Internet2 2021 Events

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This month’s IAM Online consisted of Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT) which is an outstanding example of “community good.” Begun in 2016 as the EDUCAUSE Shared Assessments Working Group, the HECVAT has morphed into the go-to toolkit for third-party, cloud, on-prem, and supply chain risk assessments in higher education. 2021 is a transformational year for the HECVAT. The HECVAT team partnered with InCommon TAC on updating the HECVAT questions in 2021. IAM Online this month went over HECVAT, the IAM questions, and how the InCommon Community can engage with their campuses on the cloud.

Speakers:

Jon Allen, Associate Vice President CIO & CISO – Baylor University
Josh Callahan, Information Security Officer – Humboldt State University
Charlie Escue, Manager, Extended Information Security – Indiana University
Brian Kelly, Cybersecurity Program Director – EDUCAUSE
Nick Lewis, Program Manager, NET+ Cloud Services – Security and Identity – Internet2
Mary McKee, Director, Identity Management and Security Services – Duke University

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Since 2015, the Cornell Cloud Forum has been the place where higher education cloud leadership meets to share their successes and failures, ask tough questions, and seek consensus on best practices. Internet2’s TechEXtra21 is including lightning talks, presentations and researcher presentations for its Cloud Infrastructure and Services track for this November 16-18, 2021 event.
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Jen Fowler, recent Director of University of Montana’s Autonomous Aerial Systems Office, and now Range Safety Officer and UAS Pilot with NASA Langley Research Center, highlighted how Atmospheric Science researchers collaborate to bolster our understanding of how atmospheric events like solar eclipses and stratospheric gravity waves, together with data on deforestation and climate change, combine to enable life-saving wildfire data modeling and mitigation strategies.
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Over the last few years, we have all observed how browsers have stepped up to support user privacy. Unfortunately, that is coming at a significant cost for things like Single Sign-on and Federated Identity. In this session, we talked about the latest changes, timelines, and how individuals and organizations can learn more and prepare their services for the changing landscape.

Speaker: Heather Flanagan, Technical Liaison for SeamlessAccess; Principal at Spherical Cow Consulting
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Participants joined Loren Malm, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at Ball State University, the past chair of the Cloud Scorecard Working group; Tyler Long from cloudtamer.io; and, Tara Gyenis, Sean O’Brien, and Quyen Vaillant from the Internet2 NET+ team as they introduced the Cloud Scorecard Directory that will support the community’s ability to acquire and deploy these services more efficiently.
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Participants joined an enlivening day of discussion about progress being made to enhance existing perfSONAR tools around the world. An international team of developers presented an annual progress update, assessing challenges for the upcoming months, providing “best practices” for performing measurement testing in the cloud, and more.

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Participants listened to a panel discussion about the NET+ program and its future.

Kevin Morooney, Internet2’s Vice President of Trust & Identity and NET+, will moderate a panel discussion featuring:
- Sarah J. Christen, Director of IT Infrastructure, Cornell University, NET+ Cloud Services Technology Architecture Advisory Committee (CSTAAC)
- Bobby Clark, Director, CCIT Procurement, Clemson University, NET+ Business, Procurement, and Legal Advisory Committee (BPLAC)
- Jack Suess, Vice President of IT and CIO at University of Maryland-Baltimore County, NET+ Program Advisory Group
- Sean O’Brien, Director of NET+ Cloud Services, Internet2
Watch the Video | Download the presentation | More TechEXtra events

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is the National Science Foundations (NSF)’s premier facility to detect neutrinos with energies above approximately 10 GeV and a pillar for NSF’s Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (MMA) program, one of NSF’s 10 Big Ideas. The detector is located at the geographic South Pole and is designed to detect interactions of neutrinos of astrophysical origin by instrumenting over a gigaton of polar ice with 5160 optical sensors. The sensors are buried between 1450 and 2450 meters below the surface of the South Pole ice sheet.

