European backbone.

The perfSONAR MDM service enables fast troubleshooting by providing secure, user-friendly access to standardised network performance metrics from multiple domains. Using its out-of-the-box or customised web-interfaces, network problems and performance bottlenecks can be tracked and resolved, and potential performance issues can be identified. Specifically, information that network administrators access through perfSONAR MDM has the same meaning across the board enabling operators to discuss problems which span multiple domain boundaries on a communal basis and to collaborate more successfully.

Read more: PublicTechnology.net

Internet2 to Extend Leading-Edge Networking to SC08
May 30, 2008

SCinet, the very high-performance network built each year to support the SC Conference, pushes the advanced networking envelope to enable some of the most demanding and cutting-edge applications in the world. Preparation for SC08, the annual international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis to be held in Austin, Texas on 15-21 November 2008, is currently underway.

Internet2 is collaborating with the SCinet committee, in partnership with the Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN) and its members in Texas, to support the networking requirements of participants and exhibitors at SC08. Internet2 will provide connectivity to its IP and dynamic circuit networks, as well as a limited number of dedicated WaveCo circuits. Current plans include:

• 20 Gbps of service to the advanced Internet2 IP Network
• 10 Gbps of service to the Internet2 Dynamic Circuit Network (DCN)
• A limited number of additional Internet2 WaveCo circuits to support specific applications

Read more: Internet2 News

Fujitsu Teams with Indiana University on Optical Communications Research
May 30, 2008

Fujitsu Network Communications, a provider of IT and wireline/wireless networking solutions, has teamed with Indiana University (IU) on breakthrough research about the effects that Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) can have on specific wavelengths traveling at 40 Gbps or more.

"Our collaboration with Fujitsu has allowed us to interact with the scientists from one of the leading research entities in optical networking," said Brad Wheeler, vice president for information technology and CIO at Indiana University.

"Together, using advanced technology from Fujitsu, we were able to discover several optical characteristics that will have a profound implication on high speed networking across the globe. Our experience continues to be extremely positive, and we look forward to future research projects with Fujitsu."

The Global Research Network Operations Center (GRNOC) of IU offers dark fiber between Indianapolis and Bloomington, Indiana, together with access to patch panels, electrical power, the Internet, and physical space to conduct the tests. Fujitsu and IU teamed on the test plan to ensure that collected data can be used to influence future optical networking research and commercial products.

Read more: TMCnet

Beijing2008.cn Leaps to Next Generation Net
May 30, 2008

The official website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games (www.beijing2008.cn) upgraded to the IPv6 system, the next generation Internet, on Friday.

It is the first time in the history of the Olympic Games that an Olympic website has been developed using high-speed IPv6 technology.

The announcement was made at a press conference, where the launching of the domain -- ipv6.beijing2008.cn -- was witnessed by officials from Tsinghua University, the China Education Research Network (CERNET), the Technology Department of BOCOG and Sohu.com, the Internet content sponsor of the Beijing Olympic Games.

From now on, IPv6 users across the world can visit www.beijing2008.cn through China's next generation Internet CNGI-CERNET2.

Read more: The Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games

Experts Highlight Security Trends for Hospitals, Offices & Schools at Symposium
May 29, 2008

"About 10 percent or more of U.S. healthcare workers are assaulted each year," said Tony W. York, CPP, CHPA, president, International Association for Healthcare Security & Safety (IAHSS) to security professionals attending the "Serious About Security - 2008 Symposium" at the Intercontinental Hotel Conference Center-Cleveland Clinic Campus, Cleveland.

Sponsored by turnkey access control provider, Matrix Systems of Dayton, OH, the recent symposium also featured security expert presentations from Texas A & M University (TAMU), College Station, TX; medical imaging manufacturer, Carestream Health of Rochester, NY; and Security Risk Management Consultants of Columbus, OH. The symposium also featured a tour of the access control and security system command center controlling/monitoring the 1.5-square-mile Cleveland Clinic's campus, home to the largest heart hospital in the US.

York, who is also senior vice president-security at Hospital Shared Services, bases his assaults estimate on a recent meeting with officials from the National Health Services (NHS), the United Kingdom's publicly-funded healthcare system. "We don't have a national incident reporting system here, but the NHS reports 55,000 assaults on UK healthcare workers last year and they suspect at least another 55,000 incidents weren't reported," said York during his "Security Design Considerations for the Healthcare Market" presentation. "That's 110,000 assaults in a healthcare system with only 1.3 million employees."

Read more: FacilityBlog

Internet2 Expands Schools' Possibilities
May 27, 2008

Thanks to a partnership with nearby research universities, students at Georgia's Barrow County Schools have used a high-definition video link to the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta to control cameras and view images of sea life remotely from their classrooms; learned calculus from Georgia Tech instructors using a "virtual whiteboard" application; and interacted with researchers on the ocean floor near Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary just off Sapelo Island, Ga., among other activities.

Barrow County is one of several K-12 school districts that have teamed up with member universities belonging to the ultra high-speed Internet2 network, giving them access to this advanced higher-education research network and the many opportunities for learning that it affords.

Read more: eSchool News

HEC Initiates High Speed Internet Access for Universities
May 24, 2008

The Higher Education Commission has initiated a project of multi gigabit network titled "Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN2)" for the education and research community of the country.

This multi gigabit network will replace the existing network of PERN which is primarily based on legacy telecommunication system.

The PERN2 will interlink all public and private sectors academic and research institutes of the country through metro fiber ring using Multi Gigabit Metro Ethernet technology in the seven metro cities of Pakistan.

Read more: Associated Press of Pakistan

EXPReS Project Creates 11,000km Real-time Virtual Telescope
May 23, 2008

For the first time yesterday, members of the EXPReS project (Express Production Real-time e-VLBI Service) simultaneously linked telescopes in Africa, Europe, North America and South America to the central data correlator in the Netherlands, simulating a telescope almost 11,000 kilometers in diameter.

Telescopes in Chile, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, South Africa and Sweden simultaneously observed quasar 3C454.3 and additional targets and streamed data to the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE). There the data was correlated in real-time, and results were transmitted to Bruges, Belgium, as part of a live demonstration at the TERENA Networking Conference 2008.

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Data from all seven telescopes was routed across numerous networks, including: AtlanticWave, AMPATH, Centennial, DFN, GÉANT2 (operated by EXPReS project member DANTE), Internet2, Netherlight (operated by EXPReS project member SURFnet), NGIX, RedCLARA, Reuna, SANReN, StarLight and TENET.

Read more: HPCwire

Free Videoconferencing Services for the Month of May
May 2008

ALL Commons services [offered by the Internet2 Commons], both current and new ..., are FREE during the month of May 2008. Everyone is encouraged to try out the Commons services, demonstrate them to your organizations, etc. As always, Commons services can only be requested by a certified site coordinator.

