Cisco News: NLR "America's Most Advanced Network"

NLR's the subject of several feature stories appearing this week on Cisco's online newsroom.

One of the articles highlights that NLR is an unfettered resource for research and commercial innovation, that it is the only national fiber optic network in the world that hosts research traffic from universities and government agencies alongside data from corporations, and that NLR has catalyzed regional broadband development around the country.

NLR Director of Engineering and Operations Grover Browning was interviewed on NLR's aggresive reliability standards, and he describes how NLR's reliability is now as good or better than that of virtually any other network. "We try to be conservative in our reliability estimates, but in most all cases we are now hitting at 99.999 percent reliability or better."

A separate story revolves around how Sandford-Burnham Medical Research Institute is using the NLR network to conduct research under a $100 million NIH grant, connecting its campuses is Florida and California.

Great read on PennREN, BTOP and NLR's Wendy Huntoon

An excellent narrative in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the Pennsylvania Research and Education Network's (PennREN) journey to securing $99.6 million in BTOP stimulus funding to bring broadband to the most rural parts of the state.

PennREN's proposal was for a broadband network headquartered at 13 anchor facilities and about 50 satellite sites, which would together provide a radius of connectivity through 39 Pennsylvania counties. The successful funding application was orchestrated by Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center director of networking and NLR Vice Chair Wendy Huntoon, who is interviewed in the article.

It's a great read: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10110/1051750-96.stm#ixzz0ldPlzEal

NLR's Glenn Ricart on Internet Evolution Radio

This morning NLR president and CEO Glenn Ricart had a wide-ranging, live audiocast conversation with Internet Evolution editor-in-chief Terry Sweeney on NLR's technology vision and strategy, high-end e-science applications NLR's seeing over its platform, NLR's role in the discussion around national broadband to communities and homes, etc.

Check it out, as well as Glenn's live-chat posts with participants at:
http://www.internetevolution.com/radio.asp?doc_id=187956

NLR, Internet2 at University of Kentucky's CI Days

Here's a photo from the joint NLR - Internet2 poster session at Cyberinfastructure (CI) Days at the University of Kentucky February 22-23, by Dan Updegrove, a consultant to NLR, and Russ Hobby, a chief technical architect for Internet2 .

Dan and Russ described how high-powered research and education networks like NLR and Internet2 are enabling innovative applications ranging from collaborative science, open science grid, remote instrumentation, multipoint conferencing and TelePresence.

CI Days are sponsored by a consortium of federal agencies to raise awareness of the benefits of an integrated, cyberinfrastructure and identify gaps in current capabilities.

White House: Call for student-led innovation, also on R&E nets

A March 25 post on the White House blog by Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Tom Kalil, deputy director for policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy suggested that promoting student-led innovation on "killer apps" for broadband would help achieve a key component of the recently released National Broadband Plan, the development of broadband applications.

Such an initiative could be led by the private sector and build on investments already made on high-speed research networks such as Internet2 and National LambdaRail, according to the blog.

The authors invite ideas and feedback at broadband@ostp.gov.

CENIC Award to Former NLR CEO Tom West

CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), announced its 2010 Innovations in Networking Awards today, at the CENIC annual conference.

The Award for Outstanding Individual Contribution went to former NLR President and CEO Tom West, who also served as CENIC's president and CEO from March 1999 to June 2004. According to CENIC's announcement, this was "a time of great expansion for CENIC, during which both the company and the communities it serves benefited tremendously from his extraordinary vision and ability to turn that vision into reality."

Congrats, Tom!

University of Kentucky Hosts CI Days

The University of Kentucky in Lexington is hosting a Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Days Workshop February 22-23, 2010. Dan Updegrove for NLR and Russ Hobby for Internet2 are co-hosting a poster session on Research and Education Networks to help educate the university community on national resources available.

The workshop is part of a national series of workshops sponsored by a consortium of federal agencies and national organizations including NSF. Goals include helping UK faculty understand the potential benefits that CI can provide to their scholarship, teaching, research and outreach.