To understand the impact of ice properties on the incoming neutrino detection, and origin, photon propagation simulations on GPUs are used. We executed a series of runs where we aggregated O(100 PFLOPS) worth of GPUs across multiple public Cloud providers and used them to run the IceCube simulations to produce the much needed calibration data. One such run harvested all available for sale GPUs across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform the weekend before SC19, reaching over 51k GPUs total and 380 PFLOP32s, with GPU types spanning the full range of generations from the NVIDIA GRID K520 to the most modern NVIDIA T4 and V100. Another run, while smaller in scale, sustained the peak performance for much longer and used just-in-time fetching of input data. We report on the tools and effort needed to create and operate such systems, as well as the science motivation to do so.

PRESENTERS FOR WEBINAR ON 10/15:

Igor Sfiligoi, Lead Scientific Software Developer and Researcher at UCSD-SDSC

Frank Würthwein, Director of OSG, HTC Lead at the SDSC and Professor of physics at UCSD

Benedikt Riedel, Global Computing Coordinator for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
Participants learned how KINBER, Pennsylvania’s state research and education network, worked with local partner Centre WISP to provide quality residential internet service to rural Pennsylvania. Understanding that a significant portion of the rural broadband needs is service to the home, KINBER saw an opportunity to play a role by providing dark fiber and internet services to Centre WISP, a locally owned and operated Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP).
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In this October 11 webinar hosted by Internet2, participants joined security leaders from UCLA Anderson School of Management and email security experts from Armorblox to learn:
- What types of targeted email attacks pose a real threat to educational institutions,
- Best practices that enable students, staff, and other stakeholders to communicate securely over email, and
- How to architect an email security stack that is effective and doesn’t duplicate what you’ve already paid for.
Learn more about CAMP Week

What is CAMP? The acronym means Campus Architecture and Middleware Planning. CAMP has come to mean the series of track sessions that include case studies, organizations’ innovations in identity management, best practices, and other presentations that help move the community forward.

What is ACAMP? It is the annual unconference where the research and education identity and access management community gathers to identify and work on long-range and global challenges.

Participants joined Trivium Consulting for an overview of scheduled and anticipated 2022 funding opportunities for community colleges from the U.S. Department of Education, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Commerce, and U.S. Department of Labor. They learned about eligibility, focus areas, award amounts, trends, and strategy recommendations for first-time applicants to specific programs and those seeking to increase their federal grant portfolio. Community colleges and the state and regional research and education networks that serve them were encouraged to join this webinar.
Watch the videos of the presentation: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Exploring Clouds for Acceleration of Science (E-CAS,) is a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF Award #1904444) that is being administered and coordinated by Internet2 in collaboration with commercial cloud service providers. This workshop highlighted the achievements of the projects undertaken by the sub-awardees and discussed some of the benefits and challenges of using cloud platforms to support research.
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Are you wondering how some of the decisions are made for the products and services coming out of InCommon? Would you like to get more involved or just learn about upcoming plans and how to provide input? In this IAM Online, that’s exactly what you’ll learn about. Attend to hear about the work plans and upcoming projects from each of the InCommon working groups and ways that you can be part of the action.

Our IAM webinars are held on the second Wednesday of every month. They are held at 2 pm ET, 1 pm CT, Noon MT, and 11 am PT.
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Participants learned how Johnson County Community College (JCCC) worked with its state research and education network, KanREN, to implement Internet2’s Cloud Connect service. Cloud Connect lets you extend your data center to the cloud with a dedicated network connection to AWS Direct Connect, GCP Partner Interconnect, and/or Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute using the combination of your regional network and the Internet2 high-speed national network. Four geographically diverse connection points ensure the best performance.
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The funding agencies are taking an increasingly positive stance toward public clouds. NSF alone has funded several Cloud-focused proposals, including E-CAS, CloudBank and the multi-cloud IceCube simulation pilot runs. There is increased awareness and recognition that public Cloud providers do provide capabilities not found elsewhere, with elasticity being a major driver.

In this presentation from Igor Sfiligoi, Lead Scientific Software Developer and Researcher at UCSD-SDSC, we provide both the observed peak performance on the various links, as well as a summary of how network performance changes over time. We also provide a summary overview of the costs associated with utilizing networking in the public Clouds.

