Abstracts

The Connector/Network Member Principals will gather to discuss Internet2 initiatives.

This is a Getting Started workshop for network automation with Python. Topics will start at a high-level and then become more detailed. These topics include: A background and introduction to automation, Python and open source tooling (such as Netmiko), templating, sources of truth, projects, examples, automation best practices, barriers, and more.

Familiarity with Python and Unix shell is helpful. Bringing a laptop is heavily encouraged for participants who wish to join the speaker in the weeds.

Learn about deploying IPv6, RPKI and DNSSEC, keeping your ARIN data accurate, and navigating the IPv4 Transfer Market.

This invitation-only gathering will offer a selection of topics and speakers tailored to the interests and issues of R&E executive leaders within the framework of Community Exchange.

Based on feedback from the inaugural 2022 Leadership Exchange series (held in May and October 2022), the format of this half-day event (Monday, May 8, 2023, from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.) will include attendee-driven topics and more networking time for discussion. Designed specifically for executive leaders and their next level of leaders as a professional development opportunity, the agenda will be communicated soon. Be on the lookout for further details.

To register, see the 2023 Community Exchange Registration page.

There are now a handful of organizations (ESnet and Internet2 to name a few) in the global research and education community leveraging Cisco Network Services Orchestrator as part of their network automation and orchestration platforms. This half-day workshop will provide an introduction to NSO, why you might consider using NSO, and hands-on experience with creating NSO service models and running NSO against simulated devices.

Agenda:

• The what and why of NSO [presentation]
• NSO in Docker – intro to the environment [hands-on]
• Anatomy of an NSO service [presentation]
• Creating an NSO service [hands-on]
• Using your new NSO Service [hands-on]

To register, see the 2023 Community Exchange Registration page.

Please join us for this workshop on Monday, May 8th, from 1-4:30 p.m. ET.  Workshop participants will learn techniques for ensuring their BGP configuration faithfully implements the intended routing policy. We will cover techniques including:

• How to tag received routes, via BGP communities, and use those tags to enforce policy when routes are exported.
• How to implement Peerlock-lite to ensure routes that transit tier one providers aren’t leaked.
• How to create RPKI Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs) to ensure that networks implementing RPKI Route Origin Validation, such as the Internet2 network, protect these routes from misconfiguration and hijacks.
• How to use the Internet2 Insight Console to determine which routes are received, accepted, or rejected.

Southern Crossroads (SoX) would like to host its Spring Participants Meeting at the 2023 Community Exchange. This will be an invitation only event.

Join us for a community-led meeting where we will discuss recent activities, topics of interest, and ways to get involved with the Community Anchor Program (CAP). These sessions are informal and collaborative, with opportunities for community discussion and brainstorming.

We invite regional network partners, applications providers, community anchor representatives, university representatives, and any other participants interested in helping community anchor institutions expand their use of advanced networking, applications, and content to attend this meeting.

Meeting with the members of the NAOPpag to discuss strategic Network Services topics.

Please join James Deaton as he kicks off the 2023 Technology Exchange Advanced Networking track. James will provide an overview of what is happening in Internet2’s Network Services division and a preview of the Network Services sessions at TechEX.

TBD

In this talk, the NSF will provide an overview of priorities and investments in cyberinfrastructure, cybersecurity, networking, cloud computing, research, and emerging topics such as Artificial Intelligence and the impacts to research and education. The session will focus both on existing programs, as well as new programs introduced for the 2023 fiscal year and beyond.

Speaker:

Kevin Thompson, Program Director, National Science Foundation

Learn about deploying IPv6, RPKI and DNSSEC, keeping your ARIN data accurate, and navigating the IPv4 Transfer Market.

Our goal is to share the real outcomes of schools that had a desire to “modernize IAM,” and hear their story; what worked, what did not, and how they accomplished their goals! You will hear everything from initial requirements to political nuances, strategy, planning, and tactical successes.

Multiple campuses are exploring the use of Private 4G/5G Wireless Networks employing Citizen’s Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) shared spectrum and Educational Broadband Service (EBS) licensed spectrum.

There are a variety of uses cases ranging from supporting campuses services and devices, small cell based distributed antenna system (DAS) and Neutral host networking (NHN) to improve cellular coverage, research platforms, and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) to extended coverage. The BoF is an opportunity for campuses to share their use cases, experiences, and opportunities community collaboration.

Do you want to learn more about what to expect with the Insight Console in 2023? Are you interested in hearing about Internet2’s network automation efforts and the automation work in the community? Have you been wondering how the Internet2 Network can be part of your solution for reaching the cloud?

This session will cover four Internet2 Network topics:

1. Insight Console. Learn about the Insight Console, a web-based console that allows members to visualize, manage and troubleshoot Internet2 network services. Looking Glass is currently available in the Insight Console. We will also talk about what is on the horizon for the Insight Console.
2. Automation. Internet2 used automation when building the Next Generation Infrastructure (NGI) to provision and manage the network configuration. Karl Newell will talk about how automation continues to play a role in the Internet2 Network. Karl will also describe the how the community is using automation in their own networks and the efforts by Internet2 to support automation.
3. Network Performance Expectations and Troubleshooting. Karl will describe a training series that Internet2 will be working with the community to create. The series will cover tuning and proper selection of protocols and applications to maximize WAN performance.
4. Networking for Cloud. George Loftus will describe Internet2’s Networking for Cloud solutions including Internet2 Peer Exchange (I2PX), Cloud Connect (I2CC) and Rapid Private Interconnect (RPI).

