Virtual CPE: Enhancing CPE's deployment and operations through virtualization

In the current knowledge-driven global economy, higher education and research institutions are taking a leading role as the hubs for knowledge creation and sharing. In contribution to the needed coordination of the efforts, this paper presents a guiding model thorough assessment of the prevailing status of knowledge resources sharing and collaboration in the regional alliance for education and research networks in the eastern and southern African countries—UbuntuNet Alliance. This research carried out a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews with CEOs of three active national research and education networks (NRENs), representing both the government-run and private consortium-based settings. The study adopted a socio-technical perspective in assessing the technological engagements and the knowledge resources utilization within and among the NRENs in the region. The findings show that the NRENs share a similar set of challenges as well as missions and objectives; they aspire to provide technology-enhanced knowledge-sharing platforms within and across their domains. Finally, it presents UbuntuKMS Model—a comprehensive technology-enhanced knowledge management systems model that intends to provide guidance for the NRENs to orient their efforts accordingly. The research revealed that contextual considerations in developing system solutions are vital as the developing economies experience unique realities on the ground.

Part 1, “The Role of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) providing connectivity and advanced network services to Virtual Communities in collaborative R&E projects. CUDI: The Mexican Case”, provides a general introduction to NRENs and explains the case of the Mexican NREN, its current infrastructure and policy status by 2015, and proposes actions to implement Article 213 of the Federal Telecommunications and Broadcasting Law to strengthen CUDI and e-infrastructures. This paper, describes how CUDI, throughout its 15 years of existence, has supported its members in their participation in different R&E collaborative projects using the NREN connected to High Performance Computing Distributed Systems (HPCDS), hardware and software tools and even remote instruments to implement different e-science applications by Virtual Communities (VCs). It extracts the positive aspects of previous collaborative R&E projects and identifies opportunities necessary to build the sustainable future Mexican NREN. That is, a robust national advanced network infrastructure with seamless, large scale, high-speed, low-latency characteristics aimed to accelerate scientific and education discovery on identified R&E collaborative projects using e-infrastructures for the short term (2016–2020).

The aim of this report is to provide guidance to governments, institutions, and development partners on how to approach the provision of advanced information and communication technology (ICT) services to the higher education and research community in Africa. The timing is appropriate as it coincides with a transformation in the telecom infrastructure and services on the continent as fiber optic connectivity, both undersea and on land, is expanding at a rapid pace. The premise of the report that the organization of ICT services and connectivity is best provided by a dedicated organization called the National Research and Education Network (NREN) is based on international best practice and the current plans of the stakeholders in the region. In the following pages, the nature of NRENs and the case for their establishment is outlined and the story of their development in Africa up to their current status is described in operation of NRENs are discussed as a prelude to a guidance note on how to go about establishing or strengthening an NREN, with recommendations to the government, the private sector, institutions, and development partners.

April, 2023 Author: Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal Introduction This blog explores my thoughts on the potential role of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in promoting the growth of a Research Software Engineering (RSE) community in Asia-Pacific. The significance of this lies in the fact that NRENs have not traditionally been significantly involved in supporting RSE groups in other regions.

National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are pivotal in modern research and education, providing a dynamic ecosystem for academic and scientific communities. These networks form the backbone for crucial infrastructures and services, propelling research, education, and innovation. This article explores the role of monitoring and advanced emulation in enhancing NREN performance. The experiences of ASNET-AM, the Armenian NREN, in leveraging these techniques are presented, highlighting the benefits and challenges.

"The nation which most completely assimilates high performance computing into its economy will very likely emerge as the dominant intellectual, economic, and technological force in the next century", Senator Albert Gore, Jr., May 18, 1989, while introducing Senate Bill 1067, "The National High Performance Computer Technology Act of 1989". A national network designed to link supercomputers, particle accelerators, researchers, educators, government, and industry is beginning to emerge. The degree to which the United States can mobilize the resources inherent within our academic, industrial and government sectors towards the establishment of such a network infrastructure will have direct bearing on the economic and political stature of this country in the next century. This program will have significant impact on all forms of information transfer, and peripheral benefits to all walks of life similar to those experienced from the moon landing program of the 1960's. The key to our success is the involvement of scientists, librarians, network designers, and bureaucrats in the planning stages. Collectively, the resources resident within the United States are awesome; individually, their impact is somewhat more limited. The engineers, technicians, business people, and educators participating in this conference have a vital role to play in the success of the National Research and Education Network (NREN).

National Research and Education Networks (NREN) have and continue to have a major impact on the development of a nation. Providing high-speed connectivity and associated services to the research and education (R&E) communities, they enable researchers and scientists to collaborate with their counterparts around the world and participate in cutting-edge scientific research and capacity building. In this paper we will look at how NRENs are moving beyond these traditional users with demanding networking needs to become more inclusive. A case study is used to show how NRENs have started to embrace and nurture the infection diseases community with particular emphasis on dengue fever. The paper will further outline the development of a workshop concept which started off in one region and progressively spread across other parts of the world, providing a platform for collaboration with immense community-building potential.