This session provided information on how the CLASS: Cloud Learning and Skills Sessions can equip research computing and data professionals (those who support researchers) with the skills to leverage cloud platforms for research and facilitate transitions to the cloud.

The 30-minute informational session about CLASS featured ambassadors who answered questions andadditional insights and specifics into the program.
Watch the video | Read the related blog post

Information and Technology Services (ITS) provides and maintains the University of Michigan’s network (UMnet).

UMnet directly connects to the internet with multiple redundant 100Gbps connections, offering U-M immense flexibility and the opportunity to collaborate with anyone, anywhere. However, no cost-effective solutions are available today to protect the network and so UMnet is still vulnerable to network security threats which could impact its availability to the U-M community.

As a response to this challenge, ITS completed a proof-of-concept for a custom network border security system that scales with the university’s network capacity needs and has deployed the full-scale, production solution.
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Trust and security are what we live and breathe in our community. Many will recall the SolarWinds incident from late 2020, and the discussion of “golden tickets” and other downstream impacts that permeated the cybersecurity world. Members of the Internet2 Community Architecture Committee for Trust and Identity (CACTI) joined the webinar on August 11th at 2 p.m. US Eastern Time for an R&E community-focused discussion on impacts and paths forward, including what the community can do to help itself prevent these types of attacks against our own software, infrastructure, and deployments.

Speakers:
- Moderator: Rob Carter, Consultant, IT (Middleware Architecture) – Duke University, CACTI Chair
- Nicole Roy, Director of Technology and Strategy, InCommon
- Matthew Economou, Chief of Identity Products, Research Data and Communication Technologies (RDCT), CACTI Member
- Carl Waldbieser, Systems Programmer, Information Technology Services, Lafayette College

View the presentation | Learn more about the Community Voices series | Watch the video

Cloud computing has become a competitive advantage to all organizations, and academic research is no exception to that. The challenge often encountered by academic research institutions in creating a cloud offering is doing so with constrained IT resources (# of staff and cloud expertise) and making it accessible to a research/scientific community that does not have strong IT technical expertise. Participants learned about UCLA’s Health Sciences IT’s experience in this journey; successes, failures, and future goals.
View the recording | Read the related blog post

Speakers:
- Maneesha Aggarwal, Columbia University
- John Bailey, Washington University in St. Louis
- David Reid, University of Missouri
CILogon enables researchers to log on to cyberinfrastructure (CI). CILogon provides an integrated open source identity and access management platform for research collaborations, combining federated identity management (Shibboleth, InCommon) with collaborative organization management (COmanage). Participants learned about what CILogon does, including examples of recent work and collaborations.
Watch the event recording | Read the related blog post

Speakers:
- Gilad Evrony, New York University, Grossman School of Medicine
- Phillip Harris, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The InCommon BaseCAMP is a workshop for those new to identity and access management, new to InCommon, or both. It includes:
- An introduction to the basics of identity and access management — whether you manage identities, make resources available to those from other organizations, or both.
- An introduction to the InCommon Federation, the U.S. identity federation serving education and research.
- An overview and demonstrations of the community-developed identity and access management suite, the InCommon Trusted Access Platform, and the role it can play in your IAM system.
For more information, visit the BaseCAMP page at incommon.org
This action-packed event combined bite-sized two-minute talks from a selection of advanced technology companies who are members of Internet2, with dedicated time to rub elbows around virtual cocktail tables and have individual conversations with the presenters and other participants. Learn more about Lightning Lounge events, download the presentation and watch the event recording.
Watch the video | Download the presentation

The computational landscape has never evolved as fast as in the last 10 years: novel research and data infrastructures, as well as hardware architectures and lab instruments, allow answering research questions that could have been not even asked 10 years ago.

Our panel discussed experiences for mature, internationally used science gateway frameworks such as Apache Airavata, HUBzero, and the Globus Data Platform as well as good practices for sustainability measures.

Read the related blog post

It all began with US eduroam subscribers in 2008, but today, the eduroam service we all love is available at nearly 1,000 colleges, universities, and research facilities across the country.