Join this session to learn more about allies and how they can play a role in removing gender bias obstacles for women in IT organizations, and help us recognize and welcome the recipients of this year’s I2I scholarships. Lunch will be provided; please get your food and beverage from the foyer (Room TBD) before proceeding to the meeting room.

Ana Hunsinger, Internet2 vice president of community engagement, will open the session with a brief update on the Internet2 Inclusivity (I2I) Initiative and recognition of this year’s I2I scholarship recipients and Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) attendees.

Steve Burrell, VP IT and CIO at Northern Arizona University, will share research he participated in a few years ago about overcoming gender bias obstacles for women in IT organizations and providing guidance for men who want to become allies to help remove those barriers. Insights were gleaned from 13 higher education CIOs who overcame gender obstacles and conveyed the importance of developing allies for women early in their careers among other ideas stemming from their lived experiences. Participants will discuss and reflect on two major questions: “What can we learn from these CIOs that translate to our own situation,” and “how can we develop relationships with both men and women allies and foster relationships that empower women to power through the obstacles to success?”

Women continue to face significant obstacles and gender bias as they pursue their careers in IT. It is incumbent upon current IT leadership to remove these hurdles and create environments where women are fairly recruited, compensated, developed, and retained equally with their male counterparts in our IT organizations. The current lack of diversity among students in STEM education fields indicates the need for programs that provide on-the-job training rather than reliance on specific degree requirements. Providing a pathway from general support positions to increasingly technical or management-specific job tracks will enhance diversity and retention.

TBD

The JET provides a forum for federal & academic members of the Research & Engineering and the Research and Education Network communities to exchange their latest network plans, issues and problems; and discuss consequences and possible solutions. It is open to all who are interested and held in a round table format (networks, IXPs & operational network security).

This panel will share how Internet2, REN-ISAC, and EDUCAUSE work collaboratively and independently to provide support for cybersecurity professionals to solve challenges as a community. The presenters will provide an update and showcase initiatives, projects, and resources each organization provides to the community and how they all collaborate.

“I’m a woman working in IT. Somedays, I still don’t believe it.” The gender gap in tech.

Take a journey into a woman’s perspective on working in an IT department, how she ended up there, and what she’s learned. Discover what holds a lot of women back from the tech industry, why we need more women in the field, and what we can do to reduce the gender gap. Grinnell College’s (male) CIO also describes his journey and perspectives on the value of gender diversity and allyship.

Background: Even with a push to make the technology industry more diverse, a large gender gap still exists. Despite efforts to expand female interest and employment in STEM fields, currently women only make up 26.7% of people working in the sector, and the number of women in tech-related careers decreased over the last two years. As for the women working in the tech, they are 22% more likely to report experiencing imposter syndrome, and up to 50% of women report experiencing gender discrimination during the hiring process or at work. Published data will be weaved into this storytelling approach to the topic, and practical actions – based on themes in the research – will be provided to help reduce the gender gap.

Join us for the Network Security Special Interest Group! Discuss RPKI, telemetry and flow analytics, vulnerability management, border blocking, and other topics. All are welcome!

The JET provides a forum for federal and academic members of the Research and Engineering and the Research and Education Network communities to exchange their latest network plans, issues and problems; and to discuss consequences and possible solutions. It is open to all who are interested and held in a round table format (networks, IXPs & operational network security).

Join us for the Network Security Special Interest Group! Discuss RPKI, telemetry and flow analytics, vulnerability management, border blocking, and other topics. All are welcome!

Both the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and the Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives, have complementary missions with the area of intersection being digital equity.

Many states received National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) funding to expand broadband and universities, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). This funding can be influential in the development of their states’ broadband plans to ensure there is a focus on digital equity.

Additionally, there are opportunities for HBCUs and community organizations to apply for funding to develop digital equity plans for the communities surrounding their campuses. This session will focus on providing attendees an update and timely information regarding how universities can serve as anchor institutions that support their communities by bridging digital divides.

Zero Trust (ZT) and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Concepts for Segmentation: This talk will provide an overview of how different network manufacturers approach the solution. As reinforced in NIST 800-207, zero trust (ZT) & role-based access control (RBAC) are central to a modern, segmented research network.

However, the major network manufacturers have a variety of different approaches to RBAC and ZT. We’ll review the key concepts and then briefly describe how each of the common network manufacturers approach the problem. Session takeaways include:

• What is RBAC, ZT and NIST 800-207?

• Understand the major network manufacturers’ approach as well as a manufacturer-independent approach to map to your environment.

The modern biomedical research environment is a highly collaborative enterprise, and the NIH has implemented a variety of data sharing policies. Enabling this collaborative enterprise and the policies in the secure environment requires the participation of IT staff from NIH and all funded and collaborating institutions. Towards this end, we must ensure the use of secure, high-quality credentials for researchers and their staff. This panel will focus on the importance of secure credentials in trust federations and some of the lessons learned by the NIH during the past few years.

Panelists:

• Michael Tartakovsky, CIO, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
• Dr. Rebecca Rosen, director, Office of Data Science and Sharing, NICHD/ NIH
• Jeff Erickson, chief of identity and access management services, NIH

The true value of eduroam increases with its ubiquity. Having eduroam in every primary and secondary educational institution, library, and public space boosts the value proposition of the service immensely and regional networks and community anchor institutions present a unique and powerful opportunity to address this scaling challenge.

We’ll discuss the latest on five statewide deployments of eduroam to K12, library, and museum populations as well as collaborations with commercial ISPs to provide eduroam in public hotspots. Come hear about lessons learned, what’s next for the work of bringing eduroam to the K12 world, and how that work enhances the value for the national eduroam community!

