News

Internet2 at SC09

Come Visit the Internet2 Booth# 1355

The focus is on state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure as Internet2 heads to the 23rd consecutive Supercomputing Conference in Portland, Oregon, 16-19 November, 2009. At SC09, Internet2 is involved in a number of activities.

Technical Program: The University of Delaware and Internet2 have been selected to participate in the renowned SC technical program in the renowned SC technical program. The technical program is at the heart of SC conferences, and technical papers selected for presentation must meet an extremely high standard. The co-authored, “Improving GridFTP Performance Using the Phoebus Session Layer,” will be presented on Tuesday, 17 November at 3:30pm PST, Room PB256 in the Oregon Convention Center.

Demonstrations: Internet2 will host four ongoing demonstrations in booth #1355 highlighting new advanced services:

• Attendees are invited to test Internet2 ION, a revolutionary network service that allows researchers to create dedicated point-to-point circuits across network domains. Attendees can set up or tear down live circuits right from the exhibition floor using the simple, secure ION web interface. The ION service will also support demos at the California Institute of Technology, Northrop Grumman, NICT, PIONIER and University of Amsterdam SC09 exhibit booths.
• At Internet2’s pS-Performance Toolkit station, the Toolkit’s easy installation and “ready-on-boot” functionality will be demonstrated, along with its wizard-like configuration interface, performance measurement visualization screens.
• The OpenFlow demonstration, housed in two exhibit booths, Ciena (Booth 1445), Internet2 (Booth 1355) is a cooperative effort with Ciena Corporation and Stanford University, and will illustrate the work of the OpenFlow architecture to address how network layers 1 and 2 management can be linked to dynamically respond to the inconstant network demands of applications.
• Worldview is an interactive, 3D network visualization system designed to show real-time network utilization across multiple networks. Attendees will get an exciting look into these new network visualization capabilities being developed at the Indiana University Global Research Network Operations Center, which provides operations support to the Internet2 Network.

SCinet Support: Each year the SC conference recreates SCinet, “the world’s most powerful network,” which provides an advanced high bandwidth network environment capable of supporting the high performance computing applications and extreme network experiments at the conference. Internet2’s community-developed infrastructure services are part of a robust set of network and monitoring services that have been integrated into SC09’s underlying SCinet infrastructure. Internet2 is providing:

• Multiple 10G connections to the Internet2 IP Network to deliver enhanced IP services, and to the Internet2 ION Infrastructure to enable dynamic circuit network capabilities
• Inter-Domain Controller (IDC) software support for controlling dynamic circuits on the conference floor
• A perfSONAR framework deployment for real-time monitoring and visualization of the SCinet network performance.

Bandwidth Challenge: SC hosts an annual Bandwidth Challenge, calling research teams from around the world to battle for the highest throughput to the conference floor. At SC09, Internet2 together with the University of Delaware is participating in the competition with three leading partners of the NSF-funded REDDnet Project: Oak Ridge National Lab, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Vanderbilt University. Using an innovative combination of REDDnet’s unique distributed storage infrastructure, the Phoebus data movement service developed by researchers at the University of Delaware and the Internet2 IP and ION infrastructure, the team will show how the throughput of data replication and download services can be dramatically improved by simultaneously leveraging multiple data replicas and multiple network paths. The demonstration will use real scientific data sets from the Large Hadron Collider CMS project, transferring them globally to the SC09 conference.

EDUCAUSE Joins InCommon

Calling InCommon "a community endeavor that represents the future of how colleges and universities will enable trusted interactions with each other, government agencies, and other organizations," Educause president and CEO Diana Oblinger has announced that her organization has joined the federation. For the full story, see: https://spaces.internet2.edu/x/eoag

University of Pennsylvania Becomes First U.S. University to Deploy DNSSEC (DNS Security)

In early November, The University of Pennsylvania's Information Systems and Computing (ISC) division announced its successful implementation institution-wide of Domain Name Security Extensions (DNSSEC) technology. U. Penn is part of an Internet2 and Educause community of early adopters of DNSSEC technology and is the first U.S. university to implement it institution-wide. DNSSEC addresses many security vulnerabilities in the Domain Name System (DNS), by providing the ability to incorporate digital signatures for names in the DNS, which can be used to verify their authenticity, and thus foil these a variety of attacks. Additionally, DNSSEC enables new capabilities in network applications by allowing them to securely publish a variety of cryptographic keying material in the DNS.

