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In a world of rapidly evolving connectivity, services, and new innovative opportunities, we see an increasing number of these opportunities left hanging in the air as missing links are creating voids and ICT evolution is constrained by both local and global obstacles. How do we identify and breach these gaps in the chain to secure global integration and services.

Multidimensional database concepts such as cubes, dimensions with hierarchies, and measures have been a cornerstone of analytical business intelligence tools for decades. However, the standard data models and system implementations (OLAP) for multidimensional databases cannot handle “Big Multidimensional Data”, very large amounts of complex and highly dynamic multidimensional data that occur in a number of emerging domains such as energy, transport, logistics, as well as science. This talk will focus on how to manage Big Multidimensional Data, including modeling, algorithmic, implementation, as well as practical issues. The main application domain considered in the talk is energy data management. Energy data come in many forms, e.g., time series of energy consumption and production data, data about available energy flexibilities, price data, weather data, etc. Typically, most of these things are forecasted both at the long, medium, and short term, before they are finally measured and captured, a complex procedure which adds further challenges to the management. Especially, integrating large amounts of renewable energy like wind and solar into the energy production is challenging, since it requires to shift energy demand to where and when the supply is, rather than the other way round, an example of the intelligent energy management infrastructure known as the smart grid. The talk will present data management challenges and solutions from the MIRABEL and Totalflex projects, which develop a unique "data-driven" approach to the smart grid, allowing to predict, capture, aggregate, and utilize the inherent flexibilities in energy demand and supply, with a focus on flexible demand and renewable energy supply.

As new approaches like Software-Defined Networking (SDN) or Named-Data Networking (NDN) appear to challenge the current way of building and operating networks, cloud providers take the lead in network innovation and conservative telcos adopt the new three letter paradigms, this talk will explore the future network architectures from the R&E perspective. The talk will also feature some of the ESnet explorations and experimentations in each of these areas.

The Network Service Interface (NSI) by OGF is emerging as the standard inter-domain interface for BoD. The NSI Connection Service version 2.0 is being released by OGF NSI-WG bringing new features and significant updates to the previous version of the protocol. As the standard is being released, it is immediately followed by implementations provided by major contributors to the NSI protocol definition, like NordUnet, PSNC, AIST, etc. The latest demonstration of NSI took place at SC12 conference during which the GLIF Automated GOLE Pilot Project demonstrated the NSI architecture for global interdomain provisioning. However, it has emerged as extremely critical for NSI to step up from demonstrations, and work on a reference implementation that could ease the NSI adoption in production RENs. A new open call project within GN3plus – NSI-CONTEST – is working on the development of a NSI CSv2.0 Reference Implementation and Conformance Test Suite. The NSI-CONTEST architecture is based on a modular architecture that comprises two major building blocks: • A NSI Reference Implementation, i.e. the stack that implements the full NSI-CS v2.0 protocol state machine • The CTS Service, i.e. the core component that implements the logic of the testing suite that controls and launches test patterns and scenarios. The system implemented and delivered through NSI-CONTEST is conceived by design to run both as a standalone NSI testing platform, and as a NSI network testing service, openly accessible by the research community. The first reference implementation by NSI-CONTEST is expected in Q32014 and a full CTS functionality by Q12015. The availability of a stable reference implementation and test suite can surely help to expand the NSI adoption to larger user communities and can facilitate the NSI and BoD support in a wider range of network provisioning systems.

The common practice for optical network operators today is to deploy optical resources based on over-provisioning towards the maximum expected amount of traffic in the network. This is a safe strategy and it takes into account the currently static nature of the optical network design, where new wavelengths and new circuits are established based on a pre-defined dimensioning plan.However, because of the continuous increase in the overall traffic demand (estimated to be between 16% and 33% per year) as well as due to the more and more heterogeneous behavior of the incoming requests – the over-provisioning deployment strategy becomes less and less efficient. This is a challenging aspect especially in NREN environments where new and state of the art services are being proposed or requested (e.g. Photonic Services) and their requirements are often hard to be predicted. Moreover, in terms of energy consumption, significant savings can be obtained and accounted into OPEX (Operational Expenditure) by taking into account a more efficient usage of the opto-electronic resources (such as transponders or regenerators). There are more strategies proposed in the literature to enhance the energy consumption in core optical networks. One proposal is to define different operational states for the opto-electronic components – OFF, IDLE and ON – which correspond to different levels of energy consumption. Another solution is to use advanced transponder architectures (i.e. elastic or flexible transponders) which are able to tune the symbol-rate of an optical circuit and thus determine a variable consumption for the transponder. The goal of this study is to estimate the challenges and the possible OPEX savings that can be achieved by NRENs when implementing energy efficient strategies based on OFF/IDLE/ON states and elastic transponders in their core optical networks.

The video and network communication tools have become irreplaceable in the daily work and co-operation with the colleagues. The improvements in the quality, usability and reliability have made this change possible. In turn, the wide introduction of mobile devices has provided a terminal to every user. For example, the centralized Adobe Connect service has a very large user base in the Nordic countries. However, we haven't seen the peak usage yet - not in the Adobe Connect or in the use of the collaboration tools in general. The session is a panel discussion with representatives from each of the Nordic NRENs. The panelists will discuss the status of the current services and the initiatives for future development. The audience has a possibility to participate the discussion by asking questions from the panelists.