For years institutions have leveraged free or low-cost cloud storage on platforms such as Google, Box, Microsoft, and others to provide their communities with a means to collaborate anytime from anywhere on any device. It transformed the way we all worked. One by one, the vendors upped the ante and finally eliminated unlimited storage.

In 2020, 26 universities participated in collaboration with Internet2 in the NET+ Google Workspace for Education service evaluation and negotiation process with Google. A NET+ service for Google Workspace for Education was launched in 2021. Schools were forced to take a critical look at their storage profile, and begin to consider data lifecycle and storage policies. Some decided to consolidate on fewer platforms to save cost and exposure. In the process, they discovered the challenges and the cost of moving large amounts of data while still preserving collaborations and the associated comments and metadata.

The Cloud Storage Working group (CSWG) facilitated by Internet2 was born out of the need to bring the community back together to tackle the challenge of making the changes on their campuses to handle the storage adjustments. More than 50 institutions are represented on the CSWG today.

The panelists represent the four CSWG subgroups which have developed solutions and documentation for the higher education community in four areas that are critical for storage management: deprovisioning of accounts, quota management, data migration, and communications. They will share their challenges, lessons learned, and recommendations to both their colleagues and the vendors in hopes of finding real solutions

The advanced computing playing field is fundamentally non-level: a small fraction of researchers have access to substantial resources—with respect to both capacity and capability—that allow them to easily scale their work from proof-of concept to large-scale experiments; but the majority are constrained by a lack of access and the advanced skills required to move from small- to ultra-scale.

A number of efforts, such as the recently announced ACCESS project, are making it easier for disadvantaged groups to compute at scale, but the technical hurdles remain. We will describe and demonstrate how a novel implementation of functions-as-a-service enables even those with only rudimentary programming knowledge to easily compute at any scale, from a laptop to a supercomputer.

In 2021, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) as part of its cyberinfrastructure initiative received funding from the National Science Foundation to develop a pilot program on Cyberinfrastructure Strategic Planning (CISP) for Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCU) nationwide.

With broad buy-in at the TCU Presidential level, the program engages with the IT leaders at the campus level using the CISP model which includes a flexible set of CI planning tools and resources available for gathering the information and data necessary to develop a campus-based cyberinfrastructure strategic plan. The tools include baseline assessment instruments that can be adapted and tailored to each specific campus environment and are aimed at understanding the current role as well as the long-term requirements and aspirations for CI within the campus environment.

A moderated panel representing the initial cohort of campuses participating in the CISP process will provide an overview of the process, background on the participating schools as well as a discussion on the benefits and challenges associated with the planning process. Finally, the panel will discuss if this process is sustainable within the Tribal College community and scalable to other smaller institutions of higher education.

In this presentation, we demonstrate how technology-enabled music creation can convey Yellowstone’s unique geophysical systems to raise awareness about geology and geophysics. The talk will discuss how art and technology can bring us (with particular focus on the visually impaired) closer to the oldest US National Park to enjoy the unique characteristics of its geothermal features through the music they create. The investigation is a result of an ongoing project with the US National Park Service.

The Connector/Network Member BoF brings together regional network representatives to discuss topics of interest such as network automation, networking for cloud, and other topics of interest. Anyone associated with a regional network is invited to attend.

This meeting is open to any attendee new to Internet2 or the Community Exchange, or those interested in learning more about Internet2’s services and community. The session will provide an orientation to Internet2 including an organizational overview of its many programs and services.

Internet2 colleagues will share perspectives on how members and partners can optimize their engagement with the community. Intended audience includes higher education, affiliate and industry members, and colleagues from our Community Anchor Program, Minority Serving-Cyberinfrastructure Consortium and international partner organizations. All are welcome!

There is a lot of discussion in the community about the challenges around cloud storage. Join members of the Internet2 Cloud Services Technology Architecture Advisory Committee and the Internet2 Google Workspace for Education Storage Working Group for a facilitated discussion to scope the areas of concern, identify the key pain points, and opportunities for collaborative solutions.

The Americas Research and Education Networks (AMREN) meeting:  The Americas Research and Education Networks (AMREN) works across Canarie, Internet2, and RedCLARA to define a common agenda for the Americas, with the goal of fostering synergies, cooperation, and creating opportunities to support research, education and innovation. This meeting will bring together AMREN leadership, team members and relevant colleagues supporting the project mission. For questions, please contact Ann Doyle.

During this session, we review the process, implementation timeline, and current state for the InCommon visioning process for Identity tools and services used by our community.

Have you heard of the Internet2 Routing Integrity initiative and want to know more? Are you interested in learning how the Internet2 infrastructure is evolving since NGI was built? Do you want to know more about how Internet2 is coordinating across worldwide networks to ensure that all function as systemic, best-in-class resources?

This session will cover three Internet2 Network topics:

1. The Routing Integrity Initiative aims to improve the research and education (R&E) community’s adoption of best practices that strengthen the resilience and reliability of data movement across the R&E network ecosystem to support our shared missions. Routing integrity is an end-to-end challenge that requires the participation of the entire Internet2-networked community and beyond.
2. Data Intensive Science and International Activities Learn how we are working with NRENs around the world to support data intensive science researchers. Projects include supporting community development of transoceanic 400G links and updating global exchange points in the US to 400G.
3. Evolving Core Network Technologies  Learn about the the state of the Internet2 Network and the short- and long-term improvements to the optical and packet infrastructures.

There will be ample time for questions during this session.

IT Governance – what feelings and emotions do those words elicit? Success, happiness, satisfaction or anger, frustration, and a deep sense of failure. No matter what your emotional response is, IT Governance is here to stay. IT must collaborate with academic and administrative partners to make strategic decisions that benefit the institution. IT organizations must find a way to tear down siloed thinking and decision-making patterns. Otherwise, no matter how good the process is, we will continue to be overloaded and try to manage a backlog of work with limited resources.

