[GB-Today] June 2004 Gigabit Today

[CENIC Editor]

Gigabit Today
June 2004

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IN THIS ISSUE
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QUOTE OF THE MONTH

GB NEWS

3rd ONE GIGABIT OR BUST ROUNDTABLE, JULY 21 AND 22 IN OAKLAND

ON THE ROAD TO A GIGABIT AWARD WINNERS
1. Biggest, Fastest in the West: On Demand Infrastructure
2. Community: Behind the Redwood Curtain: Redwood Technology Consortium
3. Education: Education Telecommunications Network
4. Gigabit or Bust: Desert Sands Gigabit Ethernet
          5. Innovation: Fontana ACES-Advanced Community and Educational 
Services Network
6. Partnership: Ultralight Partnership

ABOUT CENIC’S GB ROUNDTABLE

ABOUT CENIC

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

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QUOTE OF THE MONTH
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The quality of this year’s award winners was amazing and inspiring. The 
winners offer practical and visionary examples of how broadband is 
transforming business, education, and technology.
--Molly Petrick
On the Road to a Gigabit Judge

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3rd ONE GIGABIT OR BUST ROUNDTABLE, JULY 21 AND 22 IN OAKLAND
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The 3rd One Gigabit or Bust Roundtable meeting is scheduled for July 21 and 
22 at the Oakland Airport Hilton.  Mark your calendar now.

The agenda for the meeting will be available soon.  Most Task Forces will 
be meeting and two new ones are forming.  If you are interested in forming 
a task force or hosting a birds of a feather session, contact Susan Estrada 
at susan at cenic.org.

Don’t forget to make your hotel reservations before the cutoff date at the 
end of June.  For more information, visit 
http://www.cenic.org/GB/meetings/72104/index.htm.

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ON THE ROAD TO A GIGABIT AWARD WINNERS
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This year CENIC and the California Institute of Telecommunications and 
Information Technology (Cal-(IT)2) honored six pioneering ideas in the 
second annual On the Road to a Gigabit Awards.
The experts judging the nominations included Kathie Hackler, Research Vice 
President, Gartner Consulting; Molly Petrick, Contra Costa Water District; 
John Silvester, Vice Provost for Scholarly Technology, University of 
Southern California; Larry Smarr, Cal-(IT)2 Director; and Bill St. Arnaud, 
Senior Director of Advanced Networks, CANARIE.

The winners were broken up into six categories and showcase the ideas of 
today’s visionaries, the promise of tomorrow’s Internet, and the advanced 
technologies paving the road to a gigabit world.

1. Biggest, Fastest in the West Winner: On Demand Infrastructure
San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC), Patricia Kovatch, IBM, Roger Haskin

With grid computing becoming potentially the biggest change on the horizon 
for high-performance computing, SDSC developed an on-demand infrastructure 
that allows scientists to share data efficiently. Using IBM's General 
Parallel File System, SDSC demonstrated the ability to share data between 
two sites without the need to copy files multiple times to multiple sites.
The simple sharing of files between sites allows for roaming between sites 
so scientists can expect the same environment no matter where they compute. 
In addition, multiple geographically distributed resources can be harnessed 
while simultaneously using the same programs and data sets. Scientists will 
not need to learn new commands or paradigms to leverage computational 
resources.

This new storage grid infrastructure, which provides on-demand transparent 
access over high-bandwidth links to new, common, and archival data sets, 
introduces opportunities for research and collaboration. The grid 
infrastructure allows scientists to focus on science instead of learning 
new techniques for navigating diverse systems. SDSC’s technology can be 
applied to other resources and users throughout the state of California. 
For example, data sets from the Southern California Earthquake Center could 
be made available for real-time research and visualization in schools.
Learn more about the projects at:
http://www.cenic.org/CENIC2004/awards/winners/biggestfastest.htm
2. Community Winner: Behind the Redwood Curtain
Redwood Technology Consortium (RTC), Tina Nerat

Northwest California’s Humboldt County is one of the most rural areas in 
the state. And until the RTC stepped in, its only connection to the world 
was an at-capacity microwave link and everyone from farmers to banks 
suffered because of it.

United in its cause of getting broadband to the county, the RTC galvanized 
local government, businesses, and individuals. Everyone banded together on 
the issue, and thanks to the RTC’s grass-roots effort, helped complete a 
21-mile fiber gap--the missing link for the middle mile from the San 
Francisco Bay Area to Humboldt and Del Norte counties. This link now 
provides the pipeline to bring gigabit speeds to northwest California.

Without this link, the residents, businesses, and schools of Humboldt 
County would not have been able to join the Digital California Project. 
Economic growth suffered in these counties because businesses could not 
purchase the advanced services necessary to grow and flourish in a global 
economy.

As a result of RTC’s efforts, everyone in the region can articulate what 
bandwidth means to them and recognizes that all businesses require 
technology and telecommunications to support basic business processes. 
RTC’s efforts are a prime example of how grass-roots advocacy can be used 
as a model for other remote, rural areas that need better connectivity to 
the outside world.

Read about Humboldt County’s experience at: 
http://www.cenic.org/CENIC2004/awards/winners/community.htm

3. Education Winner: Education Telecommunications Network (ETN)
Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE), Richard Quiñones

The Los Angeles County Office of Education ETN is leading the use of 
video-based technologies in the K-12 community by combining their knowledge 
of television broadcast production with emerging digital technologies. The 
group supplies educators with the means to reach students using a 
combination of traditional broadcast media and digital technology.

By providing broadcast television quality instructional and administrative 
programs and systems over a high-speed network, ETN brings together groups 
that cannot meet in a single physical location. These online meetings 
enable collaboration that would otherwise not occur.

