Today is the deadline to submit a poster for TNC2011!

CALL FOR SPONSORED STUDENT POSTER PLACES

Sponsored by Cisco Systems

There is limited number of sponsored registration places for bona-fide students from relevant fields. Eligible students will receive free admission to the conference and are expected to present a poster at the conference and online. The best student poster will receive an award at the end of the conference.

To apply, students are encouraged to submit a short poster abstract (100 to 250 words) on any of the subjects relevant to the spirit and objectives of the conference. Applications should be sent to tnc2011@terena.org with the subject ‘TNC 2011 Student Poster‘ by
30 April 2011.

A subpanel of the Program Committee will select the best papers for acceptance and inform all submitting students before the end of the early registration.

CALL FOR POSTERS

In the last two years, several TNC participants have created high quality poster presentations. An effective poster presentation is not just a standard research paper stuck to a board. It should summarise your work with graphs and images to tell the story and should use text more sparingly. Featuring a poster at TNC will serve as an excellent advertisement for your work, and can act as a great conversation starter with TNC participants. In general, poster presentations are less formal than regular presentations, are more interactive and can provoke various points of view. Selected posters will be displayed in an area close to the parallel sessions and on the conference website. Applications should be sent to tnc2011@terena.org with the subject “TNC2011 Poster” by 30 April 2011.

“Digital Native”: a state of mind?

Ingrid Melve suggested that being a Digital Native may be a matter of attitude rather than age. Digital Natives think “of course I  can”, they are ready to move on when dissatisfied, ready to try (and fail) and have huge digital self-confidence. But although their digital confidence and digital skills are high, their digital competence – the ability to assess and learn from resources – may be much lower than those of their digitally nervous teachers.

NRENs have made available technologies that users no longer see as technology – the stage when they can really have impact. But we have also created huge expectations: meeting this challenge will require us to adapt our mindsets and approaches. But we have the tools: skills, willingness to learn and excellent contact networks. It’s been great fun renewing and extending mine this week.

IPv6 – to dual stack or not? and when to start the transition?

I was particularly interested by this morning’s session on IPv6. All three talks gave me some interesting updates into the status of IPv6. 

I spent a lot of time planning and performing a similar network transition some years ago – 20 years ago I now realise. We were then moving the large worldwide High Energy Physics and Space (NASA/ESA) network to OSI routing, i.e. from DECnet Phase IV to Decnet Phase V.  What I learned then was that planning was the most essential aspect of the project plan.

We have been told that the IPv4 address space will run out in about two years for almost as long as I can remember. Many NRENs have been IPv6 capable for a (large?) number of years butstill end users are just not moving.

Today I learned from Dave Wilson’s talk that the current estimate for the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses in just one year away. So, it is already far too late to install a dual stack on all worldwide clients and servers. I heard today that we are going to have to deal with IPv6-only systems.

The good news is that there are solutions to connect IPv6-only systems to an IPv4 world via the use of NAT64 and DNS64 – as has been demonstrated on the network at this conference – some of you will have tried it here. The talk from Jean-Philippe Dionne explained how all this works.

We also heard from my colleague in the EGEE project, Xavier Jeannin, as to the successful work they have done to make sure that all of the EGEE gLite (Grid) middleware is IPv6 compliant. This was very good news, but there are apparently many other software packages we use in the HEP community which are not yet there.

So… what should we make of all this? For my user community (high energy physics), I have already been thinking for some time as to when would be a good time to start our move to IPv6. I am now fully convinced that now is definitely the right time. There was no consensus amongst the speakers as to whether to start with dual-stack or not, but to me that seems a good place to start.

What I do know, based on my earlier experience with the migration to DECnet Phase V, is that we (my scientific community) need to start the planning activity soon. We in the Grid will continue to experience a rapid growth in end system network addresses, particularly with virtualisation growing in popularity. There is lots of work to be done in documenting and analysing all of our software packages to see which are still not IPv6 compliant (reminds me of the Year 2000 problem!).  I think we should get started.

Mind-blowing numbers

Anyone whose brain had been left intact by talks earlier in the week would have had it thoroughly scrambled by the numbers in Chris Hancock’s presentation on the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) of five thousand radio telescopes currently being planned. Some of the numbers were amazingly small: one potential site in North-West Australia is the size of the Netherlands and has a current population of 110. At the other extreme, the network to this location will eventually have to carry traffic over 6 Petabits per second!

Love your outsourcer

This afternoon we had an interesting panel session on outsourcing, with perhaps a surprising degree of agreement. Outsourcing seems likely to become an increasingly common choice for commodity services that can be well-defined and where sharing provision with others can give economies of scale. However it is essential to fully understand the service first: for example outsourcing website management on a pay-per-change model resulted in an increasingly stale site. Security is often a concern when outsourcing, though a recent ENISA report concluded that there could be advantages as well as problems.