Each of our institutions has recently gone through an IT governance review. We have learned from our experiences, banged our heads against the wall, and attempted to find a better way. During this session, we will describe our governance review processes, provide a brief overview of process refinements and debate the merits of each approach. We expect this session to be lively, none of us have solved all the problems, and most of us are restarting our IT governance journeys.

EPOC, the Engagement and Performance Operations Center, is an NSF funded project that offers a full suite of services to assist end user researchers to share data with collaborators by making sure the underlying infrastructure is efficient and effective. We offer a broad set of tools to help understand how data transfers perform and to tune them for better performance.

This session will be an interactive session between EPOC leads Dr. Jennifer Schopf and Jason Zurawski and several collaborators from national collaborations and regional networking partnerships, to discuss how EPOC has worked with teams in the past and what is possible for the Internet2 member community going forward.

Participating with the EPOC leads will be:
• A representative for a recent Deep Dive, the EPOC process that helps institutions match cyberinfrastructure and networking with application needs.
• A regional networking representative who will discuss their use of NetSage to understand data transfer performance for their member institutions.
• A researcher from a team who used the EPOC Roadside Assistance process to understand poor data transfer performance for their research application, and will describe how the EPOC team helped them achieve performance gains.

EPOC services are available for free to the full research and education community.

The session aims to showcase and encourage sharing experience in bridging digital divide by drawing upon achievements by the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in the Eastern Partnership region (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine).

The session will focus on the EaP NRENs’ contribution to the process of digital transformation in the region (specifically for education, science and research) , identifying solutions that utilize the synergies of international collaborations, expanding human networks to maximize the benefits of technology – ultimately, benefiting societies at the national level and enabling growth of education, science and research on the international scale.

From the White House’s National Cybersecurity‘s Secure the Technical Foundation of the Internet: “… We must take steps to mitigate the most urgent of these pervasive concerns such as … slow adoption of IPv6.“

While the R&E community was an early adopter of IPv6, we now must catch up to much of the commercial sector and the globalInternet. This BoF will explore the barriers to IPv6 adoption and discuss potential opportunities to lessen the need for IPv4 space.

Please attend this session to share your successes, challenges, and insights into adopting IPv6.

As a campus CIO or executive leader, you are likely responsible for developing and executing a strategic plan for campus research cyberinfrastructure (CI). But how do you capture the state of your existing CI – including IT resources for data-driven research and education – as a baseline for strategic planning? How does your institution compare with peer organizations, and how can you discover and learn from what others are doing? What if your CI resources and responsibilities are distributed across multiple campus units? How do you capture human resources to inform workforce development?

In this session, we’ll introduce the Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model, an assessment tool developed by the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) with support from the RCD Nexus, an NSF CI Center of Excellence Pilot. The tool is free to the community and already used by institutions of all sizes and complexity to aid in strategic planning. This session will be interactive, with the Model’s developers and community members on-hand to answer your questions and share their experiences with using the tool. We’ll also discuss complementary CaRCC resources, programs, and working groups relevant to the research IT strategic planning needs of CIOs and senior executive leadership.

This talk introduces a digital divide we don’t often talk about- what happens in the aftermath of a disaster. It’s something hopefully few of us have direct experience with, but after a major even like a wildfire, hurricane, or flood, how are IT needs met? We can joke about where social media and streaming services fall on the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs but staying connected is key to recovery. Keeping loved ones updated on status, filing insurance claims, finding a place to shower or do laundry- all those things require being connected to the internet. First responders and those involved in the recovery effort also have IT needs that dramatically ramp up in an area that might be cut off from the rest of the world.

This talk introduces the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC), a non-profit, volunteer organization that responds to natural disasters and other events to help those directly affected, first responders, and others involved in the recovery effort. By discussing a recent ‘deployment’ to help southwest Florida after Hurricane Ian, this talk aims to encourage participation in this public service organization.

Beyond headline grabbing needs like natural disasters, ITDRC responds to such needs as the Afghan refugee resettlement, Ukrainian refugee resettlement, assisting with remote learning at the start of the pandemic (projectConnect), and Uvalde community recovery.

Disasters can create digital divides at times and places where we don’t expect them. ITDRC can help. You can help.

When exploring the world of Federated Identity, research communities can reap considerable benefit from using common best practices and adopting interoperable ways of working. EnCo, the Enabling Communities task of the GÉANT 4-3 and GÉANT 5-1 Trust and Identity Work Package, provides the link between those seeking to deploy Federated Identity Management and the significant body of knowledge accumulated within the wider community.

Individuals from EnCo aim to ensure that outputs from projects (e.g. AARC) and groups (e.g. WISE, FIM4R, IGTF, REFEDS) are well known, available and kept up to date as technology changes. Since many of these groups are non-funded, it’s vital for their survival that projects such as the GÉANT project sponsor individuals to drive progress and maintain momentum. The ultimate aim is to enhance trust between identity providers and research communities/infrastructure, to enable researchers’ safe and secure access to resources.

As we commence the work programme for the GEANT-5 phase, which starts in 2023, it is a good moment to review the impact on the trust and identity world achieved through the previous programme, and how global engagement can be promoted as the community gets ever more interconnected. The next GEANT programme will build on the same open structures of WISE, FIM4R, IGTF and REFEDS, so that shared knowledge is maintained and updated in the future – something essential for interoperability, trust and security.