Internet2 has begun working with regional and state-wide organizations to offer eduroam to K-12 schools, libraries, and museums in an effort to expand and scale the eduroam service to selected community-anchor organizations. To support this expansion, and with input from the community, we will be moving eduroam to a cloud-forward architecture.

During this webinar, participants learned more about how Internet2 is working with the community to enable the next 1,000 subscribers with eduroam’s secure connectivity. Speakers:
- Sara Jeanes, eduroam product manager, Internet2
- Amanda Molinari, project manager, Utah Education and Telehealth Network
This virtual workshop focused on the InCommon Trusted Access Platform packaged Grouper software with a focus on learning and using core Grouper features to implement the access control models described in the Grouper Deployment Guide. The sessions were led by the Grouper developers and included a mix of self-paced learning, lectures, hands-on training in your very own hosted VM, and discussion.
View the recording| Download the presentation

Want to learn more about Internet2’s Cloud Connect? Are you considering moving a portion of your data center to the cloud?

This session introduced participants to Internet2’s Networking for Cloud. The session included a brief overview of Networking for Cloud services:
- I2PX
- Cloud Connect
- Rapid Private Interconnect (RPI)
- View the recording
- Download the presentation
- More information available on the Community Voices page.
This ResearchSOC presentation educated the community on the initial observations from this NSF-sponsored cybersecurity operations center from their onboarding of three NSF major facilities. We will also explore common challenges experienced across the higher education landscape as seen by ResearchSOC’s core partner, the OmniSOC.
Recording coming soon | Read related blog

The CEOs of CANARIE, Internet2, and RedCLARA had a common goal to work closely together and to highlight the research and education enabled by our network infrastructure and shared expertise across the Americas. With that goal in mind, a team of staff from all three organizations committed to regular meetings to explore what we do, who we support, and how we can better share our NRENs’ efforts.

The first in a three-part series of events that are open to the community was held on June 10. The event was sponsored by RedCLARA.
- View the recording
- Download the presentation
InCommon’s (mostly) monthly webinar series that delivers interactive education on timely IAM topics. On June 9, we explored “One Opportunity, Three IAM Approaches” featuring Tommy Doan, Lacey Vickery, and Keith Wessel. This IAM super trio shared how the Collaboration Success Program helped them to make headway on their recent projects and roadmaps.

Missed one? See our YouTube channel (in partnership with our friends at GÉANT) for past webinars.
View Recording (opens in new window) | More information on the Community Voices page.

Internet governance and technology policy decisions directly affect the R&E community. We provided an overview on how technology policy is enacted now and how Internet governance is conducted; we explored the channels that provide the most effective methods by which an institution can engage in technology public policy (i.e., the FCC, FTC, PUCs, Congressional hearings) and Internet governance (i.e., ICANN and the IETF); and examined who in a typical institution contributes to this role (i.e., researchers, CIOs, Legal, etc). We gave examples of past successes of the collective power of R&E in policy debates, talked about the difference between lobbying and advocacy and what are we allowed to do, and suggested high profile topics the R&E community should consider addressing first.

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Providing cloud-based solutions to meet the Higher Ed community needs is one of the driving missions for the Internet2 NET+ program. New cloud-based solutions are being introduced into the NET+ program this spring to help institutions improve how they operate while better serving students, faculty, and staff.

Participants in this May 26th online event learned about:
- NET+ CloudCheckr – cost management, asset inventory, security & compliance monitoring, and resource utilization tracking across your multi-cloud environments
- NET+ Google Workspace for Education (formerly known as G Suite Enterprise for Education) – premium‌ ‌security‌ ‌features‌ with ‌enhanced‌ ‌collaboration‌ ‌tools‌
- NET+ Palo Alto Networks – cloud-powered security for .edu – bundled offerings that enable cloud security for remote learning, collaborative research, and secure, efficient network operations
- NET+ signNow/airSlate – e-signature solution, workflow automation software generation solution, and more
Read the related blog post | View the recording (opens in new window)

In an effort to provide people on your campus and the IT infrastructure a level of protection, many institutions in our community have deployed multi-factor authentication through the NET+ Duo Security program.