One major concern is who sets the terms for outsourcing: us, the outsourcer or, if we do not manage them, our individual users! Many of the popular outsourced platforms had fixed terms and conditions, though these are becoming more flexible (for example to address regulatory concerns over logs and stored data), and some options may be available at additional cost.

One area where further developments are still needed is the use of open standards, both to allow integration of outsourced services with internally operated ones and to reduce the risk of becoming locked in to a single outsourcing platform, either by data or software formats or by transfer costs. Persuading vendors that this is in their interest is likely to need joint efforts at national/NREN or higher level.

Overall the panellists were optimistic about a future containing outsourced services: making boring things a matter of contract management should give us more time for enjoyable innovation.

Rethinking NREN Security Services

Jacques Schuurman described a new approach to NREN security services being tried by SURFnet. This recognises that many services formerly unique to NRENs are now available off the shelf, and that an increasing amount of security expertise is now in the community rather than the NREN operator. So they have formed an independent SURFnet Community of Incident Response Teams (website in Dutch) comprising trusted contacts from customer sites who can share and develop security experience and skills through quarterly meetings, a closed mailing list and collaboration space. This changes the role of the NREN from a ‘vendor’ of security services to a trusted facilitator. After six months of operation, results seem promising, with sub-groups actively working on legal issues, software audits, and developing an expertise website.

Wednesday Plenary

What came to mind when listening to Chad Kainz saying he got that customer wanting a virtual environment for their studies where you have Mona Lisa in front of you and the scientists of that period in your back: there really seem other than “simple” e-learning applications for software like Wonderland. I only met people who used it in learning environments like e.g. the ShanghAI Lectures.

This Wonderland software, initially designed for collaboration purposes, has some advantages like integrated application support, fine-granular access rights to whatever objects, immersive audio and is said to be very useful for fostering an other concept of domesticating applications: “Shared Apps” a.k.a. concurrent multiuser support. Wonderland’s plug-in system should make it comparably simple to integrate APIs to complex applications of whatever kind – but I’m not the expert in this, I just try to combine things I’ve observed.

Chad’s statement “you don’t build specific infrastructure for just 6 persons worldwide” is very true – and also we came up with a way of – umm – looking at things from two steps back: Suddenly you see that this very specific need, seen from an other angle, isn’t so very specific at all, and you can build some more generic infrastructure that fits the needs of many. That’s what makes networking so fascinating.

Doing things differently

Two of our plenary talks have highlighted how developments in networking, storage and processing technologies are changing the way that scholars work. Clifford Lynch described the new possibilities that emerge once large datasets of all kinds are available and accessible for machine processing. This is not limited to the well-known “big sciences”, for example the existence of archives of newspapers in digital form is permitting investigations of when new phrases emerge and how their meanings develop. Software’s increased ability to extract meaning from written texts is even allowing archives from different sources and languages to be linked. Visualisation environments originally used for biological or spatial research are now in demand for cultural and social studies. Chad Kainz highlighted how this type of success is creating challenges for university computing services. Researchers who see or read about these network-enabled projects quickly come up with ideas on how to use them in their own fields and expect advanced tools that may have been implemented (and funded) as one-off projects to become a routine part of their working environment, also available for teaching or community engagement, not just on campus but locally and internationally. IT people can no longer think in terms of “easy” and “demanding” faculties to service: from their perspective “everything now looks like astrophysics”!

Science feeding into Art, Art feeding into Science

Arts and science are closely related. We are having extremely interesting examples about how the two worlds appear as complementary and lively interacting, more than standing on two different pedestals barely looking at each other.

I really enjoyed the presentation Tom Fryer gave on Monday afternoon, demonstrating how seismic data could become artistically relevant (we are talking about real, professionally crafted entertainment).

Even more interestingly he showed how this artistic application triggered some new, interesting connections among scientists.

It is not the first time science feeds into art, but it is surely not common seeing the other way round. And it is absolutely fascinating.

Art can become a language to reach new researchers, to foster new collaborations.

We are looking forward to hearing more…

Third day: what a great start…

The third conference day just started here at TNC2010 and I am still speechless after a wonderful presentation by Mark Ellisman, an expert in the development and application of network and information technologies to advance the biological sciences.

Mark he launched almost 10 years ago the development of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN), linking major neuroimaging research centers throughout the U.S. In 1996, he founded the Center for Research in Biological Systems (CRBS).

The presentation showed interesting example of telemicroscopy and demonstrated network-enabled, remote use and sharing of the world’s most powerful electron microscopes, including the 3MeV facility in Osaka, Japan.

Thanks Mark for sharing this!