Read more: Internet2 Commons

InCommon Provides Online Identity Management Platform for Microsoft DreamSpark Program
May 20, 2008

InCommon(R), the first nationwide U.S. identity management federation for higher education, and Microsoft Corp. today announced that InCommon's platform will be the preferred verification method for U.S. students to access software in Microsoft's DreamSpark program. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, announced the DreamSpark offering at a special event held at Stanford University in February. DreamSpark provides professional development and design tools free of charge to students in ten countries around the world.

"Microsoft's participation in the InCommon Federation provides us with a more seamless and scalable pathway to collaborating with our important university partners," said Jim Pinkelman, director of U.S. Academic Relations for Microsoft. "We look forward to working with the Federation to engage members of the university community in a new way by extending a more user- and privacy-friendly environment that can provide access to a wider array of Microsoft's online resources."

The InCommon Federation is a non-profit initiative of Internet2 which serves the U.S. higher education sector. The Federation has close to two million users at over 80 higher education institutions and service providers and continues to rapidly expand. The InCommon Federation works by linking a resource provider's online system to a partner university's identity management system. When a student logs into the resource provider site, they are asked for their university credentials. The university system is then able to "vouch for" or "authenticate" the student, staff, or faculty to enable their access to that online resource without releasing an individual's personal information. Personal information release can be adjusted and controlled easily, based on the partnership between the university and the online resource.

Read more: Internet2 News

UM System, Jackson Lab to Get Super-Fast Net Service
May 18, 2008

The University of Maine System has hired Oxford Networks to provide the state's universities and colleges and The Jackson Laboratory with high-speed Internet access.

Oxford Networks will extend its infrastructure 140 miles south to the Internet2 network in Boston. Internet2 is an advanced, super high-capacity nationwide broadband network for research and education purposes.

"The Jackson Laboratory is extremely excited about this, the final leg of our high-speed connectivity to the Internet and Internet2," said Scott McNeil, Jackson Lab's chief information officer. "The culmination of this portion of the route is key to our success and that of the University of Maine System."

The University of Maine System has been connected to Internet2 for at least a decade, but with bandwidth it leased. In partnership with Jackson Lab, the university system will build its own network, allowing it to oversee - and dramatically increase - its own bandwidth, speed and capability.

Read more: redOrbit

One in Four Data Breaches Involves Schools
May 14, 2008

Cyber criminals are becoming bolder and more sophisticated in their operations, federal computer security experts say. And that's bad news for schools, because educational institutions reportedly account for approximately one of every four data security breaches.

At a recent Educause/Internet2 conference for computer security professionals, federal and private-sector officials discussed the evolution of cyber criminals and the latest group of security threats. Their goal was twofold: to share strategies for protecting campus information, and to press upon school leaders the importance of educating a new generation of cyber defenders.

"A big shift is occurring: Hackers are becoming thieves, and everything from intellectual property to identities are being stolen in record numbers," said Brian Foster, vice president of product management for Symantec Corp.

Read more: eSchool News

Field Trips with a Virtual Twist
May 14, 2008

As the surgery progressed before them, the 30 juniors and seniors in John Redelsheimer's class reacted to crystal-clear images of sliced flesh and bone with predictable groans and urrrghs. They asked questions of the surgical staff, such as how long the implant might last, and how a full and partial knee replacement differ.

Students in the Robbinsdale Armstrong High School anatomy and physiology class observed Wednesday as a surgeon in Columbus, Ohio, performed total knee-replacement surgery on an 85-year-old woman. And they didn't even board a bus.

Students in the Robbinsdale district are among a select group for whom technological expertise and resources have aligned to allow them to take an e-field trip -- in this case, to Dr. Joel Politi's operating room. Other classes have been to the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minn., a classroom in Egypt and a village in Mozambique.

The session was sponsored by COSI, a science center in Columbus, Ohio. It was made possible by Web-driven video-conferencing technology via Internet2, a superfast network linking universities, industry and government. The basic technology -- the cameras and microphones -- isn't new, but schools haven't been able to use it fully until recently because most lack that fast, powerful connection.

Read more: StarTribune.com

Concordia Project Tackles Policy and Entitlements Management at Burton Group Catalyst Conference 2008
May 13, 2008

The Concordia Project, a global cross-industry initiative formed by members of the standards community to drive harmonization and interoperability among open standards, policy initiatives and protocols, today announced a public standards-based policy and entitlements management workshop taking place from 10:00am to 5:00pm at the Burton Catalyst Conference in San Diego on June 23, 2008. The public meeting is sponsored by Liberty Alliance and Burton Group and is the first Concordia event to focus on policy and entitlements management and associated standards such as XACML and WS-Policy. The interactive session will feature use case and interoperability scenarios presented by representatives from the defense, government and manufacturing sectors. Registration and more information about the June 23 Concordia Project workshop is available at http://tinyurl.com/4dvtpa.

Read more: News Blaze

Techie Video Contests
May 5, 2008

Creative types interested in digital culture may want to enter a couple tech-related video contests.

In one, Total Recut has solicited video entries that answer the question "What Is Remix Culture?" Participants should submit videos that remix previously published video footage. The contest is intended to "promote awareness of remix culture in an educational capacity and to encourage the fair use of a wide variety of content." It is being judged by a number of well-known scholars and artists, including Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology comparative media studies program Henry Jenkins. (Find some examples of video remixes here.)

In another opportunity, college students are asked to submit computer security awareness posters and videos for a contest sponsored by the Educause/Internet2 Computer and Network Security Task Force in cooperation with the ResearchChannel and CyberWatch. Entries should "explain computer security problems and specific actions college and university students can take to safeguard their computers or personal information."

Read more: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Ciena Solutions to Receive Interoperability Assessment and Optical Standards Conformance Certification for Use in Department of Defense Networks
May 5, 2008

Ciena(R: 70.91, -0.12, -0.16%) Corporation (NASDAQ:CIEN), the network specialist, today announced the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) has completed testing of Ciena's CN 4200(R: 70.91, -0.12, -0.16%) FlexSelect(TM: 101.35, +0.79, +0.78%) Advanced Services Platform, CoreDirector(R: 70.91, -0.12, -0.16%) Multiservice Optical Switch and CoreStream(R: 70.91, -0.12, -0.16%) Agility Optical Transport System for optical standards and interoperability in Department of Defense (DOD: 9.29, -0.15, -1.58%) networks. The JITC testing verifies that the Ciena WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) and optical switching products adhere to various contract and testing requirements required by the DOD, making the purchase and deployment of the platforms by approved agencies for use within DOD networks an easier process.