The Federated Identity Management for Research (FIM4R) community is a forum where Research Communities meet to establish common requirements, combining their voices to send a strong message to FIM stakeholders. For example, in 2020 people from EnCo were among those who led efforts to produce a position paper on the EOSC identity management strategy from the perspective of research communities as well as the rebooting of the FIM4R activities post-pandemic.

The WISE community promotes best practice in information security for IT infrastructures for research. EnCo has been and is leading several activities within WISE. This includes the Security for Collaborating Infrastructures working group, which has produced a guidance document to encourage self-assessment against the SCI Trust Framework and is working towards updating the AARC Policy Development Kit (PDK). Also, since information security processes need periodic exercise, the community organizes challenges for communications response and mitigation of incidents affecting collaborative communities, and at times even deep forensics – all to make sure communities are prepared, and the various tests complement each other.

REFEDS is the voice that articulates the mutual needs of research and education identity federations worldwide. EnCo has been leading and participating in several activities on both assurance (the REFEDS Assurance Suite) and security to increase the level of trust in federations (SIRTFI). Trust in community for AARC proxy services is further promoted with the IGTF guidance on secure attribute authority operations and exchanging assurance for the infrastructures.

Come join the eduroam team and your fellow eduroam admins to discuss the latest developments to the service, share best practices, and noodle on the future of the service.

Join Internet2 and Radware for updates on our DDoS Mitigation service.

Internet2 engaged in the creation of a five-year roadmap in the fall of 2022, engaging stakeholders across the community by seeking input on existing Internet2 services, solutions, and value – and how those should evolve in the coming years.

This session will provide an update on where Internet2 is in the five-year roadmap process, steps being taken to categorize the input and feedback received to date, and how Internet2 plans to work with the community to validate priorities and future direction.

Institutions want to make data-informed decisions about the cloud. Whether that is benchmarking usage of services as it compares to peers, understanding usage patterns, or understanding compliance with various requirements, much of this data already exists in the research and education community. So to does a strong sense of collaboration across institutions.

This session will showcase community efforts to make data about the use of cloud services available to community participants and provide details on how you can access some of these resources today. Examples include the Internet2 Cloud Scorecard, NET+ Infrastructure and Platform Services benchmarking project, NET+ Institutional Profiles, and more.

The NTAC Network Automation SIG seeks to connect members of the research and education community for discussions and collaboration around network automation. In addition to SIG members, this meetup is available to all who are interested in implementing automation within their institution and want a launching point for interacting with peers facing the same challenges.

During this time of increased awareness and historic investment for digital equity, what roles can research and education networks (RENs), higher education, and other community anchor institutions play in designing and implementing sustainable, robust digital inclusion initiatives? The answer is multi-pronged. From connecting unserved communities, to supporting state and local digital equity planning, to training a new workforce, the needs (and opportunities) are great for organizations to think holistically about closing the digital divide. This session will highlight key funding programs and a variety of promising practices being used by RENs and higher education institutions to advance digital equity.

The NET+ Service Providers that participated in the Five-Year Roadmap feedback session requested more opportunities to interact with each other to collaborate to benefit our overall community, potentially with integrated solutions.

This working lunch will enable the conversation to continue. We welcome your feedback not only on the Five-Year Roadmap but also on current experiences in the NET+ program. This is an opportunity for you to share best practices, ask us and your peers questions and network.

The designations for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), tribal colleges and universities (TCUs), and the broad range of minority serving institutions (MSIs) have unique historical and cultural definitions. Despite being systemically underserved and under-resourced, these institutions continue to uplift their students and nurture leaders across academic disciplines.

The Minority Serving – Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC) strives to enable shared capabilities, tools, assessments, and resources in support of cyberinfrastructure for the institutions that come together through the MS-CC. It is cultivating a vibrant community of practice across HBCUs, TCUs, and MSIs, where peers can collaborate and support one another, and build a coalition to advocate for their needs as a community.

Recently, the MS-CC in partnership with Internet2 received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support this vision. Nearly $3 million over two years to fund a Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence Pilot in 2021 (NSF Award # 2137123), and nearly 15 million over five years to support accelerating cyberinfrastructure-centric research capacity at HBCUs and TCUs through proof-of-concept grants and shared resources in 2022 (NSF Award # 2234326).

This presentation will provide attendees an overview of how the MS-CC plans to affect change and make a difference in ensuring that students and faculty at HBCUs, TCUs, and other MSIs have access to advanced cyberinfrastructure capabilities through community and capacity building; workforce development; and research support and acceleration. The presentation will be followed by a moderated Q&A session focused on how we can collectively bridge digital divides that ensure the equal participation of historically underserved institutions within the U.S. and global research and education communities.

This is the monthly working meeting of the Business, Procurement and Legal Advisory Committee (BPLAC).

Research and education is by its nature collaborative and global. Hence, creating reliable, secure, high performance networking between the continents is an important mission for R&E networks. Intercontinental networking has advanced tremendously In recents years, and not just in capacity. The Global Network Architecture (GNA) has led to an emerging GREN – the global research and education network – connecting regional and continental networks, and to the creation of multi-partner collaborations such as the ANA (Advanced North Atlantic collaboration) connecting continents at capacities seen before. In doing this, we facilitate the next generation of scientific collaboration.

Arctic connectivity and Arctic sub-sea cables is the next step in intercontinental networking. Connecting Europe and North America on an arctic route offer unique, low-latency routes, fully independent from and adding resilience to existing trans-Atlantic connectivity.

NORDUnet and the Nordic NRENs have a 10-year vision to promote the Arctic and sub-Arctic as a key area for the digital transition of Europe and the world, creating Gravity North for digital resources and enterprises as well as research. We call this Vision 2030. A core element of realizing that vision is creating arctic connectivity to Asia and North America, offering the Nordic countries and all of Europe new, high-capacity, low-latency links.