The vision of the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) is to facilitate development and operation of high-quality e-Infrastructure solutions in areas of joint Nordic interest. Our focus is on targeted computing and data services for Nordic research groups and generic services in collaboration with national e-Infrastructure provider organisations. Our operation involves collaboration between five countries at multiple levels, from policy-making to technical projects. The basic organisation, operation and business model of NeIC will be explained. Particular emphasis will be given to how collaboration is implemented in practise. In particular, the challenge of engaging with the wide spectrum of stakeholders in a constructive manner will be discussed. Examples of stakeholders are national e-Infrastructure provider organisations, research funding agencies, academic high-performance computing centres and user communities.

In Horizon2020 the European NREN collaboration takes on a new form and sets ambitious goals for the year 2020. The talk will explain more about the Framework Partnership Agreement (FPA) construction and the new strategy developed jointly by the European NRENs and their collaborative organisations.

Lambert will discuss the current trends in globalization of research and education and the growing impact it has on National Research and Education Networks. He will address the developing context in which Geant and other research and education networks must plan their futures. He will specifically reference how this impacts Geant 2020 and the national research and education networks in Europe. He will update conference attendees on the purpose and activities of the Global NREN CEO Forum and speak specifically to the critical global infrastructure and service initiatives the group has committed to use their resources to accelerate.

The presentation is about the research done in the ADIMUS (Adaptive Internet Multimedia Streaming) project funded by the NORDUnet-3 programme. This research formulates effective strategies for delivery of streaming content for mobile users in resource-limited networks. In the work, we take into account 1) the presence of a large of mobile devices operating simultaneously inside an area with overlapping coverage of several mobile networks; and 2) the ability of the mobile devices to exploit several network technologies and to be connected to different access points simultaneously. Taking into account the complexity of the whole system, we intended to design mechanisms operating in a decentralized manner with partial knowledge of the system. In this work, we considered the network selection for multiuser environments with possible multicast configurations. It allows the network to perform load balancing and increase the networks’ throughput. The novelty of the solutions is that the network selection is done in a decentralized manner with only limited information available to decision makers. The solutions are evaluated through multiple simulations. We show that these provide a substantial improvement in performance compared to earlier proposed solutions from the literature.

NREN providers and sites are vulnerable for many kinds of technical and operational risks but risk mitigation is often implemented ad hoc or in a vague manner. Perhaps the network providers, who have been pioneers in network and computer security, might have become somewhat arrogant in terms of ensuring security? For efficient and effective security, a systematic but yet agile approach is needed. International standards provide guidance to implement best information security practices on both technical level and in management. The most well known international standard for information security is ISO/IEC 27001. In this lightning talk, we will present how CSC, The Finnish IT Center for Science, has successfully implemented ISO 27001 Information Security Certification. Our presentation will cover how to design a layered management system, how to support continuous improvement and how to pass a certification audit. In the discussion we will reflect on the pros and cons of certifications, on how to implement compliance in both policies and operations, and on how to ensure required controls but still be agile and support usability.

Conventionally photograph, fingerprint, IRIS, DNA or hand geometry is used for establishing identity of a person in physical world, but they all need additional infrastructure for capturing and comparison of bio-metric parameter. Id and password based technique is the most popular method for user identification, but these password based schemes are not truly capable of ascertaining persons identity, since passwords are breakable and are also vulnerable to theft. One Time Password(OTP), Session Password, Transaction Password, Time Window Based Passwords etc. are some more techniques designed to enhance security of the systems and applications. All these techniques are inadequate to establish person’s identity in cyber space. The proposed technique is based on assimilation of CAPTCHA, OTP and a human provided and controlled function. The user is provided with OTP through a CAPTCHA and the user applies a function on the OTP, manipulating its digits/ characters and returns the ‘Cognitive OTP’ to the Authentication Server. CAPTCHA is a standard technique to ensure that a human is interpreting the contained information, OTP ensures randomization and application of a function by the user (person being identified) using his brain (neurons!) adds a bio-metric equivalent dimension, thus producing ‘Cognitive OTP’. The Authentication Server(AS) needs to know the human applied function before hand for the purpose of verification. The user will have the liberty to chose type of OTP (digits and / or characters) from AS and also for the function for manipulation of OTP to produce ‘Cognitive OTP’. Using number based input for the user controlled function may enhance possible options for manipulations, since mathematical jargons are possible with numbers. There are certain extensions to this novel technique to complete the logical flow for authenticated verification of a person in cyber space, which I shall be covering in the proposed talk.

Funet has organised bi-annual Customer Survey from year 2008 and year 2014 survey was made and analysed on last April. Well-organised customer survey is a great effort and after making it several times now, Funet might have some "best practises" to disseminate for whole community: the tools used, type of people involved, mistakes to avoid, different ways getting answers from customers... etc.

For 8 years running, UNINETT has offered its customers a network monitoring toolkit service, in the form of a server pre-loaded with various NMS-related software (in which NAV is a central component). Each server is deployed locally on a campus, and operated centrally from UNINETT. Annual workshops of tutorials and toolkit discussions have been held. The toolkit service has provided immense value to understaffed IT departments, and spawned a collaborative environment in which the software and services have been continually improved for the good of the Norwegian higher education community. This talk will relate some of UNINETT's experiences with delivering this service these past 8 years.

There has been a long tradition in the European higher education administrative IT sector to collaborate within and between countries. Sharing knowledge and experience is paramount to our ability to develop our operations. Many European countries have successfully answered questions such as: Has this been done before? How can we build on others' experiences? Unfortunately we are not able to answer these questions on a pan-european scale. EUNIS (European University Information Systems organisation) is now trying to fill this gap. Through the new initiative ERAI (EUNIS Research and Analysis Initiative), we want to expand on research and analysis done in each of the EUNIS member countries, leveraging and scaling it to a European level. We would also like to provide our own research and analysis, conducting surveys and case studies. By introducing this project we would like to engage the European Higher Education IT community to participate in the endeavour.

