Increased Bandwidth to Regional and National Networks
Summary: New gigabit connectivity is now available to all UC campuses. By October 1, 2003 it will also include California State University, Community Colleges and DCP (Digital California Project).
New UCI Campus Network Connections Increase Bandwidth
to Regional and National Networks
The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC -- http://www.cenic.org/ ) has been building a new regional network in California which will provide gigabit connectivity to all UC campuses, and ultimately, connectivity for all education in California. Called CalREN (California Research and Education Network), this new regional network replaces an older CENIC network project which ran at OC-12 over a SONET architecture (Synchronous Optical Network), thus increasing connectivity for UCI from 622 megabits per second to 1,000 megabits per second. Thus far, UCSD, UCR, UCI, UCLA, UCSB, and UCSC are connected to the new CalREN network, and the remaining campuses (such as Davis, Caltech, USC and Stanford) which are immediately scheduled to connect to it are either on by now or very close to being so. CENIC began deployment of the new CalREN network in January of 2003. This is the first multi-tiered, statewide optical network of this type in the nation. It uses 1,200 miles of fiber and special optical equipment.
Unlike the previous regional POS (Packets over SONET) network which routed all traffic across one common link to each campus, the new CalREN network will have segregated traffic paths. For UCI, this means three new connections, in pairs for redundancy, for a total of 6 connections, each at gigabit speed. CalREN is a layered network, with the first layer being CalREN-DC, CENIC's Digital California network, which provides high-quality services for students, faculty, researchers and staff. These services include Internet services, which UCI receives as a separate CalREN-DC feed. Thus, UCI's CalREN-DC connection is actually two, separate gigabit links, redundantly established over diverse physical paths. UCI's third connection is called CalREN-HPR. CalREN-HPR is CENIC's High-Performance Research network, which provides leading-edge services for large-application users and CENIC associates sites. It, too, is redundantly connected.
Despite the scope and complexity of the new CalREN state network, The new optical infrastructure will be in full operation by October 1st, with the California State University system, Community Colleges, and the DCP (Digital California Project) nodes transitioning over to the new backbone by the end of the calendar year. The Digital California Project, another CENIC project, provides network connections to school districts around the state from CalREN, thereby supporting K-12 education. The goal of CalREN-DC is to provide connectivity for all K-20 education around the state.
This migration to the CENIC's new CalREN network provides advanced services to major research entities in California, including California Institutes of Science and innovation, such as CalIT2 (The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, which is based at UCSD and UCI). In addition, CalREN provides an unprecedented connection to Abilene, the UCAID (University Consortium for Advanced Internet Development) Abilene network. Abilene is a UCAID-driven, Internet2 network development project, which connects over a 100 universities nationally at speeds greatly exceeding the commercial Internet. UCI and UCSD are members of the Internet2 consortium and CENIC. Such new connectivity will provide excellent connectivity to important research locations, such as the San Diego Supercomputer Center the Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech, JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), USC's Information Sciences Institute, Stanford University' Linear Accelerator Center, and the national laboratories, to name a few.
In addition to the CalREN-DC and CalREN-HPR networks, a conceptual network called CalREN-XD (Experimental Development) will arise as research drives the need for special dedicated networks between campuses for the purpose of network research. CalREN-XD networks would be created by leasing or placing additional long-haul fiber as needed, then using already in-place local fiber at each campus to connect in through the "last mile." An example of this might be a recent proposal called PEARL which was submitted by Daniel Blumenthal (UCSB) to the NSF (National Science Foundation) under the Information Technology Research (ITR) program. PEARL would require dedicated CalREN-XD fiber in order to pursue optical networking research with UCI and UCSD faculty, and others. Another, funded, research initiative known as Optiputer seeks to establish a private, direct link between UCSD and UCI using either a lambda over CalREN-HPR or a CalREN-XD circuit in order to operate a computer which has components distributed over a wide geographic area.
CENIC affords its members a most economical solution - while network capacity has grown by 1600 percent, the network connection costs for CENIC's founding institutions has remained constant since 1997. In the new CalREN network, special optics were required to light the fiber in the backbone using Wave Division Multiplexing. Cisco Systems equipment was selected, through a competitive bidding process, to provide this equipment as well as for the links between the CalREN backbone and the campus sites.
In the future, CENIC expects to grow ONI to higher bandwidths as the state's educational and research network needs grow. CENIC represents the common interests of California's higher education academic and research communities in achieving robust, high-capacity, next-generation IP protocol (Internet Protocol) communications services. For more information on CalIT2 research programs, visit http://www.calit2.net/