To support this realization, NORDUnet and the Nordic NRENs have established an internal program called Polar Connect, creating partnerships to investigate, build, and use Arctic connectivity. Currently, two specific connectivity projects are planned in the program: Far North Fibre (FNF), a link through the North-West Passage between Greenland and North America to the Bering Strait and to Japan / North America, and Polar-Connect, a link on a direct route east of Greenland, to the same destinations.

The talk will introduce the Arctic region and the concept or Arctic subsea cables. It will explain the NORDUnet vision for connectivity to Asia and North America through the Arctic, and detail current EU-support projects to realize this vision. Finally, the talk will set Arctic connectivity and the Polar-Connect project in the context of the GREN, demonstrating how it enhances both the ANA (Europe-North America) and AER (Europe-Asia) network collaboration, creating an even stronger global network for science.

Today, GÉANT meets its members’ and European user communities’ global connectivity needs through high-capacity, direct bandwidth with other world regions and key economies, currently approaching 1.9 Tbps. These needs are met through connectivity under GÉANT ‘s member RENs, including through the EU-funded regional development projects.

This federated approach maximizes available capacities and ensures redundancy through coordinated route planning and mutual back-up arrangements (such as the Advanced North Atlantic (ANA), the Asia-Europe Ring (AER) and Bridging Europe, Africa and the Americas (BEAA) collaborations). However, international R&E traffic increases on average by over 35% year on year, and big science projects such as the SKA and the High Luminosity LHC are due to come online in the next few years, bringing with them significantly higher data transfer needs.

Consequently, GÉANT ‘s international connectivity will need to grow and adapt to address increasing demand in a timely manner and meet future application needs, whilst remaining highly resilient to disruptions. Long-term contracts (IRUs) for international connectivity are becoming increasingly available, with CAE-1 an example where RENs in Europe and Asia-Pacific have been able to secure a 15-year 100 Gbps link between the two regions. The GN4-3N and BELLA projects have both demonstrated the ability of the GÉANT  community to harness funding opportunities to meet long-term connectivity needs through the delivery of long-term IRU contracts for fibre and spectrum, both in Europe and internationally.

In the fifth iteration of the GÉANT  project, funding will be specifically targeted at securing long-term intercontinental connectivity through the GN5-IC1 (Intercontinental-1) project. In March 2021 25 European Union Member States, Iceland and Norway signed the Declaration on European Data Gateways with the concept of four platforms, each with a specific geopolitical focus: the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the North Sea and Artic, and the Baltics to the Black Sea. To meet GÉANT’s strategic goal of supplying the high-quality international connectivity needed by European user communities, it will be necessary to engage with European NRENs and user communities to understand their needs, as well as with International RENs in other world regions to align with their needs and connectivity plans.

These needs will have to be aligned with funding streams, as well as investment possibilities in the telecommunications market in order to meet GÉANT ‘s international connectivity goals. Intelligence in these areas will be used to determine procurement priorities. This presentation is targeted at attendees of the Internet2 Community Exchange interested in learning about GÉANT ‘s international and intercontinental connectivity plans and objectives for the coming years, and how we are collaborating with R&E networking partners around the globe to achieve this.

It will focus on how intelligence is gathered and interpreted, and decisions made to inform specific procurement activities, and will explore the models that may be used to achieve distinct connectivity solutions. The presentation will highlight the importance of collaborations such as AER, ANA and BEAA and new opportunities for back-up and connectivity planning cooperation in the context of the GREN community. By the end of the session, the audience will understand how GÉANT  aims to play its part in the future of global R&E connectivity and how GÉANT  will engage with the European and Global REN community to optimize the use of the resources available and contribute to the GREN network that meets R&E needs for the coming decade and even beyond.

The discussions around cloud computing have evolved from should we, to how and in what ways do we. As this happened, the cloud community grew, and grew fast, and was beginning to fracture into different areas. Regardless of how, or if, members previously interacted with cloud communities, we will discuss how a joint effort by the EDUCAUSE Cloud Community Group, its co-chairs, Internet2, and the community at large has raised awareness for everyone and broadened the reach of the conversation.

The Higher Ed (formerly Cornell) cloud forum, monthly community calls, Slack conversations on cloud topics great and small, best practices, wiki pages, and even vendor presentations have become a vibrant source of sharing and learning. This cohesive growth and collaboration wasn’t an accident, it was an intentional effort put in by the leaders in many of these individual spaces to build something that would grow and last beyond any individual effort. This has led to a number of really interesting and potentially transformative outcomes which we are now seeing the effect of. We will discuss these outcomes, and how we got here, in this session, and provide some pathways and mechanisms for how this could effectively translate to other communities.

The increasing demand to support connectivity for remote researchers and IoT devices is creating new challenges for
network engineering teams. Extending campus networks into rural areas with limited service provider options presents
roadblocks to university faculty, constrains pedagogy, and hinders the mission on R1 research institutions.
Computing at the edge, shifting resources outside of the traditional data center, continues to be an emerging technology.
Based on a distributed architecture, the goal of edge computing is to move the data closer to the user. The benefit is
bandwidth optimization, responsiveness, and reduced latency.

The required network speeds and feeds necessary to empower faculty at remote rural locations to leverage IoT and edge
computing, raises many questions that challenge the IT staff to think of alternative solutions. Point to point wireless,
wireless mesh networks (WMN), and Private LTE are just of few examples of technologies that can be utilized.

The goal of this group facilitated discussion is to learn from the success and failures of other IT professionals that have
grappled with deploying technology solutions in bandwidth challenged remote locations.