If your are responsible for security of your users' data you might be shaken by threats from Heartbleed and elsewhere… Our talk discusses the PSNC approach to make the Cloud a safer place for depositing your data. In the talk we present our NDS2’ secure data storage solution. We will show that it delivers data security and guarantee peace of mind even in untrusted environment thanks to strong user-side encryption and integrity control they implement. We will also show that security can be provided transparently, in an easy and efficient way. We will present a set of convenient user interfaces we developed including virtual drives, GUIs and synchronisation solution as well as mobile application.

Earlier this year SUNET launched eduid.se, an open Identity Provider aiming at letting any one get an Identity with high Assurans Level (up to AL2 + 2-factor), that can be used within higher education, including the start of the admission process

How WAYF messes with your federation metadata (without your consent) Keywords: interfederation, federation specific ARPs, Entity category support, federation operator responsability

An introduction of the 2 latest CBP documents written by UNINETT. Namely "Using Windows NPS with eduroam" and "NAT44 address translation"

Connecting private networks, that are dispersed over different regions and networks, normally requires a substantial amount of administration, coordination and configuration. Introducing MPLS forwarding between networks and domains, as a small complement to the current IP forwarding, allows you to create robust overlay networks between end nodes, without the need to involve administration in all the networks and domains that are between the end nodes. The design only requires the interconnection between the domains to be MPLS enabled and the BGP peering expanded with MPLS labels to advertise the end-points. This is standardized features supported on multiple vendors platforms allowing for many types of networks to participate. Any services that can use MPLS as transport can be enabled end to end. My presentation will show the technology and the steps to get it to work.

The R&E community has helped invent the concept of Software Defined Networking and has already begun to leverage SDN concepts in its production networks. Now as users from throughout the R&E ecosystem demand more integrated compute, storage and networking, we must tackle another level of network virtualization and compute/storage integration with our R&E networks. This talk will focus on Internet2's evolution of its "innovation platform" and how content, compute and storage capabilities are beginning to integrate with the SDN network capabilities.

UNINETT has for many years operated a large scale passive and active monitoring infrastructure. This infrastructure is used for things like measuring the quality of the network, monitoring multicast traffic, application recognition to categorize network traffic and security monitoring. Up until now we have used special hardware for capturing traffic to guarantee support for full packet rate speeds without any packet loss. The monitoring infrastructure is now being upgraded to handle 10Gbps speeds and this time the passive monitoring is done using commodity hardware and open source software. In this presentation we want to give a general overview of the monitoring infrastructure, show some performance numbers for the passive monitoring and present some lessons learned in getting it operational.

The standardization for the Network Services Interface (NSI) protocol framework was initiated by Open Grid Forum in 2008. This group has created the Connection Service (NSI CS) protocol open standard. Furthermore, working closely with the GLIF Automated GOLE testbed, interoperability between NSI service agents running on a multitude of networks, using heterogeneous middleware, in a global setting, has been demonstrated. With the evolution of NSI CS v2, demonstrations of control plane interoperability, such as at the 13th Global Lambda Grid Workshop and SC13 Conference, have been shown. Hence, the maturing of NSI CS service agents and supporting middleware has reached an important milestone. However, there is a gap between having an open standard and software implementations and having an actual multi-domain production-grade service. The talk will detail the experience of NORDUnet and SURFnet jointly deploying an interoperable NSI-based BoD service in their respective networks and on the network interconnect. The networks use different technologies for BoD transport, different network hardware, and different NSI service agent implementations. The talk will provide the background for the two implementations, and explain all needed components and steps in arriving at interworking services with clear expectations for users. The talk will highlight how the key questions of security, topology exchange and path-finding are handled in a multi-network setting. Further, the talk will explain the needed components of a comprehensive BoD architecture and the development efforts networks should expect to bridge the gap from a demonstration standards implementation to a deployed service. Finally, the talk will highlight the commitment of NORDUnet and SURFnet to deploying NSI-based services on their production networks, and how the joint effort described here is an enabler for larger efforts, eventually ensuring deployment across a wide range of networks globally.

The new v-scene interface for NRENs. Janet has long battled on the side of videoconferencing users against the forces of confusion, misinformation and obscure terminology. Our latest weapon is a new Videoconference Booking Interface known as “v-scene”. The new interface attempts to hide or remove most of the confusion found in scheduling conferences between multiple VC System Types. In this presentation Tim will demonstrate the new videoconferencing scheduling interface and describe the theories and processes used to achieve “videoconferencing without the confusion”. V-scene will also enable Janet to offer MCU scheduling as a cloud service. In addition to Janet, HEAnet and Belnet will be the first NRENs to use the service as a user interface to their MCU resources. This cloud scheduling approach enables NRENs own MCUs to be prioritised for their users, but also potentially allows access to a wider pool of MCU resources at times of high demand. Janet’s service is offered at no charge to most UK institutions, although with future flexibility and other NRENs requirements in mind, NRENs would be able to use the new interface to introduce charging models to their Organisations for the use of VC Services. The V-scene interface is due for launch in September 2014 Background - The Janet Videoconference Service. The Janet Videoconference Service is available to all members of the Janet Community. There are over 7000 registered videoconference systems and over 8000 users. The service manages approximately 3000 videoconferences per month via Janet’s centralised infrastructure. The existing automated booking service enables any user to book a videoconference. Users can schedule or launch a conference involving any of the service features, including recording and streaming, and add participants in any combination of interoperable videoconference standards.

