Press Release: 6th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop full of Eastern Promise.

[Kevin Meynell <kevin@xxxxxxxxx>]

6th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop full of Eastern Promise.

14 September 2006 -- The 6th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop was held
on the 11th and 12th of September 2006 in Tokyo, Japan. This was the
latest annual workshop organised under the auspices of the Global Lambda
Integrated Facility (GLIF), which provides the opportunity for managers,
engineers, researchers and developers working on global optical
internetworking to come together to discuss development and operational
issues.

The event continues to grow in popularity, with approximately 120
persons attending from research and education networks, universities,
research institutions and industry. It was the first time that it has
been held in the Asia-Pacific region, and reflected the growing
involvement in GLIF by institutes in the region. A Japanese-language
symposium was held immediately following the workshop, which attracted
upwards of 200 attendees.

The GLIF Chair, Kees Neggers, said:

    "The vibrant surroundings of the Akihabara electronic town and the
    excellent local organisation by NICT and the WIDE project formed a
    perfect basis for the fast growing GLIF community to work on the
    establishment of the global LambdaGrid, and resulted in a very
    productive meeting."

The opening plenary session of the workshop featured presentations on
optical networking initiatives around the world. There were updates
about existing activities in Japan, the KRLight open exchange facility
in Korea, the National LambdaRail (NLR) network in the US, and the
GÉANT2 service activities in Europe. There then followed presentations
about the new Internet2 hybrid optical backbone that was currently being
rolled-out, and research developments in the context of the ONT-3
programme.

The following afternoon and morning sessions were devoted to working
group meetings. There are four established GLIF working groups, which
deal with governance, research and applications, control plane
technologies, and technical issues, respectively.

The Technical and Control Plane Working Groups held a joint session to
discuss activities of common interest, before breaking out into separate
sessions. This included the establishment of a distributed repository of
GLIF resources (for connection, scheduling and policy purposes)
utilising the XML-based Network Description Language (NDL) being
developed at the University of Amsterdam and SARA. A visualisation
system that can be used to automatically generate topological diagrams
from NDL descriptions was also demonstrated. The session concluded with
a presentation on UCLPv2 developments, which provide networks with the
ability to let customers provision their own lightpaths using web
services.

The Technical Working Group, led by Erik-Jan Bos (SURFnet, the
Netherlands) and René Hatem (CANARIE, Canada), discussed service
contracting and fault resolution processes between optical exchanges. It
also considered how to reconcile the differing requirements of static,
dynamic and user-controlled lightpaths in a hybrid network. There
followed a demonstration of the TL1 toolkit being developed by SARA,
that provides a Perl-based interface to the cryptic TL1 command syntax
used by many optical switches. This should make it much easier to
develop management and accounting applications for TL1-compliant optical
equipment.

The Control Plane Working Group, led by Gigi Karmous-Edwards (MCNC Grid
Computing and Network Services, USA), discussed the different control
plane techniques being developed and tested on the GÉANT2 (Europe), JGN-
II (Japan/US), G-lambda (Japan) and Internet2 (US) networks. There was
also a discussion about suitable control plane techniques for Ethernet
WANs, and for high-performance Grid computing (in conjunction with the
Open Grid Forum's GHPN research group). The group furthermore agreed to
document the requirements for E-NNI interface information exchange.

The Research and Applications Working Group, led by Maxine Brown
(University of Illinois at Chicago) and Larry Smarr (University of
California at San Diego), identifies applications that can benefit from
LambdaGrids. These include VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry)
using radio telescopes situated around the world, SDSS (Sloan Digital
Sky Survey) for detecting celestrial objects, GLEON (Global Lake
Ecological Observatory Network) and CREON (Coral Reef Environmental
Observatory Network) that allow the collection and comparison of
ecological data, and GLVF (Global Lambda Visualisation Facility) which
provides HDTV streaming facilities. LambdaGrids are also key to
exploiting the vast amounts of data produced by particle accelerators
such as the Large Hadron Collider located at CERN.

Finally, the Governance Working Group agreed to extend its outreach
programme in order to make the GLIF infrastructure and activities more
widely known in the global research community. It also discussed the
optimal timing of iGrid events which are traditionally held every 2-3
years, and welcomed the idea of combining future iGrid and GLIF events.
In addition, Prague was confirmed as the venue for 7th Annual Global
LambdaGrid Workshop, which will be hosted by CESNET on 17-18 September
2007.

GLIF would like to express its thanks to the National Institute of
Information and Communications Technology (NICT), JGN-II, and the WIDE
project for providing the local support for the workshop.

The proceedings of the workshop are available at
http://www.glif.is/meetings/2006/

About GLIF -- The Global Lambda Integrated Facility is an international
virtual organisation of NRENs, consortia and institutions that promotes
lambda networking. GLIF provides lambdas internationally as an
integrated facility to support data-intensive scientific research, and
supports middleware development for lambda networking. It brings
together some of the world's premier networking engineers to develop an
international infrastructure by identifying equipment, connection
requirements, and necessary engineering functions and services. More
information is available on the GLIF website at http://www.glif.is/

About TERENA -- TERENA is the association of research and education
networking organisations in and around Europe. TERENA organises
technical activities and provides a platform for discussion and
collaboration to encourage the development of high-quality computer
networking infrastructures and services for the European research
community. For more information, see the TERENA website at
http://www.terena.nl/