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The presentation provides an overview of Funet 2020 - the next generation Finnish national research and education network. The presentation covers Funet 2020 network design criteria, the chosen technical solution and its features and transition schedule and status. The presentation also shows how the new network supports Nordic collaboration even better than before.er

This talk will give a quick view of the GÉANT network and then move to how this will evolve in the next few years. Consensus building and some technology will be covered.

The amount of data that a security team collects is increasing rapidly. All this data needs to be enriched and correlated for effective analysis.In this presentation we will give an overview of a new flexible framework that UNINETT is currently setting up for doing advanced security analysis. We will describe the overall architecture, current status and future plans.

What tools have we added and use to handle the incidents in our and our customers environment

DeiC has developed a DDoS mitigation system using open source components. Leveraging BGP FlowSpec for mitigation, it offers both automatic mitigation based on detection at the edges of the network — and a UI for manual input and overview.

The HEAnet Brokerage Team has been helping its clients in Ireland to avail of commercial cloud services through the GEANT IaaS framework and a range of other agreements. Cloud is complex, dynamic and can be a little scary to the uninitiated. We try and take some of the complexity out for clients.

DFN conducts cloud services brokering under the DFN-Cloud brand. "External Services" include IaaS offerings by commercial providers, while "Federated Services" are those provided by academic member institutions for member institutions.

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In early 2017, CSC/Funet developed a roadmap for wireless networks and wireless network services at university campuses in Finland. Our mission is twofold: To provide centralized services for wireless networks and to guide and inspire campus network experts as well as encourage them to cooperate with each other. Following our roadmap we aim for better WLAN network planning and monitoring as well as a user-friendly eduroam service on campus and elsewhere. We keep an eye on 4G/5G technologies and IoT in order to ensure using the most suitable wireless network technology – or a combination of them - for different applications. Regarding cooperation, we have developed widely-used best current practices and aim to go for common wireless networks-related tools with written instructions as well as international cooperation. Concrete measures to fulfil the goals include a WLAN network planning service by CSC/Funet for universities, which is now in its pilot phase. The preliminary results indicate that emphasis on frequency planning is important and that the 2,4 GHz band should be enabled on only every second or third access point. Also guidelines regarding guest access on campus WLAN networks have been published. Regarding IoT, we have surveyed the current status on campuses and we are ready to help campuses take this new technology into use in an organised fashion. In order to help WLAN network providers outside campuses to offer eduroam on their network, we have set up a RADIUS server for these providers to connect their WLAN controllers to.

EuWireless' task is to design a fully working 5G operator network with real users but providing extensive access to the inner working data for researchers. This includes on-the-fly creation of network slices and orchestration in most of the layers of the stack to be used for experimentation, while maintaining connectivity with commercial operators and the security and confidentiality requirements of the GDPR rules

eduVPN enables employees, researchers and students to easily and securely connect to the Internet and gain access to their institutes’ protected systems. Many public Wi-Fi networks, for example, on the train, in the library or in restaurants, are insecure, but your home network is not always safe either. All the data you enter and receive on your phone, tablet or computer can be intercepted fairly easily. Malevolent people can also divert you to a phishing-website in order to intercept your password. Not a comforting thought! Certainly if you are processing sensitive information. The eduVPN service solves this by setting up a so-called Virtual Private Network (VPN), an encrypted connection between your computer or smartphone and the company network of your institute. It acts as a bridge, offering you direct network access. This will allow you to connect securely to the Internet without the fear of prying eyes. In this talk the generic development op this federated service will be addressed as wel as the questions it raises by the R&E community.

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The talk will present research activity on networked music performance and education at the Norwegian University og Science and Technology (NTNU). In particular we will argue that musical interaction is an extreme application for high-speed and high-quality networks, and may become the most important testbed and showcase for the network solutions of the future. Finally we present a new joint master's programme launced by NTNU and the University of Oslo (UiO) that extends these ideas into a wider societal context. We reach out with an invitation to join us as collaborators!

Integration between media services adds great value to already existing services. Given that, then to what extent do media services at the NREN level today integrate with services at the user organisation level? Next, how can we improve the existing levels of integration? By inviting the audience to add to a more full picture, the talk aims to give some overview and suggestions.

The EISCAT scientific association will establish EISCAT_3D, a system of distributed phased array radars, that will enable comprehensive three-dimensional vector observations of the atmosphere and ionosphere above Northern Fenno-Scandinavia. The use of new radar technology, combined with the latest digital signal processing, will achieve ten times higher temporal and spatial resolution than obtained by present radars while simultaneously offering, for the first time, continuous measurement capabilities. The flexibility of the EISCAT_3D radar system will allow the study of atmospheric phenomena at both large and small scales unreachable by present systems. The EISCAT_3D radar system will, in its first stage, consist of three radar sites separated by approximately 130 km each: a site at Skibotn (NO) that has both radar transmission and receiving capabilities; and receiving-only sites at Karesuvanto (FI) and Kaiseniemi (SE). The second stage of the EISCAT_3D project will involve an upgrade to the transmission site to reach the full transmission power. The third and fourth stages of the EISCAT_3D project adds two additional receive sites, at distances 200-250 km from the transmission site, at Andoya (NO) and Jokkmokk (SE). In addition to the above radar sites, EISCAT_3D will also have two or more archives at Data Centres located in the Nordic area. During normal operation, the radar will be fully remote controlled, its configuration set in near real time through a distributed database. These EISCAT_3D sites will need to be connected via fast data links, provided by the national infrastructures and coordinated by NorduNet, over remote and challenging terrain. The receiving sites will send low-level data to a central location in order to be processed online and use the subsequent results to operate and steer the radar beam and look directions. This talk will outline the EISCAT_3D data flow and network options.

As more and more science workflows get complex and span distributed resources and involve a distributed team of researchers, the demand on the research and education networks keep increasing. In addition to expanding the capacity, Research and education networks continue to add intelligent services to increase the productivity of the science community. Research and education networks support advanced capabilities such as bandwidth reservation and automated diagnostics. Software defined approaches are being adopted to provide intelligent capabilities. The data transfer nodes are compute systems dedicated for data transfers in distributed science environments. We explore the architecture, methods, and algorithms needed for a smart data transfer node (DTN) that self-tune and self-optimize. The condition of network and other resources that data transfers depend on change dynamically. We employ machine learning methods to make the DTN learn how to respond to environmental conditions. For example, if the load on the network is high, and if there is enough compute resource available on the source and destination DTN, a smart DTN will send compressed data instead of raw data to get a higher overall throughput. Similarly, if the probability for corruption on a network link is high, a smart DTN will automatically enable additional integrity verification. In this talk, I will describe our prototype smart DTN that uses deep reinforcement learning to learn the relationship between system (including the network) state, transfer parameters and overall throughput. Our preliminary results show that it can identify transfer parameter values that achieve ~15% higher overall performance than simple heuristics.

In the last 4 years the exponential growth of the services that CEDIA offers to its members stands out. In 2014, the portfolio was of 7 services currently are more than 45, eduroam and MINGA are implemented in more than 70%, the traffic of the network grew by 500%, more than 3 million dollars in financing 145 research projects.

It was third time for me, when I overheard some colleagues talking about eduroam and how it really sucks. I overheard some more and the reasons for these opinions had very much similarities: some of the endusers are still struggling getting eduroam working smoothly in their network clients. Because eduroam does NOT suck at least from my point of view, I really want to find out if other NREN’s/universities/organisations have similar enduser stories to share. And at the same time I want to boost eduroam CAT, geteduroam and other development tasks to make eduroam rise and shine as it is meant to be!

This presentation is proposed in order to attract attention to challenges of NRENs that has solved initial tasks of providing basic services and setting up the NRENs, but that are still developing more slowly than expected. While the challenges of NRENs passing their first emerging stage can be identified being a subject of talk or support in subsequent development stages shows a lack of effort to identify/even to talk about the reason for NREN’s inability to have a fast enough development which leads toward providing a wider range of services/enlarging community in number of institutions receiving those services. In order to examine the impression that the funding is not the main reason for a slow development, we analysed circumstances which stalled the process of connecting primary and secondary schools in Serbia to the NREN for nearly a decade. We modeled the situation by using the principles of game theory and accordingly choose the set of activities that have been successfully applied to return this long-term goal among top priorities of government and funding bodies, resulting in bringing schools to NREN after ten years of "waiting to happen". Though, the story was out of scope of the TNC18 conference, we believe it should not to stay buried behind high walls. We consider to examine another nonfunctional case i.e. the case of the AAI development. Serbian NREN participated in the eduGAIN task within the GEANT project since 2009, having six institutions joined the future federation till the beginning of 2018. This number is low. With new actors on the scene, the goal is to find out "why is the place of Serbia on the eduGAIN map still empty" i.e. the reasons for stalled process of the knowledge transfer from GEANT to NREN toward its member institutions.

The landscape of Asia’s R&E regional networks has changed considerably over the last two years. Most noteworthy is the formation of the Asia Pacific Ring, establishing multi-100G links across the Pacific. Fast forward to 2019 and we will see multiple 100G links from Asia to both Europe and the USA. The creation of the APRP (Asia Pacific Research Platform) is the second major strategic priority. This lightning talk will summarize the current status and the vision for us to work together to build the services required for seamless collaborations between Europe, Asia and globally.

n this talk, we present AMIS: Advanced Measurement Instrument and Services to achieve programmable, flow-granularity and event-driven network measurement, sustain scalable line rates, to meet evolving measurement objectives and to derive knowledge for network advancement. The project aims to help planning and management of ultra-high speed international research networks and HPC centers. First, this project will take full advantage of capabilities of state-of-art many-core network processors and some new network techniques (e.g. DPDK) to deliver a highly programmable network measurement appliance scalable to line rate of 100+Gbps. Second, the event-driven query language, software APIs, libraries and tools will be developed to support programmable and software-defined measurement that empowers the network operators to design complex and responsive measurement tasks. Third, the project will deliver operational prototypes at the already-identified and future international R&E network exchange points to conduct measurement operations and gather network flow information for analysis and sharing, while preserving data privacy. The project will strengthen ongoing academia-industry collaborations and lead to new cooperation among national and international partners.

There are Google Hangouts, appear.in and several other WebRTC based meeting services around. Is it so difficult to deliver a meeting service to our community, which we control and customize? We want to present our work from Geant Task JRA4-t5

Since the definition of Interface IDs and accompanying subnet sizes in RFC 1885, the potential has existed for the forwarding and control plane resources of a router to be greatly exceeded by locally or remotely triggered attempts to discover connected neighbors. This brief talk introduces the problem as well as several feasible mitigations and their appropriate applications.

Examining some ways, from interactive video quizzes to branching videos, to take educational video from a passive experience to an interactive one.

NeIC is a joint initiative between the Nordic countries, hosted by NordForsk since January 2012. NordForsk appoints the NeIC Board based on nominations by the national e-infrastructure provider organisations in the Nordics. The path towards becoming a global role model for cross-border e-Infrastructure services will be described. It includes organizing Nordic activities regarding science, computing and data-storage infrastructure into projects, prioritizing and coordinating Nordic collaboration projects, strategic decisions regarding those and reacting on upcoming opportunities. The structure of NORDUnet is similar to NeIC. Pros and cons of joint Nordic efforts will be discussed

Since audio and video content was first digitized in the 1970s quality and availability of such content has increased significantly. However, as always, “the lunch” has a cost. Digital content can easily be buffered and may even require buffering depending on the technology processing the content. This quickly introduces delay. But how much delay…? Uninett has developed a convenient prototype delay meter, in IoT-style, which measures true lens-to-screen video and mic-to-speaker audio delay. Results of measurements are seamlessly made available on-line via Uninett's Delay Measurements Database at http://delay.uninet.no.

Over the last decade, the scientific community has experienced an unprecedented shift in the way research is performed and how discoveries are made. Highly sophisticated experimental instruments are creating massive datasets for diverse scientific communities and hold the potential for new insights that will have long-lasting impacts on society. However, scientists cannot make effective use of this data if they are unable to move, store, and analyze it. To help address this, the US National Science Foundation has funded the Engagement and Performance Operations Center (EPOC) led by Indiana University and the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). EPOC will serve as a collaborative focal point for operational expertise and analysis in the US and will become a central community hub for Science Engagement efforts. This talk will introduce EPOC and look at Indiana University's methods for working with researchers around the world to routinely, reliably, and robustly transfer their data.

While recent investments by the US’s National Science Foundation have catalyzed an enormous leap in US campus networking capabilities, it remains necessary to integrate these capabilities into the routine workflows of researchers transferring data among their remote collaborators, remote data repositories, and visualization facilities. The Pacific Research Platform (PRP) is a program to develop a science-driven, data-centric “freeway system” by federating campus Science DMZs into a regional Science DMZ. Research collaborations across PRP partners serve as use cases for deploying the hardware/software and addressing security/policy/social issues to achieve high-performance data transfers between institutions. The regional PRP represents a manageable scale for initial deployment efforts and capturing lessons learned, but the PRP also informs larger-scale deployments. In this presentation, we describe efforts to build the PRP, including the social and technical approaches, the domain science applications of PRP’s capabilities, as well as results of a recent workshop on scaling up from regional to national/international platforms.

An overview of recent advances in optical transmission technology. The focus will be on recent research achievements.

How does implementing a Information Security Management system help the operational security activities?

The presentation covers a joint security development project by Finnish universities and CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd . The Security Level Project implemented jointly best security practices according to government security requirements and ensured the implementation trough peer reviews. Lessons learned are discussed.

Slides

For the last 15 years, the Community Management team in SURFnet has been engaging with the research communities based in the Netherlands to understand their needs and provide the proper network services to meet their requirements. Community management for R&E in SURFnet forms the bridge between the network and the user by working with lead users, early adopters, and educational and research support staff in research and/or pilot projects.  From lightpaths for end-users to NWO roadmaps, SURFnet has had a rich history of engaging with the Dutch research community, for which some models had more success or revealed different opportunities. This presentation will discuss some examples of SURFnet’s research engagement strategies from before to now, and where we are headed.

The Baltic Sea Regional Study is a collaboration between GÉANT Association, Northern Europe and the Baltic NRENs to evaluate the future connectivity requirements of NRENs in the corresponding region, as well as possible connections with neighbouring countries. The Study was seeking for solutions how to deliver those requirements, from a supplier, topology and overall network design perspective. The Study formulates the strategy of the network development in the region, and propose the next steps for its implementation by NRENs and GÉANT.

The presentation will focus on how we can use precise mapping of displacements of the surface of the Earth to mitigate the effects of natural hazards (volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides), and what is needed in terms of computing, data storage and data transport. Large amount of data is acquired by satellites. After downloading to Earth it needs to accessible for analysing and interpretation. Examples of what has been produced in this respect in Iceland will be presented

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope, being built in Australia and South Africa, will generate huge quantities of data. Here we will discuss some of the challenges involved in transporting this data from the telescope locations, which are necessarily extremely remote, back to the supercomputing facilities for processing, and onto the researchers who will be working on the data.

During the past few years, OpenID Connect (OIDC) has been become a popular choice for implementing single sign-on to Web and native applications via trusted third party. Even though it has many similarities with SAML, especially the trust relationship establishment and validation processes are quite different. The GÉANT 4-2 project's task "Next Generation Trust and Identity Technology Development" has participated in drafting how an identity federation could be built with OIDC around federation operator. The specification draft is called OpenID Connect Federation (OIDCfed). Even if the OIDCfed would gain popularity very quickly, the SAML will not be disappearing anytime soon. In practise this means that both protocols will need to be supported for quite some time. Ideally same existing software would support both of these technologies, as system administrators are already used to operating identity providers in a federation with their preferred software. In many countries, Shibboleth has been very common choice for running the identity provider in research & education federations: for instance in Finnish Haka and Swiss SWITCH-AAI almost all IdPs are run on Shibboleth. For the mentioned reasons, we have seen important that Shibboleth IdP would support the OIDC protocol. The implementation project started on Spring 2017 and its main goal has been to implement the standard OICD and OIDCfed support natively on Shibboleth IdP. This talk will focus on the implementation project: how it all started and how it has been progressing during the past 1.5 years. We will also demonstrate the technical details, including how the OIDC features are configured using the familiar Shibboleth configuration files.

Since 2006, we at Uninett have provided our customers with hardware-based Network Management as a Service, through a CPE server, pre-loaded with a curated and integrated set of best-of-breed network management software - centered around our in-house developed free and open source NMS tool: NAV. Today, Uninett participates in the GÉANT task (GN4-4 JRA2/T5) to build a platform for cloud-based Network Management as a Service, a self-service portal which will be deployed by GÉANT - but, which also aims to be re-deployable by individual European NRENs. Uninett is deploying a pilot service in 2018.

This talk will present the general Funet NFV firewall idea and concept, and how it could be used to provide services to university campuses. I will also explain why we have chosen this development direction with firewalls. The presentation will also contain some information about our experiences that we have obtained so far in the ongoing development work.

Through a repeatable robust design Sunet sets a high goal to spread a common reference architecture to large and small campus networks. By providing a proactive 24/7 NOC the local network engineers will be able assist each other and build a distributed organisation under a centralised service delivery model. The local insight in the networks will spearhead the data collection capability for a National Security Operations Center for the academic sector. In parallel a procurement project will let Sunet-joined organisations own their own equipment purchased through a standardised support organisation. NRENs communication infrastructure is more strategic and relevant then ever! David Heed explains the ongoing journey, victories and obstacles.

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WAYF has recently developed a new platform for the handling of the federation's login traffic. The software was written in the Go programming language and launched in production in the spring of 2018. The platform implements a novel federation architecture, i.e. a hybrid between full-mesh and hub&spoke, and is operated in a containers-based server environment, a deployment technique new to WAYF. This talk intends to shed light on WAYF's new federation architecture and the first few months of operational experience.

The provision of access management services is an area of significant interest in the Asia Pacific region. In the UK, Jisc operates three access management services: the UK federation, eduroam and Assent. Until recently we have encouraged our members to deploy a solution themselves, such as Shibboleth, or contract with a third party provider. Responding to an increasing desire within our membership to outsource service provision, Jisc has developed Liberate. Liberate is a fully-managed, access management solution that interoperates with our access management services; while also enabling access to IP-authenticated resources. Liberate launched in October 2017 in the UK, and we are now interested in collaborating with other NRENs to make the solution available to their own users. Additionally, Jisc is developing a managed federation service, currently in pilot, which will be available in 2018 for other NRENs who want to retain autonomy in running their federation but outsource the operation and management of the tooling. We propose presenting these two services for discussion amongst the community as options for developing access management services, meeting user requirements with best-of-breed technology.

Research methodology and philosophy has taken different shapes and forms since we started using a more structural approach when studying the universe, live and our societies. Although research does not always have to have a clear application and use, it is an area that is still heavily invested in by states and by public funds since research is considered to have an added-value to our societal development and economy. The past few years the words Open Science has started to spread among the scientific community, including policy makers and politicians. Many are working on its definition, opportunities that come with and the limitations. This talk discusses the challenges with Open Science as the new paradigm in research and how the culture change is sensitive to the stakeholders and the pace in which things evolve or develop.

This presentation will review the status of EOSC-related initiatives and discuss the possible contribution from the Nordics to EOSC. By coordinating their action, the Nordic countries have the opportunity to move faster on a number of strategic areas, support the EOSC implementation and increase their influence on the EOSC overall agenda by proposing solutions & technologies that have been tested and have shown their benefits in a real, cross-border environment.

The FAIR principles, published just a couple of years ago, are quickly gaining widespread support as one of the building blocks of Open Science. FAIR data is listed as a goal in the implementation roadmap of EOSC as well. In this talk I will take a practical view on FAIR and explore what FAIR data could mean from a – possibly automated – data consumer’s point of view. This will lead into a discussion of what kind of supporting infrastructure and services would be needed in order to support supplying FAIR data to humans as well as to machines.

The ambitious goal of the GNA is slowly being realised through the efforts of participating NRENs. This talk will discuss the SA NREN's participation to date in the GNA and further detail a couple of projects that is of interest to the SA NREN which has synergies to the GNA. In addition, it will discuss some of the challenges that we have faced to date.

This presentation will dive into the current status of the work of the GNA Technical WG and the plans going forward. It will also include a quick tour around the globe to show what has been achieved thus far. Of course, there will be room for Q&A.

A presentation on legal aspects when using cloud services with focus on data protection regulation.

Kajaani University of Applied Sciences offers an advanced learning environment for its DC-students. We host our own mini-datacenter and it is administrated by students. Infrastructure is capable of hosting around 300-400 virtual machines and it is connected via own firewall straight into the FUNet. Our students are able to do learning tasks in an internet operator level environment. Plus soon we will also have a huge GPU cluster too!

After more than four years of discussions, investigations, preparations and lobbying for an LMS at a collaboration base, we are now at the starting point for 15 universities in Sweden implementing Canvas. More will follow. There has been a period of blood, sweat and tears, but also a big interest and desire from the community to do this together. The procurement was led by Nordunet, with persons from Nordunet, SUNET and the universities. The LMS framework agreement with Canvas/Instructure was signed at the end of March 2017. We all thought that we by then could start the agreement process. But we were wrong. Finally, after a period of 9 months containing an appeal in several instances, the Canvas baby was born. During the long waiting period we started a collaboration between the universities. We wanted to be prepared and share best practice regarding implementing Canvas. Not just as a technical implementation but changing how our teachers uses the LMS, more focus on pedagogical parts less on administration. Shortly afterwards we had a “course area” set up in Canvas, for communication and training and we also formed a network called SALSA, with representatives from each university. The idea is to use the tool to learn from and share knowledge between each other. We will during the presentation discuss and show parts of what the network is about and why collaboration is the way forward. Our long-time vision is that the universities should co-operate when we can, and compete when we need to. In the SALSA group we find good solutions, share them with each other and finds best practice. With the overall common goal to find the best way forward for our teachers and students, but in the end not to forget, also for the Swedish taxpayers.

InAcademia is a web service developed in the GÉANT project. It relies on eduGAIN and national identity federations to validate students and staff members of academic institutions. The validation of students is attractive for institutions that cannot or do not want to participate directly in eduGAIN or national identity federations. In practice, students and members of the academic community can prove their affiliation during online transactions (e.g. to get a discount) in a simple and privacy protecting manner.

See the places in our networks you never knew existed! Just like standard ISPs, the NRENs mostly consist of fibres in the ground and networks in office buildings. A few places, however, represent strange and extreme examples of connections and places in research networking. Nordic examples of this kind is presented by a range of NREN infrastructure people.

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