Web-RTC offers browser-based online meeting capabilities without any plugins, based on a set of upcoming IETF and W3C standards. Web-RTC has all the hallmarks of a distruptive technology. Predictions are by 2016 a billion endpoints will support Web-RTC delivering the typical functionality we now need separate clients for: high quality audio and video conferencing, document sharing, etc. With the web as a delivery mechanism unlocking this functionality with new services is going to be trivial compared to today's situation. UNINETT is driving a systematic multi-year effort to get a coherent sector-wide and well-used real time communication infrastructure in place. We assume Web will play a significant part that infrastructure. During 2014 we investigate the technology, the market and (business)opportunities resulting in a WebRTC roadmap for the Norwegian HE&R sector which will drive and guide our future WebRTC efforts. This this talk will feature the preliminary results of our work. We expect to include thoughts on a roadmap for the Nordic service area and beyond. The talk will be preceded by a workshop planned on Monday 22 September. The big promise of WebRTC is truly ubiquitous high quality communication capabilities at a far lower price point than we ever had before: video conferencing at your fingertips. We expect many new services to pop up. This is likely to change the real time communication landscape in many ways and the higher education & research sector needs to prepare for that. We need to know what to do and act in a coordinated systematic way once the market is developed enough. We need to ensure our community and its core business (research & education) reaps the benefits fully and in a timely fashion. If not globally than at least in the Nordics. Noblesse oblige.

The NRENum.net Service is an end-user ENUM service run by TERENA and the participating NRENs (National Research and Education Networking organisations) primarily for academia. NRENum.net is considered as a complementary service and a valid alternative to the Golden ENUM tree. The domain "nrenum.net" is being populated in order to provide the infrastructure in DNS for storage of E.164 numbers. The NRENum.net Service includes the operation of the Tier-0 root DNS(s) and the delegation of county codes to NRENum.net Registries. Having gained partners from Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific, NRENum.net has grown to a global, production-grade, community service in recent years. As one of the key building blocks of global unified communications, it is TERENA's mission to coordinate and continuously enhance the service for the benefit of the entire research and education community in a sustainable manner.

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Gartner reported that smartphones, tablets and ultra-mobile notebooks sales would grow in double digits in 2013. Over the past year, Wi-Fi connectivity has doubtless become an essential network service on a par with the traditional cabled network. How to address this expansion and provide a high-quality service while rationalizing and protecting the investment? Encompassing 1500 Wi-Fi access points, 6000 daily users, and 500 buildings (from large scale conference rooms to industrial halls and underground caverns), the strategy for serving thousands of mobile users will be presented. With 802.11ac, 802.11ad, BOYD, hotspot 2.0, and eduroam, Wi-Fi technology and usage are constantly evolving - providing us with new challenges and opportunities. In this presentation, the impact and expectations around this technology - as well as the future development of the CERN Wi-Fi infrastructure - will be addressed.

Data security is not a single feature, but rather an increasingly important set of technologies used to safeguard private data sent across both public and private networks. The intelligent use of data protection technologies becomes increasingly necessary for organizations of all sizes. A layer 1 network encryption scheme enables network operators to transport data securely at full throughput, low latency and lowest cost. This lowest level encryption is directly integrated with the WDM transport equipment and optimized for data center interconnection applications requiring maximum data security on the WAN network. It provides a transparent wire-speed OTN container and uses the internationally recognized Advanced Encryption Standards (AES) algorithm plus a Dynamic Key Exchange which make this solution compliant to the most stringent regulatory requirements. Implemented on a set of 10G and 100G muxponder modules a complete set of protocols including Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand can be addressed.

Networks are being challenged by both the volume and unpredictability of traffic. With the growth in video content and communications, the volume of network bandwidth required is projected to grow by two orders of magnitude over the next decade. Due to the popularity of smart phones and tablets and the rise of networked machines such as surveillance cameras, sensors, and other “Internet of things” endpoints, the number of network-connected devices has surged to exceed the number of people in the world. In line with the ability to access any application and any data anywhere, users now expect the transport network to deliver, on demand, the required quality to insure the best experience. The presentation will discuss the evolution in transport network technologies that will transform the current networks into a flexible resources aligned with the flexibility of the compute and storage components in the datacenters, bringing scale, programmability and integration in previously mainly static networks. This includes advances in both the network infrastructure, with packet-optical transport platforms and photonics agility, and the control layer with targeted transport SDN applications.

During 2013 NORDUnet procured for a new optical transmission platform, and expanded their fibre footprint to include Amsterdam and London. The new network is NORDUnet’s answer to the NREN community’s demand for both high capacity and flexibility. It is served through a mix of 100G wavelengths and fast provisioned restorable 10G services at all core sites. The following main themes will be presented: The driving technologies behind this significant upgrade in capacity are new modulation formats that combined with a flexible allocation of the optical grid ensure that the network can go beyond the current 100G per channel limit. Concepts like network sharing and alien wavelengths form an integrated part of the design, allowing NORDUnet to establish diverse routes to all core sites without traversing paths already covered by other NRENs. The introduction of OTN is further coupled with an intelligent control plane that allows fast provisioning of the OTN core as well as automatic restoration in case of fibre breaks, which is the most frequent cause for service interruptions.

Professor Clayton Christensen from Harvard University claimed in his book Disrupting Class in 2008 that education as we know it was ripe for disruption. He predicted that online learning would disrupt the campus based education system. 2012 was named the year of MOOCs, where we saw an explosion of massive open online courses from the worlds leading universities. This trend with plattforms that distribute courses for universities have had an unprecedented growth. In the first quarter of 2014 there was total MOOC increase of 62% from 1369 to 2230, and the numbers are rising. What impact will this development have for higher education? How do small countries like Norway relate to this global development? What are the trends for higher education?