Read more: FOX Business

FireEye Brings Anti-Botnet Protection to Higher Ed
May 5, 2008

FireEye, Inc., the leader in global anti-botnet protection, continues its anti-botnet offensive, helping educational institutions overcome their unique challenges to rid campus networks of stealth malware and botnets. In support of this effort, chief investigator Dr. Michael J. Staggs will co-present at the EDUCAUSE Security Professionals Conference, Security 2008, being held May 4-6, 2008 in Arlington, Va. He will be joined by FireEye customer Fred Archibald, network manager, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) for the University of California at Berkeley in a discussion entitled "FireEye, Inc. and UC Berkeley: Combating Stealth Malware and Botnets in Higher Education."

Read more: Business Wire

U.S. Internet, Health IT Prospects Improving
May 1, 2008

An international report ranks the United States' Internet infrastructure among the best in the world, tempering dire predictions of Internet traffic jams and suggesting the U.S. system is getting better, not worse.

With a rural broadband health project under way and new political fervor for health IT brewing, prospects for online health applications in the U.S. are looking better as well, some experts say.

Read more: iHealthBeat

Spring 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting Streaming Video Available!
April 30, 2008

All of the netcasted events from the Spring 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting are now available as streaming video! Go here to find out more.

Read more: Spring Internet2 Member Meeting Home

CANARIE: Theatre Over Advanced Networks Wins Canadian Partner an International Award
April 29, 2008

ORION and CANARIE congratulate the University of Waterloo and its partners in Illinois and Florida on winning the prestigious Internet2 IDEA Award for their ground-breaking collaborative live theatre production.

The experimental performance of the 1923 Elmer Rice play "The Adding Machine", over high-speed networks, enabled by advanced digital video technology, was one of three projects recognized at the Internet2 spring meeting in Arlington, Virginia.

"We are proud that we were able to help make this breakthrough cultural experiment so successful" said ORION President/CEO Phil Baker.

Read more: marketwire.com

Identity Management Streamlined at University of Texas Campuses
April 28, 2008

As a powerful collaboration tool, the Internet poses a dilemma. Asking institutions to open their IT systems to users at other institutions, so that far-flung partners can work together, is like asking all homeowners to leave their doors unlocked. Trusted neighbors can drop by easily, but so can vandals and thieves.

On the other hand, if institutions ramp up security on their networks, that makes collaboration inconvenient. Imagine the level of community spirit in a neighborhood where you have to show identification and give a password to drop off your child for a play date at one home, and submit to a retina scan to join a bridge game at another.

Faced with a mandate to encourage collaboration and an equally urgent directive to better safeguard IT systems, the University of Texas (UT) produced a solution based on technology and carefully defined relationships. UT's Identity Management Federation lets participants at the university's 16 institutions use local credentials for secure access to remote resources.

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In 2004, using seed money from the National Science Foundation's Middleware Initiative, UT officials laid the foundation for the Identity Management Federation. The technology mechanism they chose was Shibboleth, an open source middleware solution based on Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). Shibboleth was developed by the networking consortium Internet2.

Read more: Government Technology

Laptop Orchestras Bridge the Distance
April 28, 2008

A couple of dozen Stanford music students lie flat on their stomachs or kneel on cushions in a campus rehearsal space, eyes fixed on laptop computer screens.

The room fills with what sounds like a humming chorus of tuned water-bowls; actually, it's the computer-generated equivalent. Conductor Ge Wang, gesturing, seems to push the pulsing chorus from one side of the orchestra to the other, as the musicians stroke the keys of their MacBooks.

On Tuesday, they will perform - in real time, via the Internet, in front of a live audience at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium - with musicians from Beijing University, 6,000 miles distant. With the aid of giant video screens, both groups will hear, watch and play along with each other.

Forty years after the Beatles, this is the real magical mystery tour: global music-making without setting foot in a bus or on a plane. And love is no longer all you need; what's needed is high-quality streaming audio, along with Internet2 video-networking in the service of music.

Read more: MercuryNews.com

'Evolution of the Internet' Powers Massive LHC Grid
April 23, 2008

jbrodkin brings us a story about the development of the computer network supporting CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which will begin smashing particles into one another later this year. We've discussed some of the impressive capabilities of this network in the past.

"Data will be gathered from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which hosts the collider in France and Switzerland, and distributed to thousands of scientists throughout the world. One writer described the grid as a 'parallel Internet.' Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid, which oversees the U.S. infrastructure for the LHC network, describes it as an 'evolution of the Internet.' New fiber-optic cables with special protocols will be used to move data from CERN to 11 Tier-1 sites around the globe, which in turn use standard Internet technologies to transfer the data to more than 150 Tier-2 centers. Worldwide, the LHC computing grid will be comprised of about 20,000 servers, primarily running the Linux operating system. Scientists at Tier-2 sites can access these servers remotely when running complex experiments based on LHC data, Pordes says. If scientists need a million CPU hours to run an experiment overnight, the distributed nature of the grid allows them to access that computing power from any part of the worldwide network"

Read more: Slashdot

Network-Enabled Radio Astronomy Wins First Internet2 Wave of the Future IDEA Award
April 23, 2008

This week at its Spring Member Meeting, Internet2 together with Level 3 Communications announced that the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) is the winner of the first Internet2 IDEA Wave of the Future Award for its recognized leadership in the development and use of a powerful, network-enabled electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI) application. E-VLBI allows "rapid response" science, providing the astronomers the ability to react reliably and quickly to unexpected astronomical events such as supernovae explosions.

The Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) Awards seek to recognize innovators who are developing and deploying advanced applications that are enabling revolutionary progress in research, teaching and learning. For the first time this year, the Wave of the Future category highlights applications that specifically require or make use of a dedicated optical circuit technology.

Read more: PR Newswire

Research and Education Community Collaborates to Deploy Dynamic Circuit Network Capabilities
April 23, 2008

Since the completion of the new Internet2 Network infrastructure last fall, many organizations in the research and education community, including Internet2, several regional network Connectors, universities, national laboratories, as well as international and corporate partners have collaborated to deploy developmental dynamic circuit networking (DCN) capabilities to support a variety of large-scale research projects that require high-performance networking.

Dynamic Circuit Networking-enabled backbone networks, such as Internet2, the Department of Energy's ESnet, and the pan-European GÉANT2 AutoBAHN network, as well as several regional U.S. networks allow users to set up short-term dedicated network paths on demand for high-performance data transfers. In contrast with shared IP-based networks such as the commercial Internet, DCNs offer unprecedented control over dedicated network resources and enable demanding applications to maximize their utilization of the network.