This event covered:
- The historical context for authentication security
- The importance of assessing device posture
- How to leverage authentication data to surface risky or suspicious logins
- Creating the right security policies to meet your needs
During this online event, participants learned about ARIN Registration Services Agreements (LRSA/RSAs) and what they really mean for their legacy resources.

As an early Internet adopter, the US research and education community holds a disproportionate share of IP numbers assigned before the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) was formed. These pre-ARIN assigned numbers are known as Legacy resources. Holders of legacy IP numbers are encouraged to enter into an ARIN’s Legacy Registration Services Agreement (LRSA).
View the recording and download the slides!

The Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC), a university-wide, centrally supported organization that was created in 2016 to provide strategic leadership, expertise, and support to further Rutgers University’s research and scholarly achievements on all campuses through next-generation computing, data science, advanced networking, public and private clouds, and creative learning environments.

During this presentation, Dr. von Oehsen gave an overview of the Rutgers University Federated Research Computing and Data Ecosystem.

View slides and video from the event and take our post-event survey! (opens in new window)

In the spring of 2013, Internet2 created the Internet2 Gender Diversity Initiative, to focus resources and attention on improving gender diversity in the community of networking professionals who convene regularly to collaborate on the development of national and international advanced networking.

In 2018, the GDI renamed the Internet2 Inclusivity Initiative (I2I) to reflect a wider scope of action and a focus on the cultural shifts the Initiative works to foster. Today, I2I celebrates 8 years by taking a look back and a look forward. I2I co-chair Laurie Burns McRobbie and three recipients of I2I scholarships will give an update and engage in conversation about where we are and where we’re going.
Vie w the recording (opens in new window) | Read the related blog post

The pandemic has brought sweeping changes to higher education. Universities have learned to rapidly create online courses; faculty have adapted their teaching styles to support distance learning; and, students have learned how to build relationships and engagement spanning long distances. As remote teaching became ubiquitous, students’ expectations changed for what a classroom and learning experience can be. What does this shift mean for higher education?
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The Eastern Regional Network’s (ERN) Broadening the Reach program strives to understand how to support resource and technology collaborations among smaller, mid-sized, and under-resourced campuses. These include Minority Serving Institutions, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research institutions.

Participants learned about:
- The Eastern Regional Network’s Broadening the Reach program
- The ERN BTR December 2020 workshop results
- Available resources and funding opportunities that your campus could leverage
- Ways to participate with these research and cyberinfrastructure collaborations

View the recording (opens in new window) |About the Minority Serving – Cyberinfrastructure Consortium

The Minority Serving – Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC) and Internet2 held a special webinar on Thursday, March 18 to highlight new data on-campus IT infrastructure needs to help you support your institution’s research mission.

For many institutions that continue to provide access to postsecondary education for historically underserved communities, their paths in doing so have been anything but uniform. That is also true for how they support their faculty and researchers, particularly those whose work requires high-speed broadband, access to resources in the cloud, and high-performance computing capabilities.

Together with Internet2, the MS-CC gathered survey results and direct feedback on data and computing infrastructure in late 2020 from 291 respondents across 144 institutions that include HBCUs, TCUs, HSIs, and MSIs.
V View the recording (opens in new window)

As online learning continues to be a priority, video storage solutions have become a critical component in facilitating student success and driving higher education operations.

This NET+ presentation with the University of Iowa discussed establishing a content retention policy using the Panopto service offering, a video management platform. David Long, Associate Director, Enterprise Instructional Technology at the University of Iowa, walked us through their content retention journey. Read the related blog post.
View the recording (Opens in new window)

Internet2 Industry members have a shared goal – advancing technology options for the research and education community. The Internet2 Industry Member Lightning Lounge (IMLL) allowed Industry members to update the community on the most important current news via a two-minute lightning talk, followed by a chance for individual conversations, all in a 60-minute virtual event. Read the related blog post.
The March IAM Online webinar featured an overview and discussion of the newly minted eduroam (US) Best Practices Guide, produced by the eduroam-US Advisory Committee. The guide examines tools and strategies for deploying and running eduroam in an interoperable and scalable way.