The delivery systems utilized by ETN, such as the use of MPEG-2 video 
streams, harness technology to provide broadcast television quality over 
the network. One example of how LACOE used such technologies successfully 
is an event during which classroom teachers from different school sites, 
district staff development specialists, and university faculty from UC and 
CSU held a conversation across three different sites.

With budgetary constraints affecting all segments of education, interactive 
staff development opportunities with experts across the nation can provide 
opportunities for professional growth, while limiting travel costs. The use 
of high-quality video streamed over a high-speed network can give educators 
and students the ability to collaborate, attend forums, take field trips, 
and join Town Hall meetings without ever leaving their school sites.

Find out how educators are taking advantage of advanced networks at: 
http://www.cenic.org/CENIC2004/awards/winners/education.htm

4. Gigabit or Bust Winner: Desert Sands Gigabit Ethernet
Desert Sands Unified School District (DSUSD), George Araya

DSUSD is located in the lower desert area of Southern California. Distant 
from the larger urban centers in the state, DSUSD has depended on creative 
methods to economically manage connectivity between sites, and for Internet 
service.

To support a population of more than 26,000 students at 28 school sites, 
DSUSD partnered with service, equipment, and infrastructure providers, 
including Anixter, Cisco Systems, Digital Networks, Hewlett-Packard, SBC, 
Sony and Time-Warner Cable. DSUSD’s objective was to promote an early 
adoption of Gigabit technology to the mid-size K-12 environment and to 
provide a platform for gigabit infrastructure to the desktop for every 
student and teacher.

DSUSD, as an early-adopter of a gigabit infrastructure for a mid-sized, and 
growing, K-12 district, can serve as a model for other school districts and 
organizations desiring to keep pace with the demands of providing 
connectivity to a growing student population. In addition, the model of 
provider alliances is an example for other districts that have similar 
goals and want to offer students and teachers a gigabit-to-the-desktop 
experience.

Read more about DSUSD and its partners at:
http://www.cenic.org/CENIC2004/awards/winners/gigabitorbust.htm>

5. Innovation Winner: Fontana Advanced Community and Educational Services 
(ACES) Network
The City of Fontana, Janice McClintock
The City of Fontana is bringing advanced communication services to the 
entire community by building a fiber optic network that will link all 
businesses, schools, hospitals and homes across the city by 2007. Fontana 
will own the fiber optic infrastructure in the same manner it owns the 
sewer and roads, and it will act as the facilitator or franchiser to 
provision advanced service providers over the network.
Reaching the educational community is the city’s main objective for the 
network. The city carefully drafted the network design so that it will pass 
every school in both the city and surrounding areas.
The Fontana ACES Network will also reach out to the healthcare community, 
and the city hopes to fulfill public policy outreach objectives by bringing 
government and education into the home through meetings, classes, games, 
and events over Public, Education, and Government (PEG) channels. The 
Fontana ACES network also hopes to foster economic development by having an 
advanced communications infrastructure available for business and a highly 
educated, computer literate workforce and community.
Learn more about Fontana’s municipal network plans at:
http://www.cenic.org/CENIC2004/awards/winners/innovation.htm

6. Partnership Winner: Ultralight Partnership
California Institute of Technology, Sylvain Ravot; California Institute of 
Technology, Harvey Newman (PI); CERN, Olivier Martin; Los Alamos National 
Laboratory (LANL), Wu-chun Feng; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), 
R. Les Gottrell

Teams of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers at Caltech, 
CERN, SLAC, LANL, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Florida 
International University, University of Florida, University of Michigan, 
Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the MIT Haystack Observatory have 
started to develop and deploy Ultralight, the first of a new class of 
integrated information systems that will support the decades-long research 
program at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The project has profound 
implications for integrating information sharing and on-demand audiovisual 
collaboration.

The testbed, which is being built in the context of Ultralight, is an 
experimental facility for testing, tuning and deploying physics and 
astronomy applications that require reliable transfers of data at rates up 
to 10 Gigabits. The knowledge gained from the testbed will form the basis 
for the development and implementation of a statewide gigabit network in 
California. With industrial partners, Cisco Systems and Level 3 
Communications, the project has the potential to bring millions of students 
and citizens throughput up to and exceeding 1 Gigabit.

The first results achieved this fall will encourage scientists and 
engineers in many sectors of society to develop and plan to deploy a new 
generation of revolutionary Internet applications. Multi-gigabit, 
end-to-end network performance will lead to new models for how research and 
business is performed. People will be able to form "virtual organizations,” 
sharing in a flexible way their collective computing resources. This paves 
the way for more flexible, efficient sharing of data by scientists in many 
countries, and could be a key factor enabling the next round of physics 
discoveries.

Find out more about Ultralight at: 
http://www.cenic.org/CENIC2004/awards/winners/partnership.htm

ABOUT CENIC's ONE GIGABIT OR BUST INITIATIVE
CENIC's One Gigabit or Bust Initiative addresses critical technical, 
policy, economic and implementation challenges facing the delivery of one 
gigabit broadband to all Californians by 2010. Its Roundtable brings 
together the interests of research, education, commerce, state and local 
government and the general public to address the issues surrounding 
implementation of robust end-to-end broadband capabilities to every 
educational institution, business and home in California.

ABOUT CENIC
CENIC is a not-for-profit corporation serving the California Institute of 
Technology, California State University, Stanford University, University of 
California, University of Southern California, California Community 
Colleges and the statewide K-12 school system. CENIC’s mission is to 
facilitate and coordinate the development, deployment and operation of a 
set of robust multi-tiered advanced network services for this research and 
education community.

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