As a part of the eCampus programme UNINETT has establishet a set of shared services for lecture capture in Norway. For the higher education sector this means higher quality at a significantly lower price, and has resulted in a tremendous growth in recorded lectures in Norway. The talk will cover how UNINETT and the eCampus team has worked to accomplish this and also highlight what we have learned in the process.

The CIOs of the four largest universities in Norway share the opinion that the R&E-sector will have to solve their ICT-challenges in a collaborative manner in the future. They also understand the potential in cloud computing. And, they appreciate that a collaborative approach to cloud service utilization could be a catalyst for future collaboration on general ICT activities. Together with UNINETT's management the CIOs started an initiative to establish a community cloud which will act as a cloud service broker (aggregator and integrator) for the sector. They anticipate that this platform of collaboration will eventually evolve into a platform for delivery of all common ICT-services within the R&E-sector in Norway.This is quite ambitious for various reasons. Cloud Computing is in itself an evolving concept, and though it is hardly a hype anymore, it is constantly developing. It is important to keep pace to be able to harvest the promised benefits of Cloud Computing. Another aspect is that though the CIOs agree upon this initiative they are quite different in many ways. Finding common areas where they can envision actual benefits according to their own strategies is essential to succeed in the collaboration. There are also potential pitfalls regarding financing of this common cloud initiative, at least for now. The CIOs will have to pitch in, either with money or people in this startup period of the program. Of course that is not straightforward for the CIOs. In this presentation we will share how we propose to reach our ambition, and what we think will be necessary to succeed. We will share what we have done so far, the problems we have encountered and the problems and potential we see ahead.

Over 1,000 terabytes of data passes through GÉANT's IP backbone each day, much of it linked to the most advanced and far-reaching research being carried out today. However, the creation and sharing of research data is increasing exponentially, impacting research networks, high performance computing, grids and collaborative data infrastructures – collectively known as e-infrastructures. GÉANT’s recent major upgrade to terabit technology that is also SDN-ready ensures this vital support to all scientific disciplines (from high-energy physics and deep space research to those addressing societal challenges such as ageing populations, disease diagnosis and climate change) will continue well into the future – providing access to richer and ever more integrated service capabilities at higher capacities with ever shorter provisioning times and even higher levels of resilience. However we need to keep pushing forward and innovating to ensure Europe’s e-infrastructures remain at the forefront of technology for the benefit of all its citizens. This is the reason behind the GÉANT Innovation Programme, encompassing: • GÉANT’s first Open Call, a €3.3m initiative to boost innovation in networking technologies. Already 21 projects are working on a variety of topics and set to deliver results within the next 12 months. Many of these are in the important areas of SDN and AAI. • Joint research programmes into network architectures for Horizon 2020; technology testing for specific service applications; and identity and trust technologies for GÉANT services. • Testbeds to support the network research community with an environment in which to conduct technologically disruptive experiments. • Leading the development and implementation of open standards to ensure interoperability with services of other networking organisations around the world and the commercial ICT service sector. Alongside the Innovation Programme, work is ongoing to ensure alignment of GÉANT with the needs of the R&E community and the Future Internet and Cloud Service communities within the EC’s Horizon 2020 programme. With respect to the FI and Cloud communities, apart from there being a substantive and growing synergy between them, they also demonstrate a productive melting pot in which researchers and commercial players exist side-by-side and collaborate in many innovative ways – an effective instantiation of the public private partnership (PPP) paradigm. This paper will outline recent transformative developments in the GÉANT network, and the continuing work by many to bring together Europe’s NRENs along with the other e-infrastructures and the Future Internet and Cloud communities towards the common goal of realising a competitive and innovative Europe that lasts well into the future. The GÉANT project is a collaboration between 41 partners: 38 European NRENs, DANTE, TERENA and NORDUnet.

Researchers around the world need and benefit from international collaborations on projects ranging from the humanities to the physical sciences. Many of these projects produce big data, which then needs to travel across continents to collaborators. To enable these collaborations, five national research and education networks (NRENs), lead by SURFnet, ESnet, Funet, Internet2 and Janet, joined together in 2013 to proactively find researchers who needed to connect and share data-intensive research around the world. Called Enlighten Your Research Global (EYR-Global). This program’s goal is to accelerate research and discovery for program applicants in any research domain and in any country. In addition, the NRENs are offering expert networking help to researchers so they can efficiently use the high-performance networks to meet their research needs. At the Supercomputing’14 conference in Denver, four projects were awarded: - International Networking for Climate - Achieving Multidisciplinary High-throughput, Quantitative Behavior Analysis with Advanced Computing and Networking Tools - An Advanced Distributed Computing Approach to High-Resolution Climate Modeling - Cross-site VM Operation These proposals span a wide array of research domains, including two global climate projects, a biophysics and neuroscience project on how the nervous system instigates behavior, and computer science project that enables the analysis of massive bioinformatics datasets. In collaboration with affiliate partners Dante, DFN and AARnet, the EYR partner NRENs will provide and develop high-quality network services for all higher education and research institutions in their respective countries. In this session we will report about the program, how it was organized, and how the network-related outreach worked. Furthermore, we will report about our experience with the consultation of the participating research project and about the progress of the implementation of the requested e-infrastructure.