Read more: Internet2 News

Winners of the Annual Internet2 IDEA Awards Announced
April 22, 2008

Today at its annual Spring Member Meeting, Internet2 announced the 2008 winners of its Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) Awards program which seeks to recognize leading innovators who have created and deployed advanced network applications that have enabled transformational progress in research, teaching and learning. This year Internet2 introduced, in partnership with Level 3 Communications, a new award category called the Wave of the Future which focused on applications that specifically require or make use of dedicated optical circuit technology.

This year's IDEA Award winners include Bradley University's production of "The Adding Machine" and the U.S. National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health's "Geography-independent Cancer Research Tools." The IDEA Wave of the Future Award winner is The CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility's "Using Advanced Networks to Transform High-Angular Resolution Astrophysics." The University of Delaware's Phoebus project and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's High-Energy Physics dynamic circuit network data transfer application earned honorable mentions.

Read more: Internet2 News

Yes, Virginia, There Is PBS on Your Colleges' Web Sites
April 22, 2008

You're one of those people who, for whatever reason, can't get enough public television, right? (After all, you read The Chronicle, and PBS really is a fellow traveler.) Maybe it's the gee-whiz science of NOVA, or the savoir-faire of David Brancaccio on NOW, or maybe you just really like to watch pledge drives.

Well, we have good news for you, at least if you are at a college in Virginia. VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia, is now providing access to PBS resources for all of its 70 public and private members in higher education. The organization, a consortium of college and university libraries, has licensed 500 hours of PBS programming, in video form, for streaming over the Internet.

But how to keep out interlopers, and ensure that only members get to watch? Seventy colleges with ever-changing populations of students are hard to police. And smaller campuses simply don't have enough bandwidth for lots of video. So the consortium has begun using InCommon, an "identity management" program developed by Internet2, the university-networking organization.

Read more: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Internet2 Community Releases Shibboleth Version 2.0
April 21, 2008

Internet2 today announced that it has released Shibboleth 2.0, the latest major version of the most widely-deployed federated authentication implementation. Developed by the Internet2 community and its partners around the world, the latest release greatly enhances several key elements of Shibboleth in an effort to ensure interoperability with other commercial and open-source federated identity solutions; to improve personalization and security; as well as to ease installation, management and operation processes.

The goal is to provide a more robust and interoperable platform that will help catalyze the worldwide growth of higher education and research federations like the InCommon Federation which serves the U.S. higher education sector and provides a framework for participating organizations to collaborate and share resources using Shibboleth technology.

Read more: Internet2 News

Work Begins on URI's $15M Inner Space Center
April 17, 2008

Providence-based Gilbane Building Co. this month began construction of the $15 million undersea exploration center at the University of Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay Campus.

The 41,000-square-foot building - dubbed the Inner Space Center - will use satellite and Internet2 systems to give local students the opportunity for live remote interaction with ocean-going expeditions. Construction is expected to be completed in spring 2009, according to Gilbane.

Read more: Providence Business News

Spring 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting Netcast!
April 17, 2008

The Spring 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting will be available through streaming video on the 22nd and 23rd of April! We are working on showing the netcasts on campus (further details to follow), but the links to the netcasts themselves can be found here. (The streaming links will appear once the event in question is live.)

Some of the sessions to be netcast include "Campus Cyber-infrastructure", "Science in the Cinema Via Videoconferencing", "Dynamic Circuits and Commercial Implementations of Dynamic Circuits", "Virtual Worlds/Educational Gaming Panel", and many more!

Read more: Spring Internet2 Member Meeting Home

Fujitsu Collaborates with Indiana University on Optical Communications Research
April 17, 2008

Fujitsu Network Communications, a leading supplier of IT and wireline/wireless networking solutions, announced today that they are successfully collaborating with Indiana University (IU) on breakthrough research about the effects that Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) can have on specific wavelengths traveling at 40 Gbps or more. This collaboration experience between two leading research entities, which was facilitated by their active involvement with Internet2, will be the model for future research networking experiments between Fujitsu and other Research & Education (R&E) institutions.

Read more: BusinessWire.com

Internet2 K20 Initiative Launches Social Networking Site for Faculty, Administrators, and Students
April 16, 2008

The Internet2 K20 Initiative today announced that it has launched a brand new social networking site called Muse (http://k20.internet2.edu/) which seeks to significantly enhance collaboration, information-sharing and technology opportunities for the over 50,000 K-12 schools, community colleges, libraries and museums in 38 U.S. states that are now connected to the Internet2 backbone network. The site is also expected to provide a better bridge between the U.S. K20 community and its international counterparts worldwide. Within the short time since launching, the new site has already experienced significant uptake within the community.

Read more: Internet2 News

Collaborative Security Initiatives Spark Interest
April 14, 2008

IT executives who flocked to the RSA Conference heard more evidence that enterprise networks are increasingly vulnerable. An estimated 250,000 computers are compromised every day, says Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of the BSA.

The number of exploits is seven times higher than it was a year ago, and the cyberthreat is "growing exponentially," he said.

While vendors are rallying to improve enterprise security options, no one suggests it will be easy. A number of the 550 speakers at RSA highlighted the need for more industry collaboration to better fight the threats.

Read more: CIO India

ID Theft Monitor Draws RSA Conferees
April 11, 2008

On a flat-screen television monitor in the basement of Moscone Center in San Francisco, thieves are buying and selling stolen identities.

To the right of the screen is a list of the hackers' nicknames - Bitzers, Blacknet, Block13 and so on. On the left are the offers of the personal information they're selling: "SSN DOB USA 4$ BEST PRICE."

"He's guaranteed to be a victim of identity theft," said Tim Lukens, a vice president at Affinion Group, as he watched a sample name, phone number, e-mail and mother's maiden name of one unfortunate man scroll by. "He just doesn't know it yet."

The screen was capturing a live recording of an Internet Relay Chat channel, an Internet-enabled conference call where data thieves often congregate. These particular thieves were outside the country, Lukens said - "beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement."

Read more: SFGate

NEC Plots a 100 Gbps Course
April 9, 2008

While the idea of bringing even multiple Kbps or even a megabit was once thought of as science fiction, today enterprises and consumers are getting multiple Mbps and even Gbps of bandwidth. Such traffic is driving service providers to consider migrating to 40 and even 100 Gbps backbones. In the following Audiocast, Sean Buckley, Editor in Chief of Telecommunications, talks to Rocky Kler, vice president and general manager, NEC Corporation of America, Optical Network Systems Division, about the potential of 100 Gbps networking.

Read more: Telecommunications Online

The Cybercrime Economy
April 9, 2008

Dot-coms daunted by the financial downturn would be well advised to look to the cybercrime economy.