A few U.S. universities have deployed DNSSEC in parts of their infrastructure (testbeds, research departments, or other subdivisions), but U. Penn is believed to be the first to have completed a DNSSEC deployment on a campus wide scale. In fact, U. Penn's experience with DNSSEC goes back much further. In 2006, it also deployed DNSSEC at MAGPI (Mid-Atlantic GigaPop for Internet2), a regional research and education network it operates, and which serves most major universities and colleges in the eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware regions.

Additionally, U. Penn is working with Educause in its plans to deploy DNSSEC in the EDU top level DNS domain, which Educause and Verisign operate under a co-operative agreement with the US Department of Commerce. U. Penn is one of the earliest participants in the EDU DNSSEC testbed, already in progress. When the project is completed, educational institutions across the country will have the ability to publish a digital signature for their EDU domain names. For more information: www.dnssec-deployment.org/internet2

Events

Winter 2010 Joint Techs

Registration and the Call for Proposals are open for the annual Winter Joint Techs, 31 January to 4 February in Salt Lake City, Utah, hosted by the University of Utah. The meeting's focus areas are campus networking, performance measurement & monitoring, and emerging technologies, including cloud computing, network testbeds, and more. This event is also an opportunity for working groups, SIGs, and BoFs to meet, tutorials are planned for Sunday afternoon, and several small group tours of the University of Utah's renowned Scientific Computing & Imaging Institute are scheduled. Immediately following the Joint Techs meeting, an IPv6 Workshop will be offered, concurrent with the ESCC meeting. Registration, a general schedule, and descriptions of the focus areas/link to proposal submission are available at: events.internet2.edu/2010/jt-slc.

Governance Updates

GNC

At its meeting at the Fall Member Meeting in San Antonio, the Governance and Nominations Committee (GNC) reviewed the upcoming nominations and election process. The 2010 process will be divided into two separate elections, with the Advisory Council election being conducted first, followed by the Internet2 Board election. The new process eliminated the need to elect council chairs and vice-chairs prior to the election and allows newly seated members the opportunity to be elected to serve in this capacity. The Internet2 Board of Trustees nominations and election process will be conducted following the Spring Member Meeting, with new members seated at the July Board meeting. Following the election, the GNC will conduct a review of the governance structure to assess how well it is working and to institute any improvements. For more information on the 2010 nomination and election process, please visit www.internet2.edu/elections. Please note the Call for Nominations is open until 4 December.

AOAC

The Architecture & Operations Advisory Council (AOAC) held calls on 28 October and 11 November. During the 28 October call, the AOAC continued their discussion of the next Internet2 network, including hearing an update on the progress made on the charge made to the NTAC to shape direction regarding consolidating from a split SONET and IP infrastructure to a hybrid IP/MPLS infrastructure in the core. Additionally, Internet2 staff indicated that there are plans to deploy three additional Juniper MX routers by the end of 2009.

During the 11 November call, the AOAC endorsed a letter from the AOAC to the incoming NTAC chair inviting him to be a guest at the AOAC calls during 2010. This continues an effort to maintain a strong relationship between the AOAC and the NTAC as the NTAC is frequently called upon to make technical recommendations to the AOAC. The Council also began to review and discuss new connector fee options being proposed for Internet2 connectors. Further community discussion will commence among the connectors and other councils prior the further discussion during the 23 November AOAC call.

AMSAC

The Applications, Middleware, and Services Advisory Council (AMSAC) held a well-attended open session at the Fall Internet2 Member Meeting in San Antonio, at which it discussed several topics including (1) the InCommon business plan, (2) AMSAC's role in providing input to network architecture planning with respect to support for middleware and security, and (3) the role of middleware and security in CyberInfrastructure (CI). Also discussed in recent meetings was the planned revival of the Campus Expectations Task Force (CETF) and AMSAC's role in providing input into the development of new recommendations and best practices for Internet2 members, especially with respect to identity and access management (IAM) and security.