The higher education information security community and HECVAT working group have collaborated for almost seven years to build the successful HECVAT. Our session this year is a facilitated discussion for the results from the 2022 survey to ask for your ideas about where to develop HECVAT in the future. We will also go over where we need you to get involved to build more resources for the community and the service providers that support us.

A growing number of computationally intensive research activities require commensurate large-scale data management. In particular, high resolution imaging instruments such as cryogenic electron microscopes and synchrotron beamlines require automation of data flows to increase throughput and researcher productivity, as well as to ensure the instrument remains highly utilized.

The Globus platform-as-a-service is increasingly used to easily build and execute automated data flows in this context. We will describe how the platform facilitates end-to-end automation of complex research flows. We will present scenarios from research universities and national facilities that illustrate implementation of common use cases and use these to encourage sharing of requirements and knowledge among attendees.

This session details how Internet2 and their Canadian partner, CANARIE, are collaborating with Latin America, Europe, and Australia on:

1. Maintaining Network Availability through Fire and Flood
2. Connecting the Unconnected
3. Securing Global Research Through International Threat Intelligence Sharing

In this session we will discuss the prototype build out of remote access to Transmission Electron Microscope and Focused Ion Beam/scanning electron microscope instruments. The technologies used including Open OnDemand, containers, instrument edge processing with “cloudlets”, and Cryo-SPARC. Additionally we will discuss the broad partnership including Rutgers, Omnibond, Pennsylvania State University, Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and TechSquare. Furthermore we will discuss how the collaboration has grown from concept discussions to building proof of concepts and leading to collaborative grant proposals.

Systems approaches are now needed to solve urgent global problems affecting our ecosystem and societies. The complexity of the issues, frequency of unintentional problems, challenging nature of data integration, and desperate need for accountable social media focused on the common good, an Arts and Sciences for Society group has been working towards a systems approach that will ultimately include, on the one hand, cloud-based collaboration and data integration of data types ranging from climatology to organismal monitoring and public health, and on the other hand, community-based and humane tests of efficacy. We propose a broader discussion and integration of work by like-minded institutions and individuals globally to work together towards a systems solution that addresses these issues.

Infrastructure as Code tools are now commonly used in IT operations where they provide significant advantages. Information security practitioners need to familiarize themselves with these tools and the processes surrounding them. In this talk, I’ll provide a gentle introduction to Infrastructure as Code using a cloud-hosted penetration testing environment as an example. Attendees will learn the basics of Packer, Ansible, and Terraform as well as best practices for using infrastructure as code to both manage and secure an environment.

As InCommon participants, we have federated AUTHENTICATION down pretty well. But when it comes to AUTHORIZATION between institutions, we have a long way to go. At Illinois, we currently require outside users to get guest credentials to complete HIPAA training or manually upload certificates for same before they’re allowed to access our REDCap instance.

We’re looking at ways to streamline this through shared federated services and authorization information passed through SSO. In this session, attendees will learn how Illinois (and others) are exploring federation to go beyond just letting users sign in with their home institutions’ username and password. Attendees are encouraged to share their own interesting use cases.

This is an opportunity for the 2023 Community Exchange Program Committee to debrief about the planning process, the changes to this anchor event, and generate ideas for future Community Exchange meetings.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst launched a new High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster and operations model beginning in 2018 known as the Unity cluster. Built as a pilot cluster that has since moved to production Unity uses common tools, such as Slurm, Shibboleth, and Jupyter to deliver services. Importantly, the cluster was designed to both support federated identities for users, but is also operated as a mutually operated collaborative serving the needs of several institutions.

The Unity Cluster provides computing to the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Dartmouth campuses, as well as the University of Rhode Island. The Unity Cluster includes equipment (cores and storage) contributed by each participating campus as well as centrally-funded components.

The Unity Cluster is located at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke MA. The MGHPCC provides space, power, and cooling capacity to support over 680 racks (80 racks for UMass) of computing and storage equipment, drawing up to 15MW of power. High speed network connections to the facility are available via private dark fiber, the Northern Crossroads, NEREN, and Internet 2. The MGHPCC facility was designed and built to be a leader in green computing and has been awarded LEED Platinum status.

The NET+ team is preparing to do a service evaluation for a cloud vendor risk management service that campuses can use for third party risk management, vendor management, service inventory, and many other uses! More details on this can be found in this blog.

This working meeting is to get together to explore what campuses are already using, GRC functionality, campus requirements, and potential service providers.

Inevitable digital transformation poses numerous challenges to modern organizations, whose users are demanding fast setup of secure, stable, reliable and resilient services. Orchestration of resources to enable automation and virtualization of processes and services is an obvious way forward, though not very easy or without challenges, neither within a domain or when needed to enable and support multi-domain service provisioning and maintenance. The Network eAcademy (NeA) team from the GÉANT project Network Development work package (WP6) offers and provides support for using several tools that are addressing some of the recognized issues:

– An Orchestration, Automation and Virtualization (OAV) Terminology document to support better understanding and correct interpretation of different terms; the document is created in collaboration with the GNA-G automation working group, and constantly reviewed and updated;
– OAV architecture analysis and its mapping with a reference architecture to help involved organizations understand individual building blocks and functionalities their system, and systems of other organizations provide, to help and speed up a cross-domain service automation;
– Community portal that lists worldwide OAV examples and use cases.
– An OAV Maturity Model self-assessment survey to assess the current state of a digital system with indications of future development towards higher maturity levels.
– An OAV training program to help advancing through individual maturity levels, adopting and adapting new tools, thus supporting digital transformation within a domain as well as multi-domain interconnectivity and interoperability

On the other hand, the Network Development team is working on TechLab, a way to make several testing facilities available for network engineers and researchers, either to try out solutions developed and supported within the project, or as an infrastructure that can be used to test their own solutions. Production services like perfSONAR, PMP, NMaaS, WiFiMon, Argus, TimeMap, as well as research and development work -QKD, OTFN, RARE, GP4L-,  or the Incubator are among these initiatives.