Students display their wares at TNC

For the third consecutive year, students from relevant fields were invited to present a poster on any of the subjects relevant to the spirit and objectives of the conference. The selected posters are being displayed this week at TNC 2010 and can be viewed online. This is a unique opportunity for students to share their ideas with a knowledgeable captive audience keen on innovation.

With sponsorship from Cisco Systems, selected European students from all fields related to research networking were able to attend the conference free of charge.

Klaas Wierenga, Cisco’s representative in TERENA : “I have been very impressed with the quality of the ideas expressed in the student posters – they contain concepts that challenge the paradigms of some of the more traditional networking concepts.”

TERENA’s President, Janne Kanner, encouraged the students to meet as many people as possible at the conference, not only to expand their network of contacts, but more importantly, to share and evangelise their ideas.

Some of the poster topics covered by the students include ‘User-centric privacy in a multi-protocol SSO environment’, ‘Quality of VVoIP applications in wireless networks’ and ‘Multi-cast tests on the GÉANT network’. A non-technical poster presentation on ‘Copyright issues as the effect of Internet technologies and the opportunities they offer’ added diversity to the mix of technical concepts.

For more information, check out the full list of all posters presented at the conference, including those of the nine students and other TNC 2010 participants.

Food oddities III

Gourmet krautuvele at Gedimino pr. 12 (that’s the avenue parallel to the river, and the address is opposite “Marks & Spencer”) caught my eye with their ad “original recipe Tiramisu”. It looked alright, but I wanted to explore the Melionu “Trio”, which is some stiff pinkish jelly with chunks of three different kinds of melon immersed in it. The staff BTW is very friendly, and the dessert is excellent. Refreshing. The ideal thing for an unexpected sunny evening. No arguments not to get there and try it out.

Speaking of very friendly staff: those blue-dressed assistants are extremely kind and guide the speakers professionally thru their endeavor. The (differently dressed) microphone pages probably belong to the same crew, at least according to their behavior.

Is it bleet or twog?

Carrie and I discussed my rather short way of expressing myself (don’t hit me, Carrie, for saying this). We found out that I use some kind of mixed form between tweeting and blogging, and we even came up with definitions for the two terms:

Bleeting is tweeting with hyphens in each tweet to indicate that it is a longer story and you should look out for the (temporally nearby) follow-up.

Twogging is blogging in tweets-short manner.

Wanting to be a good TNCie I went and elongated my twog re: Plenary session into something noteworthy. Check it out.

(BTW: it seems not being widely known that blogs can be commented.  ;-))

Some thoughts on Grids, VOs, Identity Management and attributes

As someone who spends much of their time working on Grid Security matters, I have been particularly interested in much of today’s agenda, both in today’s plenary and then in the Federations track which took place the rest of the day.

Firstly, Kim Cameron’s excellent plenary talk this morning on Identity Management issues made me think again about attribute release and privacy issues in today’s production Grids. We have so many VOs and applications that need fine-grained monitoring and access control that we often have to know “who” the user is as well as other VO-based attributes, e.g. roles and groups. The Grid security model is far from simple and one way of keeping things reasonably simple is with the one-size-fits-all approach we have to attribute release. The user is able to choose some of the VO-based attributes he/she wishes to release, but their name is released, whether they like it or not. They are informed about this and we have policies to control the use of this data, but it will clearly be much better when we have technology available that will allow the user to decide to keep the “who” part of their identity secret from Grid service providers, in cases where it is not needed. They will of course still have to reveal their identity to the VO to get the attributes they need from them!

I have also been interested at this year’s TNC to see how many times people are talking about the growing importance of Virtual Organisations, authorisation, and the need to aggregate attributes from other sources of authority, not just the Home Institute IdP. This was not so true in previous years. This is really interesting because this is exactly the use case we have for Grids, eScience, eResearch infrastructures etc. International research collaborations, whether you call them VOs or not, are a particularly good use case for interfederation of our research networks – I would argue that they are the actually the best current use case. We are already using federated identity management and attribute aggregation in today’s Grids, but this is not yet fully integrated with the mainstream AAI and federation activities in NRENs today. I really would like to see the NRENs and Grids work closer together on this problem. We have a lot to learn from each other.

Attribute Harmonisation?

Just finished my talk raising the issue of different national meanings for the values (particularly “staff”, “employee”) of the standard attribute used by federations to describe a user’s relationship with their home organisation. In fact I don’t think that this matters for any of the international applications that have been drawn to my attention yet – the values that those applications need (“member”, “student”, etc.) do seem to be used consistently – but it’s a warning not to assume too much about common understandings.

In questions I was asked if it was possible to change the way attributes are used. Unfortunately the intermediate steps in doing that reminded me of a travel guide to Bulgaria, which explained that Bulgarians shake their heads for yes and nod for no, except for Bulgarians who know that confuses other Europeans…