Cybercriminals "have very sound business models," said Joe St Sauver, manager of Internet2 Security Programs through the University of Oregon at an RSA Conference panel on Wednesday, "better than many corporate business plans I routinely see."

The conference session, "Deconstructing the Modern Online Criminal Ecosystem," offered interesting insight into the way the Internet's black market works.

While most of the security professionals I've spoken with at RSA expressed optimism about dealing with future cyberthreats, I find it hard to see where that optimism comes from, given the economics of cybercrime as explained by the participating panelists.

One of them was Larry. He provided no last name and asked that his picture not be published, presumably for his safety. He's the chief investigator for Spamhaus.org, a site that tracks spammers. "It's almost impossible to take these [spam Web sites] down because the DNS changes every five minutes or so," he said.

"Almost impossible" is not the stuff of optimism.

Read more: The InformationWeek BLOG

HEC Launches Research, Education Connection with US Foundation
April 9, 2008

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) of United States of America (USA) are jointly funding a high performance research and education network connection to support Pak-US Science and Technology collaborations.

This dedicated network will link scientists, research facilities, supercomputers and databases in Pakistan and the US. This project will connect the existing PERN and the developing PERN2 network to the global research and education network infrastructure. This connection will be implemented by a joint purchase of capacity on an undersea cable system connecting PERN/PERN2 in Karachi to an international network connection point in Singapore.

"The launching of new connection is part of HEC's strategy to leap frog forward. We have similar parallel networks connections to connect Pakistan to research networks in Europe, Canada and Korea. The HEC has come of age and it has been successful in creating the infrastructure for best quality research through harnessing technology," said Prof. Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman, Chairman HEC, while speaking as chief guest at the inaugural ceremony of seminar on ‘Dedicated Research and Education Connection between Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN) and Internet2 of the USA'.

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In his welcome speech, Dr. Sohail Naqvi, Executive Director, HEC, termed the new project a dedicated digital motorway between Pakistan and USA.

"Today we are launching a high-speed connection with Internet2 of USA with a complete focus on research. This will not be used for commercial purpose", he said.

Read more: Associated Press of Pakistan

Philadelphia Orchestra's Global Concert Series Continues
April 9, 2008

The Philadelphia Orchestra's Global Concert Series continues with a broadcast of its performance on Thursday, April 10, at 8:00 p.m. (EST). The live concert, with enhanced and interactive content, will be transmitted in HD and Dolby surround sound. This season, dozens of colleges and universities in the United States and Europe have participated in the Global Concert Series program.

The Orchestra has two additional transmissions scheduled for the remainder of the season on May 3, and May 16, 2008.

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The Philadelphia Orchestra is the first major orchestra to transmit live concerts to multiple large screen venues on college and university campuses. Its Global Concert Series, begun in September 2007, is made possible through a partnership among the Orchestra, the Internet2 Consortium, and the presenting schools.

Read more: HULIQ.com

Infinera Boosts Lead in Key Market Segment
April 8, 2008

Infinera (Nasdaq:INFN) confirmed its rapid emergence as a leader in the optical networking market by taking first place for the full year 2007 in a new study of the North American multi-reach DWDM market, and taking fourth place worldwide in that market segment.

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[Among other things, i]n 2007, Infinera: ... extended its reach in the research, education, and government market with wins at BOREAS-Net and the state of New Mexico, while continuing to support Internet2 as it built out its nationwide and metro networks offering connectivity to more than 200 academic and government Internet2 members.

Read more: FOX Business

Security Sleuths Search for a Single Sign-On Solution
April 8, 2008

Security vendors are working to create a single sign-on that would make it easy for users to log on to the Web and to different Web sites. Project Concordia -- formed last year by vendors offering electronic identity products to create a harmonized standard and ensure identity initiatives and protocols can interoperate -- held a series of demonstrations by seven vendors: FuGen Solutions, Internet2, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL), Ping Identity, Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) and Symlabs.

Read more: TechNewsWorld

'Next-Gen Internet' Still Faces Many Questions
April 7, 2008

The blogosphere has been buzzing about a Times Online story from Sunday, talking about the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid and its progress.

The Times characterizes it as a next-generation Internet, in the vein of the Internet2 project which links researchers and universities in the United States. The LHCCG, however, has nodes in Switzerland at CERN, as well as 11 sites elsewhere across the world.

The hook here is that the Large Hadron Collider is close to launching (albeit with concerns from some quarters that it will destroy the world. When it launches, the trillions of gigabytes per year of data it generates will need to be disseminated out to researchers, hence the need for the LHCCG network.

Read more: ExtremeTech

Clemson's Jim Bottum Elected to National Internet2 Board
April 6, 2008

Clemson University employee Jim Bottum has been elected to the board of trustees for Internet2.

The board is comprised of more than 300 member institutions that include universities, corporations, government research agencies and not-for-profit networking organizations.

Read more: independentmail.com

Researchers Squeeze 20-second Clarinet Solo into 1KB File
April 3, 2008

Despite being derided for its lack of resolution and flexibility, no real contender for MIDI's throne has appeared in its 25-year history. Still, Professor Mark Bocko thinks he might have found a superior approach—as long as you like solo clarinet. The end result is a 20-second recording in a file smaller than a single kilobyte.

Related StorieseMusic to charge more for music Making money selling music without DRM: the rise of eMusic A brave new world: the music biz at the dawn of 2008 Indie labels "revolting" against eMusic's low prices? Bocko, department chair for electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester, along with two of his doctoral students, Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling, have combined physical instrument modeling with a simulation of the musician's movements to create a synthesizer that recreates a clarinet solo in a very small data format. But that's not the really interesting part, says Bocko. What makes his technique different from previous synthesis approaches is that it's driven by acoustic analysis.

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The original purpose of the project was to explore real-time musical interaction over the Internet2 network. Upon experimenting, however, Bocko found that the bandwidth of Internet2 was sufficient to transmit actual audio streams with the same latency as a compressed representation, and so the team moved their research in a new direction. They chose the clarinet for modeling because it has been reasonably well-studied, and there are even a few papers on the physics of woodwind reeds in the literature. Also, the availability of a willing clarinet player to volunteer for recording didn't hurt.

Read more: ars technica

Building A Faster Internet
April 2, 2008

A conductor in Tokyo moves his baton, and an orchestra in Cleveland starts to play. A few bars later, a violinist in Berlin joins in. To compensate for a slight delay, the musicians play along with an electronic metronome. The performance is broadcast on high-fidelity speakers and high-definition television. Such a musical experiment would be challenging enough for a television network to pull off; over the Internet, it would be impossible.