When building applications utilizing special-purpose networking you need to bring the network into place all the way to the endpoints of your application. To have this set up by network operators from different domains can be a burden and completely disregard the user. Novel services like Bandwidth-on-Demand (BoD) and Multi Domain VPN (both GÉANT services), do address the multi domain aspect from campus edge to campus edge. Still a circuit delivered by e.g. BoD has to be handled in the local environment at campus and exposes limited management functionalities to requesting users. Doing this in a user demanded way will be an enhancement and will normalize the way users request networks services as such. It seems worthwhile studying a mechanism for organized provisioning of network at campus in both ends of the circuit. Such work is being done in the GÉANT3 plus Technology Testing effort (JRA2 Task 2). This work aim for establishing a general service on Network-as-a-Service. The service will include a framework for delegating local networking resources to abroad users in a controlled way. Programmability, virtualization, slicing and aggregation of resources are among the concepts. The service will allow automation within network provisioning and thereby enabling new service innovations and productivity improvements. The talk will address varied user scenarios including large data transfers over Bandwidth-on-Demand. Key words: NaaS, VPN, Bandwidth-on-Demand, virtualization, programmability, dynamic circuits, resource delegation, multi-tenancy

The last 5-10 years we have seen a dramatic increase in use and demand of wireless access in the Campus environment. New technologies like 802.11ac and new types of devices have changed the way we access the network. How did we get here and what's ahead? How to keep up with constant expansion and increasing demand? When does it make sense to rely solely on wireless access? The practical implications on campuses are quite visible. The exhaustion of the IPv4 addresses suggests that IPv6 should be deployed in the wireless access networks as well. Recent results from the field are introduced in this presentation. Best practices and guidelines based on experiences on HD deployment and 802.11ac are shared.

SURFnet has developed the SURF Green ICT Maturity Model (SGIMM). Using this maturity model higher education institutions and NRENs are able to do a self-assessment on Green ICT. This should enable positive gains in efficiency using ICT equipment as well as using the same ICT resources to lower environmental impacts of other processes. An obvious example of the latter is a videoconferencing service, which does increase the footprint of ICT, but has a much higher effect through reducing travelling. The SGIMM is designed to be practical and easy to use. Higher education institutions can use it by letting a multi competency panel of users score roughly twenty Green ICT attributes on maturity and discuss these scores in a joint evaluation session. With the scores and the discussion, next steps to increase maturity and performance for the organization are easily identified. While the end results of a maturity scan are an analysis of the status quo of the organization, they should facilitate an action plan for improvements. After executing these actions, another maturity scan can be carried out to re-evaluate the organization and measure the effects of the actions taken in the period between. This creates a continuous cycle of improvement. An important aspect of using the SGIMM as a benchmark is that it creates a common language amongst higher education institutions. While scores cannot be quantitatively compared, it is possible to identify well-scoring institutions on specific attributes and let them share their experiences as best practices. Now that SURFnet have translated the SGIMM to English, next steps are to promote international use of the model and develop and disseminate it further through the GEANT Environmental Team. In this presentation, we will demonstrate the SGIMM and the first experiences with it in the Dutch higher education community.

Norwegian universities are moving rapidly into digital assessments for students. The transition from pen and paper for assessing knowledge to digital assessments requires work on identity, networks, reliability, scaling and security. What are the impacts for infrastructure? How do we identify the shared infrastructural challenges, while leaving the assessment to educators? Ingrid is going to present work from the eCampus program, addressing shared challenges and provide an update from ongoing work in the area of digital assessments.

University of Southern Denmark decided to start a project to implement digital assessment in May 2010. By the exam term of January 2014 the formal goal of the implementation project – all written exams should be digital – was reached. Paper is no longer used at exams, and the students handed in a total of 75.000 digital assignments in 2013. According to other goal of the project, we have been partially successful by having: • A conscious approach to assessment and ongoing discussions has brought us a long way in increasing validity and reliability. • A high acceptability among students. • Automation of workflow and students bringing their own computer (BYOD). In this presentation you will hear about our challenges, our solutions and the process In this presentation you will hear about our challenges, our process and solutions

Previously a staple of formal computer education, nowadays campus computer rooms are beginning to collect dust. Not only do most students bring their own laptop or tablet to school but they have begun expecting computers to replace the traditional pencil-and-paper exam format. In this talk, I will give an overview how this problem was solved at Reykjavik University in Iceland where we developed a Linux-based USB bootable exam system for our students’ laptops. In particular, I will also discuss a variety of problems that came up during the process and how they were resolved.

Few countries have a National Strategy on Data Management. With the Danish e-Infrastructure Cooperation (DeIC) as facilitator, as of 2014 Denmark is one of them. Consensus as to needed joint action at the national level has been obtained among universities, national libraries and archives. This talk will cover the rational of and background for the initiative, its key challenges and the expected process onwards of creating joint ownership among the stakeholders of addressing the need to better manage research data.

In recent years, the amount of research data generated has increased exponentially. So there has been an increasing demand of getting this data to work by storing and processing it in a horizontally scalable way. At UNINETT, we have large amount of data coming from different sources e.g. Netflow, System logs. To process such an amount of data, we require systems which can store data at high speed as well as offers capability to analyze incoming data. The system should be able to support real time analytics as well as batch analytics on historical data. Considering such requirements, we are testing systems which can store and process data in a distributed and scalable manner. Currently we are looking into system such as Hadoop, Spark, Hbase and Graph processing system to store and process Netflow data. This talk will describe our experiences from such systems and using them to analyze Netflow data. The experiences will include advantages and drawbacks of different systems, their performance etc.

Preserving cultural heritage in digital form creates large amounts of data, especially in the case of audio-visual material. This presentation describes some challenges and solutions presented by the large data volumes, highlighted through two example services which CSC provides for the National Audio-Visual Institute of Finland (KAVI).   The Radio- and TV Archive stores the entire program stream of essential Finnish channels and shorter samples of other channels which translates to nearly 200 000 hours of programmes yearly. The Digivarasto digital storage service handles digital storage needs as part of KAVI's responsibility for preserving Finnish moving picture heritage where the digitization of a single 90 minute feature film creates 29 terabytes of archive material. Combined, the storage needs of these two services enter the petabyte scale in 2014.   Storing, managing and disseminating large amounts of data presents challenges for digital preservation, infrastructure performance and scalability, continuous service development and cooperation with multiple partners.