The National Research and Education Network (NREN): Research and policy perspectives

International audience

The integration of state-of-the-art fibre optic sensing technologies with telecommunication systems has not yet been achieved. There are many challenges which need to be overcome to allow for a pan-continental research instrument, all of which requires international collaboration. Such international collaborations would allow for the creation of novel applications and research into Earth science, such as cetology and abiotic and biotic marine interactions, oceanography, seismology, volcanology, and soundscape monitoring, to name but a few.Over the past 5 years, research teams from National seismic and oceanographic infrastructures, together with National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), and partners from universities, research institutes and industry have pioneered sensing techniques to use submarine optical telecommunication fibres to monitor the Earth and its systems.Fibre sensing technology and collaborations created by developing these techniques have now reached a level where a new paradigm shift can occur. This presentation will discuss the SUBMERSE project (SUBMarinE cables for ReSearch and Exploration), which is creating and delivering a pilot research instrument which could serve as a blueprint for continuous monitoring upon many more existing submarine fibre optic cables in the future.The SUBMERSE project, which started in May 2023, is a Horizon Europe-funded, 36-month long initiative which is investigating the combined acquisition of SOP (State-of-Polarisation) and DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) data from live telecom cables, with the aim to then make that data available to researchers globally and F.A.I.R. The project team, consisting of 24 organisations, uses existing fibre-optic infrastructure deployed across multiple national research infrastructures to create a pan-European research instrument.Our presentation will discuss the latest field deployments of DAS and SOP technologies across 5 geographic locations on 3 cable systems, which are spread across the European continent and Atlantic Ocean. It will offer a first glimpse of the effects of running a DAS in the L-and C- Bands on a live DWDM telecoms system, in combination with SOP, in a submarine and terrestrial environment.The aim of the SUBMERSE project is to disseminate the data following FAIR principles through established community data centres. The main challenges we have faced relate to ensuring compliance to security restrictions and handling huge data quantities generated by DAS.  The approaches to down sampling, frequency filtering, and potentially time-and-space-gating will also be presented.  We will discuss the approaches taken for acquiring, streaming from remote sites, data staging, pre-processing and raw file retention. We will also highlight the tools and approaches that we have adopted to develop best practices for running such a multi-national, distributed, sensing instrument which must take these elements into account.Our work has shown that a pragmatic approach, with collaboration at heart, is needed to address these challenges. Without a strong commitment and collaboration between research communities and research infrastructure providers, the potential to lose valuable research data is high. This risk can be mitigated by focusing on datasets which are valuable to communities and ensuring the long-term availability of those data sets in a F.A.I.R manner.

The Radiology Consultation WorkStation (RCWS) is a multimedia, medical imaging workstation beingdeveloped for use in an electronic radiology environment, utilizing a prototype Asynchronous Transfer Mode(ATM) telemedicine network, in support of radiotherapy treatment planning. A radiation oncologist in theRadiation Oncology Department, and a radiologist in the Diagnostic Radiology Department, will be able toconsult, utilizing high-quality audio/video channels and high-resolution medical image displays, prior to the design of a treatment plan. Organ and lesion contouring is performed via a shared-cursor feature, in a consultation mode, allowing medical specialists to fully interact during the identification and delineation of lesions and other features.Keywords: Telemedicine, Multimedia System, ATM Network, Medical Consultation, Medical Imaging 1. INTRODUCTION The development of the National Research and Education Network (NREN) was one of the five majorcomponents mandated under the Federal High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC)Program, by the High Performance Computing Act of 199 1 . The

Telecommunication networks have had a significant impact on the provision of library services. Networks such as the INTERNET and Canada's CA*NET have modified the manner in which librarians manipulate and distribute data. Both the United States and Canada have decided to invest in the creation of more powerful high-speed communication networks. In the U.S., the project is called the National Research and Education Network (NREN) while in Canada the corresponding project is called the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry, and Education/Reseau national de communications a grande vitesse (CANARIE). By exploiting the services and capabilities in existing and future networks, libraries are able to remain key partners active in,research and education. The provision of new services, however, has required the investment of scarce resources. With the advent of CANARIE, libraries will have to increase substantially the amount of resources devoted to using the network. Failure to do so will hin...

The task of transferring massive data sets in Data-Intensive Science (DIS) systems, such as those generated from high energy experiments at CERN in Switzerland and France, and at the Sirius synchrotron light source in Brazil, often rely on physical WAN infrastructure for network connectivity that is provided by various National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), including ESnet, Géant, Internet2, RNP, among others. Sliced WANs bring a new paradigm for infrastructure yet to be exploited by DIS, but a realistic study of these particular systems poses a significant challenge due to their complexity, scale, and the number of factors affecting the data transport. In this paper, we address some of these challenges by deploying and evaluating a virtual infrastructure for data transport within a representative national-scale WAN. Our approach here encompasses two main aspects: i) Evaluating the performance of TCP congestion control algorithms (BBR versus Cubic) when only a single path is available for the data transfer; and ii) Assessing the performance of flow completion times (related to the management of bandwidth allocation) for sets of interdependent transfers in an environment provided by a network slice.

<p>Precise measurement of time and frequency has been instrumental in the development of modern geosciences. It has enabled us to quantify many observations, including plate motion, the variations of Earth rotation, and modern-day sea level rise.</p><p>Over the past decade, European National Metrology Institutes (NMIs), together with National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and partners from universities and research institutes have pioneered the dissemination of ultra-stable optical frequency and timing signals via optical fibers. Initially started as proof-of-concept experiments, this technology has matured to aim for a paradigm change: making precise time and frequency signals available to the wider scientific community and thereby enabling new research avenues.</p><p>The CLOck NETwork Services Design Study (CLONETS-DS) is a research and innovation action intended to facilitate the vision of a sustainable, pan-European optical fiber network for precise time and frequency reference dissemination.</p><p>Here, we will present the envisioned technology, its performance parameters, and discuss potential applications, requirements and limitations for geophysical applications, for example in geodesy (chronometric levelling, gravity field observation), seismology, and very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI).</p>

Large-scale not-for-profit Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) often have significant amounts of underutilized bandwidth because they provision their network capacity for the rare event that all clients utilize their purchased bandwidth. However, traffic policers are still applied to enforce committed purchase rates and avoid congestion. We present the design and initial evaluation of an SDN/OpenFlow solution that maximizes the network link utilization by user-defined fair allocation of spare bandwidth, while guaranteeing minimum bandwidth for each client.