That may soon change. Engineers are developing a new type of Internet connection called a dynamic-circuit network that could carry so much data so quickly it might startle even Net surfers in Japan or South Korea. If all goes to plan, the vast data speeds required for such a collaboration may soon be available to all. That might go a long way to solving the problem of how to handle the enormous growth in Internet traffic, which by some estimates is doubling each year.

Read more: Newsweek

ADVA Optical Networking's FSP 3000RE Enables High-Bandwidth Research and Distance Learning Across Growing Georgia Network
April 2, 2008

ADVA Optical Networking today announced that the University System of Georgia has deployed the ADVA Fiber Service Platform (FSP) 3000RE optical transport system to expand PeachNet®, a statewide communications network supporting more than 60 University System of Georgia (USG) sites, as well as other government agencies, education institutions and public libraries in the state. The ADVA Optical Networking solution supports high-bandwidth research and online learning applications - as well as Internet access, video, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and business applications - for millions of users across the state.

Read more: marketwire.com

FireEye Joins Internet2 to Participate in Consortium's Development of High-Performance Network Security and Malware Analysis Initiatives
March 25, 2008

FireEye, Inc., a leader in global anti-botnet protection, today announced that it has joined Internet2 as a corporate member. Internet2 is an advanced networking consortium led by the research and higher education communities. FireEye plans to collaborate with the Internet2 community on advanced network security projects involving high-performance network security and next-generation malware analysis. In addition, FireEye and Internet2 will host a joint webinar titled "Botnet Incident Response" on April 2, 2008. FireEye's chief security content officer Dr. Fengmin Gong will also present "Scaling Security Analysis vs. Next-Gen Botnet Malware Using VM-Based Analysis," at the Spring Internet2 Member Meeting on April 21-23 in Arlington, Va. Harold Stonebraker, a security investigator at FireEye, will present "Incident Response and Network Forensics: Avoiding Common IR Errors."

Read more: Business Wire

Concordia Project to Showcase Identity Management Interoperability at RSA Conference 2008
March 24, 2008

The Concordia Project, a global cross-industry initiative formed by members of the identity community to drive harmonization and interoperability among identity initiatives and protocols, today announced its first interoperability event taking place at RSA Conference 2008 inSan Francisco on Monday, April 7 from 9:00am - 12:30pm. The event will include FuGen Solutions, Internet2, Microsoft, Oracle, Ping Identity, Sun Microsystems and Symlabs demonstrating varying interoperability scenarios using Information Card, Liberty Alliance, and WS-* identity protocols. Over 500 RSA Conference participants have registered to attend the Concordia Project interoperability event to date.

Read more: News Blaze

Internet2 Announces Board of Trustees Election Results
March 18, 2008

Internet2 today announced the results of its 2008 Board of Trustees elections. Representing leaders from academia, research, and industry, Internet2's Board of Trustees provides strategic guidance, directs the setting of priorities, and ensures that Internet2 continues to meet the needs of the research and education community which it serves.

Read more: Internet2 News

RedSky 3rd Generation Location Information Server Chosen for Next Generation 9-1-1 Proof of Concept Test
March 17, 2008

RedSky Technologies, a leading provider of E911 location information management solutions, today announced that its new, 3rd generation Location Information Server (LIS) has been chosen by the US Department of Transportation's Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) Initiative to support Proof of Concept testing of its new NG9-1-1 architecture. The announcement was made at VoiceCon Orlando 2008.

"Our 3rd generation Location Information Server determines the physical location of Voice over IP (VoIP)-enabled devices and communicates this location information back to these devices as well as to next-generation 9-1-1 network elements," says Nicholas Maier, RedSky senior vice president. "We are proud to participate in the development of next-generation location services that will support 9-1-1 service for existing and emerging IP-based devices and next-generation wired and wireless networks."

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The 3rd generation Location Information Server was donated by RedSky to Texas A&M University who will install the server in its Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center (ITEC) laboratory in College Station, TX.

Read more: The Earth Times

JA-SIG Spring Conference Positioned as Premier Open Source Event for Higher Education in 2008
March 17, 2008

JA-SIG, the non-profit organization focusing on the sharing of open technology in higher education, today announced that its JA-SIG Spring 2008 Conference will be expanded to include partners, communities, and solutions for CAS, DSpace, Fedora, Fluid, Internet2 Middleware, Kuali, Sakai, and uPortal. The conference, to be held April 27-30, 2008 in St. Paul, Minnesota, promises to be the premier open source event for higher education in 2008. The conference, themed as "Higher Education Solutions: The Community Source Way!", will feature seminars, presentations, panels, poster sessions, and various educational tracks showcasing cutting-edge community source solutions from each of the collaborating projects. Also at the conference will be a number of commercial partners demonstrating their capabilities and experience with community source projects. For more information on the conference or to register, visit: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/08spring/registration.html.

Read more: marketwire

Bergen Community College Presents "The Ron Mazurek Memorial Concert"
March 14, 2008

Bergen Community College presents a memorial concert for former Bergen professor Dr. Ron Mazurek on Thursday, April 10 and Friday, April 11, 2008 at 7:30 p.m. in the West Hall Recital Hall, 400 Paramus Road, Paramus. This performance will be an interactive collaborative event utilizing Internet2 technology between Bergen and the University of California at Irvine.

Read more: The Paramus Post

High-tech Capabilities Drive Lab's Ongoing Bandwidth Appetite
March 13, 2008

Tucked away within the labyrinth of subterranean hallways beneath The Jackson Laboratory is the world's most powerful optical microscope.

With it, research scientists here are using laser light to visualize in three dimensions such biomolecular wonders as the structure of genetic material within the nucleus of a single cell.

Researchers throughout the world can make use of the instrument, too, as it can be remotely controlled and its imagery distributed digitally to scientists who understand the significance of what they're seeing.

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Working in partnership with the University of Maine, Jackson Lab has spent the last four years expanding its bandwidth capabilities and tapping into Internet2. A research and development consortium involving more than 200 U.S. universities, Internet2 users work closely with industry and government in developing advanced networking capabilities that extend well beyond the limitations of the conventional Internet.

"We needed to go from 20 megabytes to, some people said, up to 1 gigabyte, which is 50 times what we had," said Scott McNeil, the Lab's senior director for informational technology and its chief information officer. "Quite frankly, back then, I didn't believe that."

He does now. Beyond the many other 24/7 bandwidth requirements of the Lab's 38 biomedical research teams, the 4Pi microscope on its own can generate a terabyte of data in a single day. That's the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes, or 1 trillion bytes.

"We had 25 or 26 terabytes over the last 30 years of data storage for the whole lab," McNeil said. "And then suddenly we had this device that can generate a terabyte a day. Not only can you generate it, you have to store it someplace and back it up someplace and deal with how you share it."