Traditional security abstractions rely on the authenticated identity of subjects in the system. These abstractions have been extended for use on the Internet through trusted computing platforms and trusted third parties, in particular Public Key Infrastructures (PKI). Such abstractions, however, are only appropriate in contexts where verification of identity has some restricting behaviour on subjects, e.g. where malicious subjects may be ostracised or where legal frameworks can enforce good behaviour. In a global context, such as the Internet, most subjects will be virtually anonymous and identity only has limited effect on the behaviour of subjects. This problem is exacerbated by the availability of multiple cheap identities on the Internet. This talk will examine alternatives to identity based security abstractions. In particular, abstractions that may provide some form of security in the absence of a global authority to enforce good behaviour, resolve conflicts and punish misbehaviour. Such abstractions are useful when strangers need to collaborate across national or organisational boundaries and when users need to build sufficient trust in a service provider to rely on their service.

Managing large scale centralized cloud services requires the operators to automate as much of the infrastructure as possible to ensure that the solution is competitive. As all consumers of resources must be considered hostile to preserve the privacy of other consumers, security requirements are high. Tools as data-in-transit and data-at-rest encryption, tenant isolation and least privilege are vital to provide secure cloud services to fulfill customers' requirements. Technologies covered: Type Enforcement, TLSv1-1.2, ASLR, seccomp, SED storage, automated deployement of TE-policies, mandatory host firewall rules, hardening, auditing, backup & archive security.

Recent revelations have called into question the integrity of some of the implementations of basic cryptographic functions and devices used to secure communications on the Internet. There are serious questions about algorithms and about implementations of those algorithms in software and particularly hardware. The cryptech project is building an open & free hardware crypto engine that can be built by anyone from public hardware specifications and open-source firmware.

In 2013 NORDUnet tendered for a cloud storage service for the Nordic NRENs and the Nordic universities, one year later the Box.com-service is being rolled out to the universities in Norway, Finland and Denmark. Sweden started a year earlier and have been offering the service to the Swedish universities since fall 2012. What lessons have we learned along the way? What kind of obstacles did we face before we had services up and running? What makes NRENs and universities different from other business? What will these kinds of services demand from the NRENs and the universities? Why we should work together as NRENs

The research and education community is increasingly “cutting the cord” and research and education users are rapidly adopting mobile devices and a “nomadic” work style, both on and off campus. They want to be able to go online anytime and anyplace. However, the current mobile services (3GP; 3G and 4G services) supplied by commercial providers in many countries do not offer sufficient value: subscription costs are too high, data bundles (i.e. the data traffic permitted) are too low, and the mobile services are not connected to the research and education IT infrastructure. This limited and fragmented experience impedes the research and education community in their work. Sweden is, through SUNET, collaborating in an international project to make mobile data consumption affordable for students and staff of higher education institutions in four countries (Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden). These discounted smartphone and data-only services are expected to become available in Q1 2015. During this presentation Michel Wets (project leader) will present on the procurement process and Fredrik Persson Jonhed (SUNET) will focus on the current offers on the Swedish mobile market and the added value SUNET expects to gain in this process and a brief list of expected marketing efforts promoting these services.

2014 saw the availability of the first Optical transmission network equipment and services European wide framework agreement for the NREN community, known as Project PRISM. Working with NORDUnet as the first user of the framework a competitive dialogue was carried out in the second half of 2013. This talk will explain the legislative basis for the PRISM procurement; framework agreements and the use of centralised purchasing bodies, but will also touch upon commonly associated principles e.g. Teckal. It will close by looking at what has been learnt from Project PRISM – current national interpretations of EC procurement directives and what they may be in the future and how to work within these rules to get the best deal for commercial services.

On 2 March 2004 the European Space Agency’s ambitious mission Rosetta was launched to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August 2014 and place the Lander Philae on its surface three months later. Since August 6 the satellite is flying around the comet, taking many high resolution images, analyzing the comet surface with remote sensing instruments and measuring the dust and plasma environment of the comet. Our institute contributed hardware and software to five different instruments on board the orbiter and the Lander and additionally the Lander’s mass memory as part of the Lander control system. The presentation will cover some details of these instruments, the mission and what we have learned so far. For operation planning and data analysis supporting information from other spacecrafts and ground telescopes have to be utilized. During the past years the Virtual Observatory approach of the astronomy community has been adapted to solar system research. Using the tools developed in the EU-FP7 projects Europlanet and IMPEx it is now possible to access automatically data from space assets stored in ESA, NASA or JAXA data archives and combine them with model simulations run in various institutes in Europe. This is made possible by the implementation of common access protocols, which allow applications to query archives, select, fetch and reformat data on the fly and merge them to compatible data products without detailed knowledge of the original archives, calibration or the diverse data formats. Examples will be shown in the presentation. For details see the web pages http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/ , FMI’s Rosetta web page http://space.fmi.fi/rosetta/ , http://www.europlanet-ri.eu/ or the related data network site http://europlanet.fmi.fi/ and http://impex-fp7.oeaw.ac.at/

Vestas Wind Systems A/S has the most powerful computer in Denmark and on it they have petabytes of simulation and sensor data. Why does a wind company invest in computers and data? What is possible with such a computer and how do they do it? These are some of the questions Anders Rhod Gregersen, Chief Specialist and architect behind the Firestorm Supercomputer at Vestas, will address.

