EDUCAUSE Conference: NLR Session, TelePresence with Cisco

NLR made several important contributions to this week's EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver.

NLR Board Director Ron Hutchins presented on how NLR is an extended resource for universities and colleges, giving examples of the value NLR provides Georgia Tech and other institutions on Southern Light Rail, such as flexibility of service offerings, fast turn up of new circuits and very cost effective pricing structure relative to commercial providers. Ron's presentation is available on the NLR website.

New CEO Glenn Ricart also spoke briefly about his commitment to ensuring NLR remains a highly valuable asset for the research and education community.

In addition, NLR was the platform for Cisco's TelePresence demonstrations, with TelePresence capability managed out of NLR's TelePresence Exchange in Kansas City and coming in to the show floor via NLR's Denver PoP. Wendy Huntoon, Vice Chair of the NLR Board, participated in several TelePresence sessions with visitors to Cisco's booth from her office at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), talking on how PSC and NLR increasingly use TelePresence to reduce physical travel and enhance collaboration and productivity. Conference attendee comments on TelePresence in the Cisco booth with NLR are available on Cisco's YouTube channel.

NLR Now on YouTube!

National LambdaRail (NLR) now has its own YouTube video channel, which currently has videos from NLR staff and users on NLR services, network features, how to get started with a research project, TelePresence on NLR, NLR history and other topics: www.youtube.com/NationalLamdaRail.

We'll be expanding this, including this week from the Educause conference in Denver, where NLR is providing the platform for Cisco TelePresence and Board Director Ron Hutchins is talking on new and noteworthy happenings at NLR and in the NLR community.

GENI Goes Global

At this week’s 9th Annual LambdaGrid Workshop held in Korea, a consortium of network researchers announced that they received a three-year grant from the U.S. Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) program, which NLR supports with Layer 2/Layer 3 services, to develop a major new national and international distributed infrastructure called “iGENI,” the “International GENI.”

Led by the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, the consortium includes the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago; the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego; Cisco Systems, Inc.; and, the BBN Technologies GENI Program Office (GPO). This project is funded by NSF through BBN Technologies to enable research at the frontiers of network science and engineering.

For full news announcement, see: http://www.icair.org/news/200910/20091029.html

IU Team Wins Grant for GENI Network Tools

NLR congratulates the Indiana University team, including PI Beth Plale and co-PI Chris Small of IU's Global Research Network Operations Center for being awarded a $484,485 grant from the National Science Foundation to provide essential tools related to the history and authenticity of an experiment's data set (called "provenance") for the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) computer network. Such tools are essential because as computer network experiments increase in complexity and size, it has become increasingly difficult to fully understand the circumstances under which a network experiment was run, particularly when it comes time to reproduce the results.

For complete news release, visit:
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/12274.html

New NSF Grant for GENI

BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, announced today a $10.5M National Science Foundation grant to fund additional prototyping for GENI, the virtual laboratory for exploring future internets at scale supported by NLR which is also using NLR's national network backbone for much of its research. NLR is one of the PIs for the grant.

The new NSF funding will enable three sets of collaborating academic/industrial research teams to replicate those GENI prototype systems that have gained significant traction, based on GENI-enabled commercial hardware, across 14 U.S. campuses, NLR and Internet2. These prototypes will serve as a foundation for creating major opportunities for early experiments on an end-to-end suite of GENI infrastructure at a scale significantly larger than has been possible until now.

For more details, see http://www.geni.net/?p=1489#more-1489.

TelePresence in Action at Quilt Workshop

At the Quilt's TelePresence Workshop last week in Kansas City, Missouri, NLR was able to participate -- from across the country -- thanks to Cisco TelePresence on the NLR TelePresence Exchange.

TelePresence meeting rooms from as many as six different locations were simultaneously connected to the live event, enabling remote attendees to literally join around the conference table with those on-site and in several cases sparing speakers the need to invest a couple of days' worth of travel for an hour presentation.

Participating were two TelePresence rooms from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (where NLR Vice Chair Wendy Huntoon joined); one from MOREnet, the Missouri Research and Education Network; and at least three from various Cisco offices coast to coast.

First University-Corporate Telepresence Connection across a Research and Education Network

The first university-corporate Cisco TelePresence session through interconnection of a research and education telepresence exchange (National LambdaRail) and a commercial telepresence exchange has taken place. This significantly expands the collaboration potential of the telepresence platform for the academic and research communities.

National LambdaRail (NLR), AT&T and Cisco successfully tested and demonstrated the interconnection of the NLR Telepresence Exchange with the AT&T Telepresence Solution via the AT&T Business Exchange. NLR and AT&T are now working out the details of an ongoing interconnect service enabling additional universities or research organizations with access to NLR and a Cisco TelePresence endpoint to quickly and seamlessly use the AT&T Business Exchange to collaborate with partners in private industry.

The telepresence session involved four separate locations and worked flawlessly. Participating were: Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers from Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose; Bruce Klein, Cisco SVP of Public Sector, from Cisco offices in Herndon, Virginia; and the Duke University leadership team from two locations on the Duke campus in Durham, North Carolina.

NLR’s very excited about the increasing opportunities presented by telepresence for researchers and research groups to collaborate with colleagues around the country and the world – and now with access to the AT&T Business Exchange and to partners in the commercial space. We’ll keep you posted of the new interconnect service as plans firm up.