Read more: The Ellsworth American

Higher-Education Groups Urge Federal Lawmakers to Oppose File-Sharing Measure
March 12, 2008

A coalition of 13 higher education groups is urging education leaders in Congress to reject a provision in the Higher Education Act approved by the U.S. House of Representatives last month that would require colleges to buy computer tools to detect student music and video piracy and to offer students subscription-based music services.

The American Council on Education this week sent a letter to some members of the House and Senate - on behalf of 12 other higher education groups - stating that "legitimate online alternatives and technologies designed to deter illegal file sharing are largely ineffective." The letter was sent to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and to the ranking minority member of the committee, Sen. Michael B. Enzi. It was also sent to Rep. George Miller, chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, and to the ranking minority member of the committee, Rep. Buck McKeon.

In addition to the council, the signatories to the letter are: the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, the American Association of Community Colleges, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Community College Trustees, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, Educause, the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, Internet2, the National Association of College and University Business Officers, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.

Read more: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Verizon Moving to 100Gbps Network in '09
March 10, 2008

Verizon Business plans to start deploying a 100Gbps network over its major routes at the start of 2009.

Verizon Business has long said that it viewed 40G network capability as a mere stepping stone to an eventual 100G network. Fred Briggs, Verizon Business' executive vice president of operations and technology, says the company will deploy 100G network capabilities over all its major routes within the United States, which include routes connecting cities such as New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago, in the first quarter of 2009.

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Verizon was the first telecom company to conduct a field trial over a native 100Gbps network. In June 2007, Level 3 finished building a nonnative 100Gbps network for Internet2. Unlike Verizon's test 100G network, the Internet2 network features 10 10Gbps links that are provisioned on each network segment, and can be scaled up to 100Gbps, depending on network demands.

Read more: NetworkWorld.com

Live Ocean Broadcasts Bring Monterey Bay to the Classroom
March 6, 2008

Thousands of students across the country this week have forayed into the mysterious world deep beneath the waters of Monterey Bay without leaving land.

The students have seen swaying, sunlit kelp forests 100 feet tall. They've seen a predatory sun star with 24 legs creeping across a rock in search of food. They've seen the hypnotic gyrations of the Spanish Dancer, a snail-like animal with a swishy fringe of orange tentacles.

This glimpse into the life of Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary has come courtesy of The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its partner, Immersion Presents, a science education program based in Rhode Island.

They're producing five half-hour long broadcasts per day March 2-7, which are beamed live from Monterey Bay through Internet2 [fiber optic] technology and satellite. The broadcasts can be seen at 84 sites nationwide -- at museums, aquariums, science centers, and Boys & Girls Clubs -- as well as on the Internet.

Read more: Santa Cruz Sentinel

AIU Signs $8 Million Agreement for RWAN
February 29, 2008

The Allegheny Intermediate Unit (AIU) has announced an $8 million master service agreement with two telecommunications companies for construction and Internet services, according to a press release. The move is part of the company's development of an ultra high-speed Regional Wide Area Network (RWAN) for school districts.

Under the agreement, Expedient Communications, a leading provider of data center and managed data network services for local business customers in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Boston, will deliver Internet and hosting services from its Green Tree facility. On the other hand, Sunesys, a Warrington, Pa.-based telecommunications company, will be responsible for setting-up the network's physical structure across 130 miles.

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With the new RWAN, school network communication speeds will increase from 10 to 1,000 megabits per second. It will allow districts to connect to each other, to schools across the state as well as to Internet2. In December, the AIU had received a three-year, $2.35 million state E-Fund grant for RWAN development. The agency is expecting Federal E-Rate funding soon.

Read more: TMCnet

Brookline Students Use Videoconferencing to Connect with Students All Over the Globe
February 23, 2008

With cameras rolling, 15 fifth-graders shouted with gusto, "Hello, world, from Pittsburgh Brookline."

The world was waiting.

That greeting was the start of an educational presentation sent live Thursday over the Internet and Internet2 to hundreds of schools in 13 countries as part of the fifth annual Megaconference Jr.

The conference, which has grown from about 50 schools, is just one sign that students around the world are eager to connect with one another.

Read more: post-gazette NOW News

Asia-Pacific TEIN3 Network Gets 18M [Pound] Boost
February 21, 2008

Collaboration between researchers in the Asia-Pacific region and their peers across the globe has been extended by an 18 million [pound] investment in the new TEIN3 high-speed research and education network from the European Union and its Asian partners. The new network is set to initially link 11 countries at speeds of up to 2.5 Gbps and run until 2011. It will enable increased cooperation between researchers in over 4,000 institutions across the region, and underpin global collaboration through links to the European GÉANT2 network.

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TEIN3 will link to the European GÉANT2 network, the world's most advanced international research and education network. Through GÉANT2's connections, researchers in the region will be able to collaborate with colleagues across other EU-funded networks in Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East, as well in the United States through the Internet2 network, thus creating a truly global research community.

Read more: GRIDToday.com

Community College Upgrades Network for Video Collaboration
February 19, 2008

Bucks County Community College in Newtown, PA has upgraded its data network and installed Extreme Networks switches to support video collaboration applications. Additionally, all servers were upgraded to Gigabit speeds. Extreme BlackDiamond 8800 switches support the core of the network, and Summit X450 switches outfit the edge. These switches feature Power over Ethernet (PoE), as well as routing capabilities. PoE enables network devices to run off a single CAT5 Ethernet cable that carries both data and power.

The 10,000-student campus replaced its Ethernet network to support video conferencing via Internet2. Internet2 is a global, non-profit organization consisting of universities that develop and deploy advanced network applications and high-speed networking technologies. Members of the consortium are testing new forms of network capabilities, such as IPv6 and multicasting, both of which the campus needed for its video collaboration initiative.

Read more: CampusTechnology.com

New 'Net Neutrality' Bill Introduced
February 13, 2008

"Reps Ed Markey (D-MA) and Chip Pickering (R-MS) introduced the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008' (HR 5353) this week. The proposed legislation [PDF] would not legislate what is and is not 'neutral'. Instead, it would add a section to the 'Broadband Policy' section of the Communications Act which spells out principles the FCC is expected to uphold, in addition to having them hold summits which would 'assess competition, consumer protection, and consumer choice issues related to broadband Internet access services' and make it easy for citizens to submit comments or complaints online."

Read more: Slashdot

Listening to the Sound of a Celestial Black Hole
February 9, 2008

Scientists hope that a new supercomputer being built by Syracuse University's Department of Physics may help them identify the sound of a celestial black hole. The supercomputer, dubbed SUGAR (SU Gravitational and Relativity Cluster), will soon receive massive amounts of data from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that was collected over a two-year period at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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It also takes a dedicated, high-speed fiber-optic network to transfer the data between Caltech and SU. To accomplish that, SU's Information Technology and Services (ITS) collaborated with NYSERNet to build a special pathway for the LIGO data on the high-speed fiber optic network that crisscrosses the United States. The one-gigabit pathway begins in the Physics Building and traverses SU's fiber-optic network to Machinery Hall and then to a network facility in downtown Syracuse, which the University shares with NYSERNet. From there, the pathway connects to NYSERNet's fiber-optic network and goes to New York City. In New York City, the pathway switches to the Internet2 high-speed network and traverses the country, ending in a computer room in Caltech.

Read more: AzoOptics.com

Victor Firm to Provide Fiber-optic Resources to Cornell
February 8, 2008

Finger Lakes Technologies Group Inc. in Victor has signed a 20-year lease with Cornell University to provide "dark fiber" that will allow the university to easily upgrade its fiber-optic network over the duration of the contract.

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Dark fiber is the term given to fiber-optic cable that has not yet been connected to electronics, as opposed to "lit fiber," which the provider would service and set bandwidth limitations on.

Cornell opted for dark fiber because it allows the university to create its own high-bandwidth networks to send large volumes of information without having to pay as it goes.

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The fiber allows an alternative path to research networks such as Internet2, National LambdaRail and Teragrid, Vernon wrote in an e-mail to The Journal.

Read more: The Ithaca Journal

Extreme Networks Boosts Adoption of Internet2 With IPv6 Enabled Network for Pennsylvania Community College
February 8, 2008

Extreme Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: EXTR) is assisting Bucks County Community College in its transition to a next generation network that supports Internet2 applications, enabling video collaboration. Extreme Networks(R: 57.72, -0.69, -1.18%) provided Bucks with a new converged network with flexibility of supporting IPv4 and IPv6 switching and routing as well as 10 Gigabit core speeds and a Gigabit edge.

Read more: FOXBusiness

College Rolls Out IPv6 in Full Upgrade
February 7, 2008

Bucks County Community College is midway through a three-year, $750,000 network upgrade that depends heavily on IPv6 switching hardware that is used to support video collaboration applications.

While IPv6 technology has been slow to catch on in business settings in the U.S., it is gaining ground in research and government installations, as well as in education settings such as the Bucks County two-year college in Newtown, Pa., analysts and vendors said.

One reason IPv6 hasn't moved faster in business settings is because IT managers have sometimes relied on machine translators to continue to use IPv4 addresses to adapt to IPv6 environments, analysts and IT managers have said.

However, the Bucks County college has benefited from making its IPv6 changeover, primarily to gain access to video streaming in Internet 2-related applications, said Ron Smith, director of networking and telecommunications at the community college.

Read more: ComputerWorld

Internet2 and EDUCAUSE Awarded NSF Grant to Develop Collaboration Tools
February 6, 2008

The EDIT Consortium of Internet2 and EDUCAUSE has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for its ongoing work in the development of important middleware technologies. The grant will support further work in identity and access management and infrastructure that organizations use to verify and manage online user identity and access.

Research and education collaboration teams share many online tools and resources to do their work, including calendars, email list services, wikis and document sharing software. One of the primary goals of the EDIT Consortium is to help such groups improve their productivity through scalable tools that enable appropriate access to protected online resources.

Read more: Internet2 News

Extreme Networks Completes US Department of Defense Joint Interoperability Test Command VoIP Assurance Testing
February 6, 2008

Extreme Networks, Inc. today announced that the company's Ethernet switching products have completed and passed the Department of Defense's (DOD) Joint Interoperability Test Command VoIP Assurance testing for Assured Services Voice Application Local Area Network (ASVALAN) and these products are now certified to be interoperable to operate in DOD VoIP networks.

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To further adoption of next generation network services and meet the proliferation of devices supported at the edge of the network, Extreme Networks offers native hardware and software support of IPv6 and IPv4 protocols with its ExtremeXOS(TM) based Summit and BlackDiamond switches. This supports the emerging requirements for federal government data and communications infrastructure and Internet2. Tests performed in 2007 by the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) demonstrated that Extreme Networks core to edge network products, consisting of the BlackDiamond and Summit switches, support full featured IPv6 networking that is compliant with the requirements of the IPv6 Forum's Phase 2 IPv6 Ready program.

Read more: CNNMoney.com

Barrow has Big Plans for Internet2
February 2, 2008

Most students in the Barrow County School District won't be certified as scuba divers when they graduate from high school, but they'll still have had some face time with the deep sea residents of Georgia's Grays Reef National Marine Sanctuary.

An entire class never would be able to fit into a Genome Research Lab at the University of Georgia, but they all will be able to get a close-up look at the way UGA's scientists engineer proteins to build new medicines.

Barrow County school administrators and teachers hope the school district's new connection to an Internet2 pipeline passing through Barrow County and new partnerships with research and arts institutions across Georgia and North America will give students an edge in the global marketplace, said schools Superintendent Ron Saunders.

Read more: OnlineAthens.com

Behind the Scenes of Internet2
January 31, 2008

You might think the network you oversee is big, but consider Chris Robb's new job: network operations manager for Internet2, which in October announced completion of a new research and education network boasting initial capacity of 100Gbps nationwide. Robb takes on his new position as an assigned staff member from the Global Research Network Operations Center (GRNOC) at Indiana University and will be based in Bloomington, Ind. Network World Editor Bob Brown interviewed Robb by e-mail to get an idea of what lies ahead for him and Internet2.

Read more: WebWereld.com

HD Videoconferencing Links Critical Care Newborns from Rural Hospitals to Tertiary Care Facilities, Specialists
January 30, 2008

Without ever leaving the nursery, fragile babies born at Chillicothe's Adena Regional Medical Center are receiving clinical assessments from specialists an hour away at Nationwide Children's Hospital - thanks to high-definition videoconferencing capabilities made possible via the Ohio Supercomputer Center.

An example of telemedicine, the project enables specialists in Columbus to view distressed newborns with exceptional clarity, examine detailed x-rays, view lab results and consult with attending physicians in Chillicothe in real-time.

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These three regional telehealth networks will connect to Broadband Ohio's backbone to transport data traffic between regions in Ohio, as well as to use OSCnet to access Internet2, the primary national research and education network in the country. This fulfills a key requirement of the grant - that the healthcare traffic be able to flow across the country from Ohio.

Read more: newswise.com

Dragon Breathes New Life Into Internet2
January 29, 2008

Research and education consortium Internet2 has completed deployment of a hybrid control plane that supports IP and circuit networking across its new nationwide network.

The successful deployment of dynamic circuit networking puts to rest the group's Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) testbed, which had helped integrate its IP network with dynamic circuit