Our webinars are held on the second Wednesday of every month. They are held at 2 pm ET, 1 p.m. CT, Noon MT, and 11 a.m .PT.
This hands-on webinar was designed specifically for the Internet2 community on the basics of IPv6 address planning and enabling hosted services. This webinar helps you better understand IPv6 address planning, how to determine the right block size for your organization, and how to plan for growth. It equips you with some pointers on how to enable IPv6 on your hosted services including web servers and email. We use real-life examples and an opportunity to try your hand at planning for your own organization!

Topics include:
1. Comparing what you know about IPv4 and IPv6
2. Understanding the building blocks of IPv6
3. Building an address plan
4. Avoiding common mistakes
5. Determining the right block size for your organization
6. Planning for growth
7. Overcoming the challenges of hosting IPv6-reachable services

View event slides, session recording and Q&A transcript (opens in new window)

In partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Internet2 provided this virtual event designed to aid Higher Education researchers leverage new self-service, managed, cloud-based research environment solutions. During the session, participants were introduced to two new solutions — RONIN and Service Workbench on AWS — that are helping researchers from the University of Sydney and Harvard Medical School quickly and securely set up managed research compute environments. Additionally, there was an AWS Solutions Architect participating and available to answer any technical questions that you may have. Learn more from this related blog post.
This workshop focused on the InCommon Trusted Access Platform packaged Grouper software with a focus on learning and using core Grouper features to implement the access control models described in the Grouper Deployment Guide. The sessions included a mix of self-paced learning, lectures, hands-on training, and discussion. Go to the Grouper Workshop page for more information.
This IAM Online event featured how and why the University of Minnesota expanded its Identity and Access Management team from three to 18 and counting. From CIO Bernie Gulechek to the IAM boots on the ground, you’ll hear about the organizational journey and experience the highs and lows of the evolving structure. Even if you aren’t thinking about this right now, the webinar could spark ideas on how your campus team could be organized. Get more information on the InCommon IAM Online web page.
In late 2020, a leadership consortium from minority-serving institutions (MSIs)—including historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), tribal colleges and universities (TCUs), and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs)—worked with Internet2 to gather data and more information on computing infrastructure that may bring needed resources and funding opportunities and overall priority setting for MSIs of cyberinfrastructure improvements.

This webinar offered the opportunity to learn more about recent survey results and how the information could help inform future directions for collaboration initiatives, such as access and funding to advanced research cyberinfrastructure, professional development, and training opportunities. View the recording (opens in new window) and download the presentation.

The webinar focused on the following key survey findings:
- The need for basic broadband infrastructure on campus and at home for students, staff, and faculty;
- Workforce development gaps and opportunities for professional skill development in the areas of data, computing, and research;
- The need for strong collaboration across MSI constituencies like HBCUs, TCUs, and HSIs; and
- How administrators across institutions need more accessible and responsive data infrastructure to support ongoing operations.
More information about the MS-CC and Internet2 collaboration can be found here.

Internet2 welcomed current and prospective Affiliate and Federal Affiliate members for a Town Hall meeting on Friday, Jan. 29. Affiliate members include non-profit organizations (excluding K-12 schools) that are research- and/or education-oriented. Federal Affiliate members include federal government departments, agencies, laboratories, and other like units. The event featured updates regarding Net+ services, the Next Generation Internet (NGI) platform, and network-based solutions such as Cloud Connect and RPI. View the recording (opens in new window) and download the presentations.
The National Science Foundation has announced another Campus Cyberinfrastructure funding program and it again includes InCommon Federation requirements. Are you planning to respond to the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) solicitation? Looking to better support inter-institutional academic collaboration? Would you like information on including federation capabilities in your cyberinfrastructure plans? This webinar helps you learn more about developing Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CI) plans and how to support the InCommon Federation requirements. Three organizations will share their previously funded CI plans. Moree information on the IAM Online page at incommon.org

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