The objective for this presentation is to raise the awareness in the community of the tools and solutions that are made available, together with the support that the team provides, gather inputs and feedback for its future development, and explore the possibility for expanding the content with the contribution from the Internet2 community, as well as providing information to the community about the tools they can use and benefits they get from using testing facilities provided by the GÉANT project.

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) products are opt-in services that can help mitigate the impact of unintentional misconfigurations or malicious attempts to hijack IP address resources. If your resources are already under a Registration Services Agreement (RSA), we’ll help you start using RPKI immediately. If you hold legacy resources not under agreement, we’ll help you learn how to sign a Legacy RSA and lock in lower annual fees prior to a fee change that’s coming at the end of 2023. Find out all the information required for you to participate in ARIN’s RPKI service to strengthen your routing security and establish an agreement with ARIN before the legacy rates expire.

During InCommon’s Collaboration Success Program (CSP), a question often asked by participants is, “What approach, policies, tools, and workflows are others using to address the primary Higher Education use cases?”

The answer to this question can be as unique as the institutions that answer it! During this session, we will place a spotlight on several key use cases and explore the general landscape of solutions. And, to start to understand the complexity and nuance of the “what solution?” question, our panel of institution representatives will share how they address the use case and explain why they made the choices that they have. Come away from this session with with additional insights on what to consider and how to frame solution combinations as you make decisions on how to address important use cases

We discuss how the Academic and Commercial sectors can collaborate to bring powerful tools to the hands of researchers. As an example to drive the discussion, we will explore how the Open OnDemand and Omnibond-CloudyCluster teams have collaborated over the past few years to provide an integrated solution for cloud research computing.

We will discuss the aspects that have led to a fruitful collaboration including what has made this successful and what can be done for improvement in the future. We will also give a brief demo and get feedback from the community on what they would like to see in future development.

Working together through the Research Data Integrity & Security  Center Advisory Board with LabArchives, this interactive and  facilitated discussion will highlight research collaboration.

Working together on the NIH data sharing policy, NSPM-33 requirements, and Research Data Integrity & Security Center website, this collaborative initiative created a one-stop-shop for discussing, collaborating, and disseminating information about research data security and integrity. This Advisory Board group will discuss the strength of open discussion and examples from other institutions to enhance their research data security, integrity, and compliance.

Science applications expect networks to perform in a reliable and predictable manner to enable the distribution of computation and data movement to produce science. New technologies and new paradigms have emerged in the Research and Education (R&E) Networking community to support science applications: Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs), Programmable Data Planes, In-band Network Telemetry (INT), distributed compute and data infrastructures, research and dedicated network testbeds, and new inter-domain federated orchestrators. Network virtualization and programmable networks are two key enablers that facilitate agile, fast and more efficient network infrastructures, as well as service development, deployment and provisioning.

Challenges in the WAN are being addressed by the adoption of orchestration and automation solutions to improve automated control, configuration and operation of network services, to reduce labor-intensive network deployments. Most network orchestrator solutions require science applications to interact with an orchestrator interface to respond to actions, recommendations, and for service instantiations. As a result, these interactions can result in adding undesired complexity to science applications.

The AtlanticWave-SDX project is developing a closed-loop orchestration system with the capability to react to unplanned network conditions and events by adding autonomic networking functions. The Autonomic Network Architecture (ANA) paradigm defines a set of self-managing functions for self-adaptability and context-aware behavior changes in response to the emergent properties in the networking environment, with limited contextual information and local control. Closed-loop orchestration refers to a continuous and repeating cycle of communications between the network infrastructure and software elements, including analytics, policy, and orchestration, to enable self-management capabilities.

A goal of the AtlanticWave-SDX project is to automatically regulate the participating Open Exchange Points (OXPs) to a desired state without human interaction by creating autonomic control loops through the design and implementation of resource provisioning, control, learning, and fault tolerance algorithms in the policy modules in the AtlanticWave-SDX controller and management components. A major contribution of the project is to implement Closed-loop orchestration on a per-OXP level and inter-domain level (across multiple OXP domains).

For the Community Exchange, we propose to present the AtlanticWave-SDX project as a solution to improve reliability and predictability of network services for science applications. Closed-loop orchestration, autonomic network functions, and how network telemetry and new technologies at each OXP are leveraged to develop end-to-end autonomic network functions will also be presented.

AtlanticWave-SDX is a project at Florida International University (FIU), in collaboration with Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California (USC-ISI), Institute of Informatics of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil’s National Research and Education Network (RNP), and the Research and Education Network of Sao Paulo (rednesp).

The designations for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) have unique historical and cultural definitions. One area of shared commonality is that despite being systemically underserved and under-resourced, HBCUs and TCUs have continued to uplift their students, and by extension, their communities, and nurture leaders across academic disciplines.

Join us to hear first-hand from HBCU and TCU leadership as they tell their own stories, in their own voice, and invite us to reimagine alongside them how to ensure their equal participation in both our national and global R&E communities.

The panelists are:

• Sandra Boham, president of Salish Kootenai College
• Deshon Miguel, director of information technology at Tohono O’odham Community College
• Joseph Whittaker, vice president for research and economic development/associate provost at Jackson State University
• Urban Wiggins, vice provost for decision science and visualization at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore