Programme

A welcome from the host institution

The Square Kilometer Array will be the largest radio telescope in the world. This talk describes the organisation established in order to realise this ambition, the science that can be explored with the instrument and the technology developed for this purpose. The data network requirements will be explored in more detail.

With the impact of the globalization and R&E core network services becoming a commodity how will NREN's look in 2020 ?

Since December 2008, SURFnet’s Dynamic Lightpath service is running as a production-grade Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) service for users within the Netherlands. We have promoted the use of this service, among others by organizing contests for researchers. From these contests we have learned which factors are important for the uptake. Obviously, BoD is typically needed for connecting (Grid) computing, storage and/or other resources. Furthermore, the (scientific) users of this combined infrastructure collaborate in Virtual Organizations distributed over many institutions. Providing the bandwidth alone is thus not enough since much of the complexity and challenges are found at the endpoints; an integrated approach, in collaboration with organizations such as the computing center SARA and the Dutch National Grid Initiative (BigGrid), to ensure ease of use is therefore very important. In the presentation we would like to show a number of use cases for BoD and how we have organized the collaboration with e-Infrastructure partners (SARA and BiG Grid) to support them. Furthermore, we will relate these use cases to the work we have done to support the OGF’s Network Service Interface specification and to SURFnet’s federated identity and group management framework OPENconext. This framework provides authenticated users the capability to define user groups - in essence this is the building block for the creation of virtual organizations, allowing groups of users to share a set of applications and resources. We will extend OPENconext with an elaborate policy framework suited to deal with resource and network management. Advantages are that SURFnet users will be able to add BoD services in the same environment that also supports their existing collaborations and other e-Infrastructure resources.

The presentation will summarize the content of the NSI v2.0 protocol, explain why users should be implementing it and provide information on upcoming interoperability and prototyping events.

Electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (eVLBI) uses high data rate academic networks to send data from radio telescopes to a central processing centre. The networks have the capacity to provide 10Gbps connections, but the applications often only need such high data rates intermittently. The NEXPReS project (http://www.nexpres.eu), in collaboration with network providers and GÉANT, aims at providing a Bandwidth-on-Demand (BoD) service for eVLBI in Europe. Such connectivity needs to be verified before observations using real-time data transfers can begin. User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is the best format for eVLBI data however dedicated links are required to avoid denial of service to others, hence BoD offers an ideal solution. We compare the use of two different hardware solutions for the measurement of network characteristics, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based bespoke solution and a general purpose PC. The PC ran the UDPmon software, a network test and diagnosis tool specifically designed for UDP, and the FPGA was designed to send and receive time-stamped UDP packets in a compatible manner. We find that both systems perform well, producing data rates of over 9.9Gbps on an 80km 10GE static test link. The FPGA system has considerably smaller jitter in inter-packet arrival time, but the PC is easier to programme and can be used for other purposes. We will report on our initial experience of using BoD paths requested from the AutoBAHN system over several different paths with end hosts in the UK, Sweden and Finland. We will also present the performance of the PC systems for verification of the inter-administrative domain BoD circuits at rates of up to 4Gbps, and what these represent in terms of future international BoD links for eVLBI and other data intensive experiments.

Large volumes of language-related data exist, but collections are very scattered as well as heterogeneous. Primary language materials comprise speech, video and text in various encodings and different transcription codes and formats. Furthermore language may carry multiple levels of annotation (such as morphological, syntactic and semantic, as well as layers of normalized editions). Secondary (derived) language materials such as lexicons, wordnets and grammars adhere to various encodings as well as different theoretical paradigms and formalisms. Experimental data (such as reaction times, fMRI data etc.), geographical mappings of language, etc. must also be considered. Making sense of the thousands of encodings and converting formats to standards is an enormous challenge. The European CLARIN ERIC and associated national projects such as CLARINO in Norway are aimed at establishing a common language resources and technology infrastructure where language resources become more interoperable and available for exploration and modeling.

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) is a technique in which the signals received by remote radio telescopes are combined to make high resolution images of astronomical objects. With support of the EC, the European VLBI Network is a world-leader in innovating this data-intensive technique by making the telescopes connected in real-time and supporting various new observational modes. In my talk I will describe the considerations and the progress we have made in data transport, data curation, computation, archiving and user interfaces for e-VLBI. I will discuss how VLBI will become more and more a global facility and how the current technical developments are feeding into the definition of new radio astronomy facilities.

History and experiences of implementing cross-border fiber connection Finland-Sweden. The possibility for cross-border connection between Finland and Sweden was first sketched in early 2000's. When both Funet (Finland) and SUNET (Sweden) both installed DWDM equipment a few years ago near the border, making the connection became a realistic option.

In 2009, the Nordic Council of Ministers asked a group of e-Science and e-Infrastructure specialists to conduct a feasibility study on knowledge infrastructures in the Baltic Sea area. The report of the study points to a vast potential for regional collaboration, with the objective of strengthening the region within the wider European research arena. One recommendation of the study is to enhance the existing network infrastructures in the region, by a Baltic Sea redundant network ring using existing resources in a federated manner where possible, with the objective of ensuring that all countries in the region have access to core network services on the same level as other European countries and to establish the basis for wider e-Science collaborations. Such a Baltic Sea ring was expected to interconnect better the e-Science communities in the region, strengthen collaboration, and strengthen the role of the region in the European collaboration. As a follow-up action, the Nordic Council of Ministers has funded a design study, drawing up a detailed network design based on federation of regional resources. The study has delivered technical designs, recommendations for operational models, organization models, and cost sharing. As such, the study is both a concrete design of a network and the federation to establish and run it, and a template for regional network collaborations. Following up on the study, the Baltic Sea countries will be establishing a consortium with the objective to build and operate a advance optical network infrastructure. In addition, a far-reaching initiative, CyberBaltic, will seek establish advanced scientific and infrastructure collaboration in the region, enabled by the core Baltic Ring network. This talk will recap on that initiative, results achieved, the current status and next steps for the Baltic Ring initiative.

The SEELight project aims at deploying a SEE regional lambda networking facility, which will constitute the infrastructure that will be the basis for further sustainable development and operation of the regional networking infrastructures. At the same time the establishment of a collaborative operation centre that will ensure the efficient and unobtrusive deployment and operation of the inter-domain network services will be also explored. The presentation will focus on the project's objectives, current status as well as obstacles and opportunities presented.

Emerging research and commercial services like IPTV, high quality video conferencing, remote surgeries and cloud computing in particular are time sensitive and their successful deployment assumes network with minimal delay and jitter in combination with high bandwidth and preferably low packet loss. The NREN communities must provide underlying network infrastructures and transport technologies to facilitate services with such requirements to the network. In this paper we investigate and evaluate circuit and packet based transport technologies from classic best effort IP over MPLS flavours, Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB), “Transparent Interconnect of Lots of Links” (TRILL) to Optical Transport Network (OTN) and SDH. The transport technologies are evaluated theoretically, using simulations and/or experimentally. Each transport technology is evaluated based on its performances and capabilities with respect to a num-ber of points. First, its capability to guarantee low delay and jitter during normal and high load conditions; this includes service model and reservation procedure. Secondly, how the technologies proactively and reactively handle failure situations in links and nodes including resource overhead and restoration time. Thirdly, complexity and automation possibilities for establishment of paths for high demanding applica-tions, and finally how the technologies are backed by research communities and major vendors like Ciena, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia-Siemens and Huawei. The technologies are compared in defined scenarios and a subset of them is tested with high demanding research applications. The work is part of GN3 JRA1.

An overview of NORDUnets current and future network plans,, Highlevel vendor trends, and some personal views on SDN (Software Defined Networks). A view of a possible future European NREN peering service

When we analyse operation of photonic transmission systems from economical point of view, cost of fibre pair dominates the whole operational costs, in both cases of fibre pair rental or installation (via annualized costs). This makes fibres sharing by transmission systems interesting from economical point of view. Furthermore we can find it useful where simply all existing fibres are already exhausted. The paper further shows possible ways of fibre sharing by more transmission systems and practical deployment in CESNET network.

ELIXIR unites Europe’s leading life science organisations in managing and safeguarding the massive amounts of data being generated every day by publicly funded research. ELIXIR is a pan-European research infrastructure for biological information. ELIXIR will provide the facilities necessary for life science researchers - from bench biologists to cheminformaticians - to make the most of our exponentially growing store of information about living systems, which is the foundation on which our understanding of life is built. The talk will describe the status for this emerging infrastructure for biological information in Europe, which is created under the ESFRI infrastructure program.

The establishment of a collaborative data infrastructure is one of the key aspects within EUDAT, managing and sharig the ever growing volumes of scientific data is one of the key aspects. We are focussing on the community requirements and identifying common services suitable for this collaborative data infrastructure. There is strong demand among research communities for data replication services associated with better access to computing power, but EUDAT does not want to be only an infrastructure to store and compute data. It has also some ambitions to establish itself as a central portal for making scientific data visible - and accessible. Part of the challenge resides in finding good metadata solutions that allow data from different communities to be integrated in easily searchable collections. EUDAt offers "Building Blocks of Data Infrastructures" and offers both theoretical knowledge about data architectures and practical experience of concrete implementation work to "data practitioners", i.e. persons that are designing and building data infrastructure solutions.Placeholder

There is a growing trend to capture lectures given in higher education institution. Lectures on video turns out to be of great value for students in many ways. They supplement lecture notes, text books and exercises. Viewing statistics of lecture videos show active use of the video content. Students tend to watch certain parts of certain videos more often, i.e. they wind forward to find and watch again those parts where the lecturer explains very difficult and/or relevant topics. Sharing lecture recordings openly is also a global trend helped by services like iTunes U and YouTube Edu. As UNINETT is in pilot with centralized services for lecture capture, the idea of sharing recordings on a national basis comes natural. Given a large national collection of captured lectures combined with students desire to access specific parts of recordings, new improved techniques to access video content is of interest. In cooperation with the iAD-centre headed by Microsoft, UNINETT is developing and testing a search engine which, based on search keywords, attempts to find not only videos, but parts of the videos that have relevance. The result of a keyword search is a video production based on chuncks of videos potentially from many video sources. Hence a student may get a specific topic re-explained multiple times by different lecturers, an ideal setting for most students. The presentation will explain how the search engine is designed and what requirements it imposes on the video content to operate efficiently. A demonstration will be given, and challenges and future work addressed.

The ASPIRE study was undertaken by four panels of experts coordinated by TERENA as part of the European Commission’s GN3 project. ASPIRE which is intended to inform policy and decision makers, has been exploring: --Future Internet developments over the next 5-10 years in the context of the research and education community. --Stimulating collaboration and knowledge transfer throughout the network provision and use chain: at the pan-European; national and campus levels. --Collating and defining best practice that can be widely taken-up in Europe. The study has focussed on four central themes: --The adoption of cloud services in the Research & Education community --The integration and use of mobile device connectivity into NREN services --Middleware and managing data and knowledge in a data rich world --The future roles of National Research and Education Networks. The presentation will review the major findings of the panels and provide a summary of the ASPIRE conclusions and recommendations.

The basic offering of the new Internet2 nationwide backbone network is a sliceable, OpenFlow-enabled layer 2 Software-Defined Network; there will also be a standard routed IP service, and individual waves will be accessible for experimental or special production purposes. The new services bring new possibilities and challenges for campus networks, and Internet2 is collaborating with forward-looking institutions to take advantage of them. This talk will focus on the hardware/software design of the backbone and on recommended changes to campus networks. The talk will conclude with a look into some likely developments of the near future.

Carrier Ethernet is quickly becoming the de-facto standard in research and education networks, and is used to provide dedicated network connections to end users. Indeed, not only do most NRENs provide their end users with Ethernet interfaces, but also many of the GÉANT transport connections and their extensions through NRENs are comprised of Ethernet segments. An extensive set of Ethernet Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) functions (Ethernet Connectivity Fault Management (CFM) 1 and Y.1731 2 being the most well-known) is one of the strongest features of Carrier Ethernet. Ethernet OAM functions provide a standard way for verifying (service assurance), monitoring and troubleshooting connections in the next upgrade of the GÉANT network. Service assurance checks if connections perform to their specs, e.g. of CIR (Committed Information Rate) and EIR (Excess Information Rate), after service configuration and activation. Monitoring is required for periodic checks of connectivity (sometimes called continuity) and performance of connections. Connectivity measurements verify if destinations can be reached, and if they are not, allow detection of the locations and cause of the fault. The presentation gives a detailed overview of standards in the areas of service assurance, monitoring, and troubleshooting and reports the results of the trials that had been carried out in these areas by GEANT3 JRA 1 Task 1 and JRA 2 Task 3 teams.

OpenFlow is a new network technology and a form of Software Defined Networking (SDN) which could revolutionize the way we do networking in the near future. With SDN applications can program the network to create a communication infrastructure according to the application's needs. The OpenFlow infrastructure consists of OpenFlow switches and external OpenFlow controllers. OpenFlow is separating the data and control plane, where the intelligence is implemented in the OpenFlow controllers. These controllers can run on much more powerful hardware than what is available on routers or switches. The switches can be relatively simple and cheap because they only need to do the forwarding. The IEEE 802.1ag protocol for Ethernet OAM was implemented at SARA and was integrated to the NOX OpenFlow controller for a demo at the SC11 High Performance Computing and Networking conference. In the demo a large international OpenFlow testbed was set up between Amsterdam, Chicago, Ottawa and Seattle. The links between the sites were monitored using periodic hello messages. The status of the links was stored in a round-robin database. This status information was published using perfSONAR measurement points and a collector showed the overall status of the network live on a website. It was chosen by the SC11 organization among the top six out of eleven demos.

The talk introduces very briefly the status of OpenFlow and the EU FP7 testbed project OFELIA (OpenFlow in Europe - Linking Infrastructure and Applications). Typical use cases and experiments are introduced, and a short tutorial is given that shows how to get access to and use the testbed.

HELIX NEBULA, the Science Cloud shall develop, through a Public-Private Partnership, a European cloud-based scientific e-infrastructure in line with the vision depicted in the Science Cloud Strategic Plan* where four developmental goals have been identified, building on the collective experience of all involved. Goal One Establish HELIX NEBULA – the Science Cloud – as a cloud computing infrastructure addressing the needs of the European Research Area and capable of serving as a platform for innovation and evolution of the overall e-infrastructure. Goal Two Identify and adopt suitable policies for trust, security and privacy on a European-level that can be provided by the HELIX NEBULA framework and infrastructure. Goal Three Create a light-weight governance structure that involves all the stakeholders in HELIX NEBULA – the Science Cloud - and which can evolve over time as the infrastructure, services and user-base grows. Goal Four Define a funding scheme involving all the stake-holder groups (service suppliers, users, EC and national funding agencies) for a Public/Private Partnership to implement a Cloud Computing Infrastructure that delivers a sustainable and profitable business environment adhering to European-level policies. This Strategic Plan was adopted by a group of 23 organisations, representing potential users, IT suppliers and national and European policy-makers at a workshop hosted by ESA/ESRIN in June 2011. *http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1374172/files/CERN-OPEN-2011-036.pdf

In this paper, we present the Campus Services platform, the Polish computing cloud for academic and research community. This plat- form is built within the PLATON project, which aims at creating a na- tionwide service platform based on the wide-area network infrastructure provided by the Polish Optical Network PIONIER. The PLATON Cam- pus Services will be carried out by 20 MANs (Metropolitan Area Net- works) and HPC centers, equipped with local clusters connected by the PIONIER network. Campus Services are built on the basis of an innova- tive computing and service infrastructure operating nationwide. It will deliver applications on demand, and will be able to provide users with flexible and scalable access to specific applications, both under MS Win- dows and Linux, for a wide range of users from academia and research environments, taking into account the needs of specific workgroups in these environments.

With the increasing demand for Cloud-based content service by faculty and students, IT teams in academia are looking for solutions that both meets their users' needs and come with the fit and finish required by EDU administrators. U.S.-based Box is one such solution. In this presentation, David Lee will present an overview of the Box platform, how students and faculty in American universities currently leverage Box, and how academic IT organizations manage their Box services.

Can you build a framework for information security and privacy where both universities, suppliers and government agree upon? SURFaudit does so and has a strong buy-in from internal and external auditors, IT directors, CIO's and board members. It helps universities to organize information security and to be in control. The SURFaudit framework is based on ISO standards. It is becoming a key requirement in a growing number of services.

Databases and raw datasets of different kinds are becoming an increasingly vital part of the infrastructure of the global science system, often used and reused beyond the endeavour of the original aim for which they were gathered. Free and open access to research data increases the return from public investments and facilitates the wider progress of science. And besides, government-funded research data and data collected by government funded organisations should be openly accessible for the public that provided the funding in the first place, one could claim. “Open” is indeed a popular word today; open data, open source, open standards. But what are the implications if we try the idea of implementing the notion of open access (OA) to research data? And what is the situation for OA policies when comparing Sweden with other countries in the Nordic, and in Europe? The situation for OA to research data varies in the different countries in Europe, some being more tolerant and open minded than others. Sweden has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and OA for articles and monographs has been in use for the last couple of years. However, OA to raw data, meta data and research data, also stated in the Berlin declaration, has not yet been fully implemented in Sweden. In my presentation I will present and discuss the technical, administrative and legal obstacles, benefits and conceivable disadvantages of OA to and reuse of digital research data, using the present situation in Sweden as an example in the discussion, landing in how the situation on a European scale affects the work for OA to research data on a national level

FileSender is open source software designed to make it easy to transport arbitrarily large files to a private audience: use the network rather than hunting for an USB flash drive. NRENs in several countries offer a FileSender service to their national higher education community. During the BoF we will give an update on the state of development of FileSender, plans we have, and we hope there will be lots of feedback. More information about FileSender on www.filesender.org <link to http://www.filesender.org> Try for yourself! Norwegian FileSender service: https://cloudstor.uninett.no DeIC FileSender service: http://www.forskningsnettet.dk/FileSender CSC/Funet FileSender service: http://www.csc.fi/hallinto/funet/palvelut/filesender or check the list of known installs (https://www.assembla.com/spaces/file_sender/wiki/Existing_installations)

Agenda 1. Welcome Participants: Martin Bech (MB), Uni-C Jorgen Qvist (JQ), NORDUnet Juha Oinonen (JO), CSC/Funet Harri Kuusisto (HK), CSC/Funet Jari Miettinen (JM), CSC/Funet (chair/sc) Marius Olafsson (MO), RHNet Magnus Strømdal (MS), UNINETT Olaf Schjelderup (OS), UNINETT Site: Room number PH131, Pilestredet 35 The meeting started at 17:30 CET 1.1 Agenda bashing round of introductions agenda review note that meeting is shorter than usually 2. Last meeting 2.1 Minutes from last meeting accepting the minutes 2.2 TODO-list review on the done and pending items, progress 3. Short update for the last 3 months (approximately 3 main issues) 3.1 Funet 3.2 Sunet 3.3 FSKNet 3.4 RHNET 3.5 UNINETT 3.6 NORDUnet 4. Service Matrix 4.1 Status for the Service Matrix recent updates 4.2. Update of the shared services update needs? 5. Next meeting decided beforehand to be in Stockholm on Wednesday 14th of November 2012 6. AOB 6.1. Co-operation and outreach recaptures of the NREN round table, item 3 6.2 Joint HA service development to be revisited in Stockholm meeting? results from the Nordic NREN community IaaS workshop? 7. Closing Meeting ended at 19:30 CET.

It has often been said that content providers are reluctant to convert their service to dual stack because of concerns that the end user experience would be worse as a result. At the same time service providers are reluctant to offer a dual protocol service because of concerns that the experience would be worse for their customers. How much of these concerns are based on measured data? In this presentation we will examine the outcome of a large scale data collection exercise in measuring the dual stack experience for end users, and see to what extent these concerns about dual stack performance are seen in the data.

The Internet is cementing itself more and more into our lives. What does it mean that it becomes part of society's infrastructure? Is DNS part of that infrastructure? Reflections about makeing a best-effort network part of infrastructure.

After the World IPv6 launch and RIPE being on their last /8, where are we with IPv6 deployment? This talk will take a look at a collection of IPv6 statistics from the Internet, that Cisco has collated. How is Cisco doing on IPv6? Are we eating our own dog-food or spending all our resources on IPv4 life extensions?

In the past 4 years, DNSSEC has catapulted from niche technology to the latest & greatest Internet security solution. More than 2 years ago, the root zone was signed, and many (cc)TLDs (representing ~80% of all domain names) now support DNSSEC, bringing the technology within the reach of the majority of domain name owners. The road so far has been bumpy and littered with the occasional roadkill. This talk will give a brief overview of how we got where we are, what we have learned, what has gone and goes wrong and what the future will bring. White papers: General DNSSEC: http://bit.ly/sn-dnssec-2008 DNSSEC validation: http://bit.ly/sn-dnssec-vali Applications of Modern Cryptography: http://bit.ly/sn-cryptoweb

The NREN community has created a superb WiFi roaming service for their community called eduroam. There is no reason to lean back and relax however: users are becoming more and more demanding, to an extent that their expectations can't be fulfilled by eduroam alone. What's happening in the WiFi space that can enable eduroam to become more than it is today? How will connectivity solutions for academic users look like?

We will report on the lessons we learned deploying wireless sensor networks in the arctic in the context of the MANA project at Zackenberg, and in the context of the INTERACT project - an FP7 infrastructure project federating european, as well as russian and canadian arctic stations.

UNINETT has got funding for a submarine cable between Longyearbyen and Ny-Ålesund, both at Spitsbergen. The talk focuses on challenges related to submarine cables in an extreme environment with icebergs, sea bottom trawling, risk at landfalls, sensitive and vulnerable wildlife and cultural heritage.

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a self-configuring network of small sensor nodes communicating among themselves using radio signals, and deployed in quantity to sense the physical world. Sensor nodes are essentially small computers with extremely basic functionality. They consist of a processing unit with limited computational power and a limited memory, one or more sensors, a radio communication device and a power sour Wireless sensor networks in Developing Countries have a great role to play not only to expedite novel solutions that help mitigate development problems, but also to facilitate research activities in crucial scientific areas such as environmental monitoring and energy management. The solutions found when designing sensor networks for Developing Countries can be used in Nordic countries, where the climate is harsh. Some of the issues addressed include: ? Power consumption is an important issue for the network to be self-sustainable. Minimizing the cost of deployment is of paramount importance. Since WSN is a nascent technology, many of the existing general purposes solutions in the market are expensive and/or they are not well tailored for use in the developing world. To be usable in large numbers in developing countries, where climates are extreme and spare parts are rare, sensor nodes must also be rugged and reliable. Enclosures are needed to protect nodes from moisture and heat, but still expose sensors to the outdoor conditions that they are monitoring. As such, the environmental conditions must be taken into account when designing the system. We will describe some WSN applications we have been involved in, highlighting how the solutions developed can be used in other harsh environments as well. The applications have to do with Solar Energy Monitoring, Irrigation and Air Quality. During the presentation, we will demo some of the solutions we developed.

Flexible learning, as well as research collaboration, is depending on a coherent video infrastructure spanning from the local device to the mega-databases. The Norwegian initative eCampus is putting video solutions in place: collaboration tools, lecture capture, video-as-learning-process, mobile video. This talk presents the architectural work and working example solutions.

Making sense of H323, Lync, SIP, web conferencing, Skype and the rest The Norwegian higher education community uses a variety of tools to facilitate synchronous online communication: audio & video calls, group calls, webinars etc. Our tool box is well equipped with mobile phones, a national SIP infrastructure, H323 video conferencing, Microsoft Lync, web conferencing tools (AdobeConnect), free tools (Skype), etc. While all these tools offer similar functionality, they differ substantially on many aspects: historical background, the basic problem they address, market positioning, price points, deployment strategy, supported platforms, technology and more. In the years to come we will need to deal with this wide variety of tools as none of them is going to go away any time soon. No one single tool addresses the various use cases well enough at an interesting price point to make that happen, there's always some pesky "little" detail in the way. Compounding this is the lack of community consensus and synchronised timelines. Existing investments and the FUD caused by expected market changes (HTML5! Google! Facebook!) top it off. All this is of little interest to those trying to get their job done: students, lecturers, researchers and staff who want "stuff that works" that doesn't cost them an arm and a leg. They expect us to come up with the answers. This talk will explore how the current tools for synchronous communication relate to one-another from a user-centric and the institutional/national service delivery point of view. It will mix user experience, technical and business considerations. The talk will make some educated guesses about future directions, based on two years experience with the problem space through the Norwegian eCampus project, a national effort to take the technical infrastructure needed for net-based learning and research to the next level.

In The Netherlands, many campuses are eager to move services into the Cloud. Cost reduction and better user experience are among the drivers for this process. It is however not easy to combine these remote services with the on-campus services in a coherent, secure and user friendly way. At the same time institutions also struggle with supporting Collaboration scenarios. Dealing with (international) user level collaborations in research and education pose a significant challenge. The same is true when engaging in collabortions between campuses. This presentation showcases the work that has been done within SURFnet in the past years to support the above scenarios. Several pilot and production level usecases will be presented as these became possible when SURFnet created the OpenConext collaboration platform.

NSF’s GENI program seeks to enable experiments that run within vir- tual network topologies built-to-order from testbed infrastructure offered by multiple providers (domains). GENI is often viewed as a network testbed integration effort, but behind it is an ambitious vision for multi-domain infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). This paper presents ExoGENI, a new GENI testbed that links GENI to two advances in virtual infrastructure services outside of GENI: open cloud computing (OpenStack) and dynamic circuit fabrics. ExoGENI orchestrates a federation of in- dependent cloud sites and circuit providers through their native IaaS interfaces, and links them to other GENI tools and resources. The ExoGENI deployment consists of cloud site “racks” on host campuses within the US, linked with national research networks and other circuit networks through programmable exchange points. The ExoGENI sites and control software are enabled for software-defined networking using OpenFlow. ExoGENI offers a powerful unified hosting platform for deeply networked, multi-domain, multi-site cloud applications. We intend that ExoGENI will seed a larger, evolving platform linking other third- party cloud sites, transport networks, and other infrastructure services, and that it will enable real-world deployment of innovative distributed services and new visions of a Future Internet.

NOVI is an EC FP7/FIRE STREP project whose name stands for "Network Innovations over Virtualized Infrastructures". The project explores efficient approaches to compose virtualized e-Infrastructures towards Future Internet (FI) cloud services. In FI cloud services the various resources, i.e. networking, storage and processing, will be managed by separate but federated providers. NOVI is developing and validating methods, information models and algorithms that can provide users with isolated slices, baskets of resources and services drawn from these underlying federated infrastructures. The NOVI testing environment is based on combining PlanetLab and FEDERICA, two dissimilar virtualized experimental infrastructures with attributes widely anticipated in a FI cloud. My talk will show the results obtained so far in the project, the lessons learned and will identify the roadmap still ahead.

From the start, the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) were connectivity providers building the high-performance datanetworks for their constituencies. While this is still an area of great importance, quickly moving to speeds of 100 Gbit/s and incorporating programmability through Software Defined Networking, middleware and services have quickly became an essential part of their work to stay relevant for the institutes for Research and Education. An explosion of very relevant online services are being offered now, some by the NRENs themselves but the majority through commercial providers. Can we as the R & E Community easily integrate them, and seamlessly use these services? Leveraging the Internet2 Network and enabling services like InCommon federated identity management, Internet2 is developing a portfolio of service offerings. The goal? To create access to services that are cost-effective, easy to access, simple to administer, and tailored to the unique needs of the R & E community. The name for this is NET+ Services. This talk will dive into what NET+ is and how it works. It will also zoom in to how the R & E Community can work together on this at a global scale.

We are intimately familiar with trust in our day-to-day lives. As individuals living in complex societies, life is a constant sequence of trust decisions. Indeed only a fraction of these will we take consciously; it is an essential part of the human condition. Yet increasingly our lives are becoming digitised and connected. However it has proven challenging to translate the subtleties of trust that we develop and manage in 'real life' within the online environment. This has resulted in many negative outcomes, impeding the use of the network for applications where specific types of trust are required. In this presentation, the author will discuss and reflect on strategies to enable a richer and more sophisticated online trust environment.

A virtual organisation (VO) of researchers operates beyond the institutional borders and often in an international context. For easy collaboration between members of a VO, it is essential to use a coherent set of web-based services. Traditionally, the VO or group administrator must create and maintain a group for each service, which is cumbersome and most error-prone. For the ease of use and to simplify maintenance, the use of an external group provider is a possible solution. In this way, the VO or group administrator only needs to maintain the group at one place. A good standard for using external groups did not exist yet, and so there is a need for a standard. Within GN3-JRA3-T2 (Identity federations) SURFnet works together with Uninett, SUnet and Renater on the specification and implementation of VOOT 1. VOOT stands for Virtual Organization Orthogonal Technology and is a protocol for exchanging external group information, based on a distinct subset of the group related features of the OpenSocial REST API. The focus for VOOT is on inter-federation contexts, with collaborators across federations. However VOOT is orthogonal to Identity Federations; it can make use of federated authentication but does not require it. Furthermore VOOT does not require shared user identifers between the external group provider and the service. At the moment tests are done as a proof of concept between: Sympa (Renater) SurfConext (SURFnet) Foodle (Uninett) COIP (SUnet) A successful integration test was done with Foodle using groups from the external group provider SURFconext 2. The presentation will provide an overview of the protocol and the use cases.

OpenID Connect is the next version of OpenID, which is getting standarized these days. OpenID Connect builds an authentication and session layer on top of OAuth 2.0, and may play a signficiant role for the federations in the future. Roland Hedberg has been one of the first implementors of this new authentication protocol, and will share some of his experiences. Together with Andreas Åkre Solberg, he has, as part of a joint collaboration effort between GÉANT and Kantara Initiative built an advanced automated interoperability testing and verification infrastructure that may help increase the quality of OpenID connect implementations.

UNINETT is in the process of building a SIP infrastructure for the academic community in Norway. The task is to facilitate and help colleges and universities to do peer-to-peer communication in compliance with the SIP standards. A major player in such communication is telephony and naturally much focus is given to VoIP. The goal is to migrate all colleges and universities from local ISDN connections to the SIP infrastructure with a centralized PSTN connection. The process is nearly 40% complete but already saving the connected institutions money and enabling them to route calls directly. The migration process also serves as a motivator for many institutions to modernize their local PBX solution to one that uses SIP, being a commercial product or self-developed, based on open source. The talk will describe how the infrastructure is built. It will detail why and how the use of open standards are important and why SIP and ENUM are crucial components. Also the talk will show how the open source platforms, notably KAMAILIO and Asterisk, has enabled us to create connectors and SIP-enable all the various PBX solutions and platforms we find amongst our members. Building a SIP infrastructure is much more than setting up SIP proxies. Opening up telephony to the Internet is often frowned upon due to security concerns. Much effort has gone into the many layers of security aimed at protecting from hacking and abuse. The transition to SIP has also produced befits like the ability to better monitor and log activity for statistical purposes, which in turn helps create a better service. The talk will show some of the security measures that have been implemented and some of the tools that have been developed for monitoring, debugging and management of the infrastructure and its services. Not having finished the work, there will also be a glimpse into our future plans for improvement and development of the SIP infrastructure and it’s supporting systems.

Realtime video has long promised to revolutionize the way the we communicate. Unfortunately, the fulfillment of this promise has been hindered by challenges including poor quality, reliability, and ease of use. Powerful mobile processors and the proliferation of cameras in mobile devices have increased access to and ease of use of video communication, but these solutions threaten to mask the true potential of realtime video. Only with solutions that are not just easy to use but also have high quality and reliability can truly effective global collaborations happen. This is a problem that cannot be solved by a single vendor, but instead must be addressed by the very community that most needs these global collaborations: the research and education community. Only by working together can research and education networks enable the full potential of video communications through the creation of interoperable dialing, directory, and scheduling infrastructure. Ben Fineman will present Internet2's perspective on the Global Video Alliance, an international group that includes NORDUnet and that is working to achieve this vision.

perfSONAR NC is a framework for sharing and visualizing network statistics. As part of the framework an advanced web library is under development which makes it possible to do rapid development of advanced web based interfaces for network statistics. In this presentation we will give a general overview of perfSONAR NC and then demonstrate how an advanced web interface can be implemented with very little code.

The aim of this presentation is to show practical aspects of the topology information management in multi-domain federated network. The authors will leverage their knowledge and experience gained during the deployment of the Common Network Information Service (cNIS) in NRENs within the confines of the GEANT3 project (FP7-ICT 238875). cNIS was designed to be an integrated network topology repository that manages IP, Ethernet and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) data within a single administrative domain 1. During a testing phase it proved that the expectations of service designers from GEANT community for having a versatile network discovery engine can be met 2. Currently cNIS belongs to the GN3 workflow tool providing together with the AutoBAHN system the implementation of the Path Provisioning element of the GEANT Multi-domain Bandwidth on Demand service. The BoD is a service for automatic provisioning of bandwidth in the GÉANT Service Area . It is being introduced in NRENs in a 12-month, three-phase pilot programme. During the technical pilot phase cNIS was deployed in 5 participants -GEANT, GRNET, HEANET, JANET and PIONIER . The authors will summarise the cNIS pilot in NRENs, paying particular attention to: • state of the report for L1/L2 information management, • two approaches for a network discovery (layer vs device) and how it matches the NRENs testbed and production networks, • human aspects for automatic network discovery i.e. how NOCs trust the automatic tools, • how NOCs evaluated major cNIS features like plugins for network discovery, • lesson that have been learnt during the course of the pilot or pilot planning, • the next steps to be taken following the global strategy of meeting the expectations of multi-domain service users, • cNIS development perspective with long-term goals of cNIS development towards NG NMA communication interfaces

Configuration management of the NORDUnet network made easy, secure and controllable using a proxy layer. NORDUnet has a system called NCS that works as a proxy towards the network equipment. With the help of the NCS software the operational changes in the network can be made in one location and then automatically configured and redistributed in a consistent manner across multiple devices in the network. Configuration management with integrity constraints also ensures consistent device configuration which makes troubleshooting faster due to e.g. less inconsistencies in configuration. With integration to other systems services can be created, maintained and documented automatically or semi automatically depending on requirements. This enables different departments in an organisation to have access to all the relevant information without having to adopt new routines or interact with systems they are generally not working with, e.g. the department that provision services and the department that has to troubleshoot the same services. It also enables the creation of services to be initiated by other systems, e.g. BoD services that are requested by other domains.

Very brief presentations on a variety of topics

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Many media stream recording system (e.g. Mediasite, Matterhorn) relay on an internal calendar database for scheduling recording session. Import and export of events may be supported, but typically through somewhat cumbersome file upload web interface. UNINETT is developing a recording control system base 100% on standardized calendar protocols (iCalendar, CalDAV and iTip). Users schedule recordings in their own favourite (standard) calendar with their preferred calendar client and simply invite the recording system to "attend" the relevant event. Users may edit, move or cancel events. The recording system will be seamlessly informed (by help of the calendar standards).

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Integrated hybrid optical networks (IHON), also known as fusion networks, fuse the circuit and packet network in a time-interleaved manner without using time-slots. We experimentally demonstrate an Ethernet integrated hybrid network offering both an Ethernet wavelength transport and the ability to exploit vacant wavelength-capacity using statistical multiplexing without interfering with the performance of the wavelength transport. The field-trial was carried through the Uninett network in Trondheim. The results verify that the guaranteed circuit paths have zero packet loss, low delay and minimized packet delay variation, while the packet paths with statistically multiplexing capability increase the throughput efficiency of the wavelengths.

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To create awareness about the advantages that lightpaths can offer, SURFnet organizes various activities for both researchers and local ICT departments. One of these activities is the contest Enlighten Your Research (EYR). This competition gives researchers of all disciplines the opportunity to explore the benefits of the network for their research. In the past years, three of these competitions have been delivered. In the first competition, researchers were asked to submit a proposal for the application of one or more fixed lightpaths, whereas EYR2 aimed at promoting the use of dynamic lightpaths. One of the conclusions from these editions was that a researcher’s primary concern is not just connectivity, but rather integrated services including compute and storage facilities. Therefore, we decided to join forces with our national e-Infrastructure partners SARA and BiG Grid, and with The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research as our scientific partner. Hence, in the third edition of EYR, we searched for cross-institutional research collaborations that would benefit from combined use of central storage and compute facilities, grid infrastructure and high-end connectivity via lightpaths. One of the goals of the presentation is to share our experience with this approach and the best practices that resulted from the competition. Up to now we have supported more than 15 research groups requesting one or more (dynamic) lightpaths. From these use cases, we have learned which factors are important to the success of a lightpath project. We will present these lessons learned. Finally, we will call for international collaboration towards the scientific community, and open the discussion about ways to join forces.

The availability of state-of-the-art European e·Infrastructures to the research community is part of the Europe 2020 vision, the European Commission’s growth strategy for a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. The Networking infrastructure is a core building block of the European e·Infrastructures and thus is anticipated to majorly contribute to Europe’s Digital Agenda strategic priorities. One of the key challenges faced by e·Infrastructure providers though such as the National Research and Education Networks is to report the diversity and scope of their resources and their usage to funders and decision makers at national and European levels. The European e·Infrastructures Observatory can provide to the e·Infrastructures community a comprehensive monitoring and dissemination framework that will allow stakeholders to keep overall track of the development and prospects in e·Infrastructures for Europe and beyond, including especially a frame of reference for assessing over time Networking infrastructures towards other global regions of interest, and disseminating worldwide e·Infrastructures success stories of European-led and European-supported initiatives. Such a facility can be of great interest and value, as a yardstick tool for tracking and detecting trends and potentially initiating actions and initiatives or for informing when drafting new programmes for future developments of Networking e·Infrastructures and overall.

One of the prioritized aspects of the High-Performance Computing (HPC) services at University of Oslo, is to make the use of complex HPC resources accessible to end-users who do not have extensive HPC experience. Galaxy - an open, web-based platform for data intensive research - brings a solution to this problem. It is an example of a collaborative tool that combines different technologies, and allows administrators and end-users with different levels of IT expertise to work together. Galaxy allows non-expert users to execute HPC tasks by manipulating a Web interface responsible for handling of complex computational tasks. This feature of Galaxy makes it open, not only to researchers who traditionally possess extensive IT knowledge, but also to researchers from domains with recently emerging needs for computational resources (e.g. statistics in medical research or linguistics). The flexibility of Galaxy makes the collaboration between the end-users and administrators easier - installation, tuning and maintenance of resource access through a web-tool middleware layer is much simpler than administration of a low-level terminal-based system with direct user access. However, the most important "collaborative" feature of the Galaxy platform is that it allows the users to share workflows and intermediate/final results of the data processing at any stage of the computation. This sharing procedure is quick and entirely user-driven. Due to the web interface, Galaxy can easily become a front-end to large computational resource(s), like storage, grids, clouds, Nordic sharing, and services with sensitive research data. In this talk we will present our work on web-portals as an interface to advanced resources. We will explain how we are using the portable Galaxy framework to achieve our goals and why it was chosen, along with some of the challenges and future plans.

During 2011, several incidents significantly shook the confidence in Internet Certification Authorities and, consequently, in the global TLS trust infrastructure. We will have a look at what did (and what did not) happen to the CAs, what the attacks helped reveal about the TLS trust infrastructure, and what are some proposed ways out of the situation.

Growing number of IPv6 devices in the network would bring new security challenges. Are there any security improvements comparing to IPv4 or IPv6 brings some new security threads. IPv6 have been developed for more than 15 years so far and presentation tries to find the answer if IPv6 provides better security comparing to IPv4.

Cloud Security has received a lot of attention recently, both due to the complexity of cloud but also due to how Cloud services are being used. This has lead to insecure Cloud deployments, both within the Enterprise but also in Public Cloud offerings. This session will focus on the fundamental principles of security, how they can be applied to Cloud architectures in order to regain control and also on the tasks needed to ensure the security of Cloud Services

The Internet is more than 40 years old. There are more than 2 billion Internet users now, and passed the tipping point of 25%. We expect 5 billion users by 2020. It is about time to think about what kind of the global infrastructure the Internet should provide in the coming decades. The talk covers the future Internet research, which addresses fundamental issues on the Internet for the coming decades. Then, the talk covers what are happening on the Internet around the world, and the talk concludes what we may anticipate on the Internet toward the ecological Internet, which is to harmonize with the human society and the global environment.

Abstract for GEANT Green Best Practices • Description of the GEANT GN3-NA3 T5 activities looking at nine subject areas such as environmental policy, GHG audits and reports, green network management systems, Power Usage Efficiency (PUE), virtualisation, energy-aware traffic engineering, videoconferencing, distance working, Green Public Purchasing (GPP), green electricity, energy source choices or options, and disseminating green ICT in the Higher Education (HE) community. • Overview of GreenStar Network (GSN) and Mantychore collaboration using their experimental network environments to derive best practices and guidelines for building energy-efficient or green, data networks. • Overview of new programs such as GRNET Smart Metering in Schools using IPV6.

NRENs posess a massive high capacity and fault tolerant network infrastructure where routing and load balancing are controlled by the NREN itself. By utilizing the routing mechanisms to control reachability for end system instances, optimal service quality can be achieved. The talk focused on building blocks and functions for creating scalable highly available NREN cloud type of services and why we could do that.

University of Bergen (3500 staff, 15000 students) have started a double journey: 1. From a traditional, closed phone system to a unified communication system based on open standards and both open and closed source components. 2. From having a commercial partner run our phone system to using internal telecom, linux, and windows resources to run the system ourselves Several benefits from this journey are being harvested, including: 1. Lower costs and better control of costs. 2. Better service and higher service spectrum to students and staff The presentation will go into both the components of the solution and the process that has led to it. Components include: 1. Aastra MX-ONE Linux-based commercial phone exchange 2. Microsoft Lync and other Windows-based commercial software packages 3. Applications built on the open source Asterisk software running on Linux 4. Video conferencing rooms 5. SIP.

Data based on human subjects are a rising trend in current research, for example in life sciences, social studies, and medicine. This is creating a huge demand for infrastructure and research support services for sensitive research data, as existing resources are not capable, security-wise, legally or capacity-wise, to handle this type of data. To address this problem, the University of Oslo central IT-department (USIT), with support from two different projects funded by the Research Council of Norway, have started a project for establishing services for sensitive research data. The project will involve a broad range of institutions, including the national research network (UNINETT), The Data Inspectorate, The Norwegian Directorate of Health and Oslo University Hospital. The goal of the project is to provide a set of secure, legal and user-friendly services for researchers working on sensitive data, including health-data that demand the highest level of security. These services will enable researchers to focus work on their research material rather than building or maintaining computer infrastructure for sensitive data. The services will include, storage, data collection, computational resources for running analysis, archiving and a backup service. The Norwegian national infrastructure for research data, NorStore is one of the funding projects, and the implication is that the services will be provided for researchers nation-wide. The project will establish and put the services into production by the end of 2014, but a working solution with a subset of the complete set of services will be available earlier. In this talk we present the project and discuss aspects related to security, authentication mechanisms, and requirements from user communities, such as the need for sharing of data and collaborative tools within a secure context.

It’s time to start thinking about research networks as instruments for discovery, not infrastructures for service-delivery. In this talk, I’ll describe what’s at stake in the distinction. And I’ll explain how the culture and strategy of ESnet are influenced by its unusual institutional context: embedded in a US national laboratory, classified as a ‘user facility’, and located uphill from a famously-audacious university.

Presentation of tentative date and time for the next NORDUnet conference.