Open Source technologies, such as CloudStack and OpenStack are enabling new cutting edge solutions in cloud infrastructure. These technologies can be built into an organisation’s services and software offerings to provide competitive differentiation. The key technologies are Cloud IaaS software stacks like CloudStack and OpenStack, and storage solutions like Ceph. The key to delivering these solutions effectively is to glue these components together with automation and DevOps tools, like Chef. For the software development process, new innovative solutions such as Docker and Vagrant are accelerating the speed on which these solutions can be developed and delivered to customers. This presentation will demonstrate how GreenQloud is using Open Source technologies in both public and private cloud infrastructures, using case study examples of how we’re working with SURFnet, GÉANT and VUMC. We’ll also outline the benefits of both public and private cloud models. This will include the many advantages the public cloud offers over the private virtualized environment, such as a self-service interface, API access, and ease-of-use. We’ll demonstrate why hybrid is the best current solution for mixed workloads and compliance. This will include examples of how CIOs and CTOs can prepare for a hybrid cloud future in a manner that aligns with sustainability strategies and minimizes the industry’s CO2 footprint.

Higher education and research institutions are now in the process of migrating their services into the ‘cloud’. For some of the cloud cases the regular Internet connection is sufficient, e.g. for remote collaboration or personal storage for students. In other cases, like backup-on-demand services, virtual machines in the cloud or Unified Communications an institute needs a connection with the characteristics of a lightpath to ensure service levels or logical separation from the Internet. Many R&E networks do not allow commercial vendors to connect to their networks or have such complicated policies due to which they become less interesting for CSPs. Therefore we present a new model on how CSPs can be connected to the R&E community. More than ten years ago the first Open Lightpath Exchange (OLE) was initiated having the goal to facilitate international lightpath connectivity for the R&E community. The OLE allows any party to connect and does not have limitations on the possible cross connects, e.g. no policy on interconnecting within the exchange is in place, except for the fact that it is fully open. Cross-connects inside the OLE are made on layer 2 or below and bring a fully transparent service to its requesters. Nowadays a major part of the world can be reached with lightpaths via OLEs and their connectors. OLEs used to facilitate research traffic only, but their openness allows for connecting commercial entities as well. The need of the R&E community to use cloud services with lightpath characteristics assigns a new role to the OLEs: a marketplace via which service provides can offer their services to other members of the exchange, e.g. the NREN, its institutions and their users.

In 2012, AARNet embarked on a project to build a cloud based storage system using solely open source components. Distributed file-systems had been around for a while, and the edge cases where they didn't suit were few and far between. Master-Master Databases were known to be painful over high latency internet links, but with AARNet owning the backbone links in use, there were technical solutions to ease this pain. 18 months on, the deployment team is now much, much, wiser. Little did the engineering team know, but these perceptions, plus a lot more, would be challenged with every choice of technology. From grumpy file systems to latency-triggering replication wars, every bug report seemed to find more and more assumptions that had been made on the eventual use of each particular building block by its development team. With each discovery of a limitation, the deploying engineers found themselves thinking further and further out of the box to find a solution. More and more products came into the testing system, including Gluster, Ceph, XtreemFS, and even a multi?master BitTorrent based replication system, in an attempt to find 'The One That Would Work'. Come along on a tour through what should have been a simple-to-deploy research facilitation tool that turned into something that consumed engineers, open source projects and waking hours in ever increasing amounts.

More and more individuals have information on online services. The norm so far has been that that such information is public, open to anyone to view/use. Eventually this has to change, people will start realizing that public access to all publish information is not in the individuals best interest. Information that once was thought just fun to publish might a couple of years down the line have a negative impact on the future of a person. Therefore individuals must be able to control who (other persons as well as other services) can do what with what. And to do this in a standardized way that many, if not all, services can support. To that end a working group was created a number of years ago by the Kantara Initiative (http://kantarainitiative.org) to try to: ”develop a set of draft specifications that enable an individual to control the authorization of data sharing and service access made between online services on the individual's behalf, and to facilitate the development of interoperable implementation of these specifications by others.” The name of the working group is User-Managed Access (UMA). In this talk I will present a couple of proof-of-concept implementations that I have been working on: - Allowing individuals to control the attribute release policy of a SAML2 Identity Provider. - Allowing individuals to control the access to JSON resources in a simple web server adhering to Paul Bryant’s Internet draftand possibly, dependent on progress. - UMAfying the Health IT Record Location Service (Data Aggregation) use case.

UNINETT is extending its WebSSO service with a complete ecosystem for advanced services for Higher Education and Research. A working prototype is already operational providing most of the functionality, and work is in progress of demonstrating real-life use cases. Self-service is in the core of Feide Connect. Authentication is now built on top of OAuth 2.0, and provides a easier path to integration. New functionality includes supporting native mobile applications, long-term sessions as well as innovative concepts like OAuth auto-configure and out of the box cross-federation. Similar to how providers such as Google, Facebook and Twitter builds eco-systems around the social graphs, UNINETT is working on building an eco-system around the educational context of users. To this, a base layer built around identity and educational groups and roles is fundamental. We believe in a large variety of services available to end users, giving them the option to select the best of breed tools. We put our efforts into providing a seamless and user-friendly experience across these services extending authentication with features like Aggregated Activity streams and Federated Widgets. Feide Connect is promoting a service architecture that is highly scalable, where data is fetched via APIs when needed, and not provisioned in advance. To encourage even better services in the future, APIs and data access is crucial. Feide Connect is encouraging institutions to offer Open Data. Open Data typically involves data that is publicly available, but Feide Connect would like users to take control over their personal data as well, exposing data for third party services. To help institutions cope with the complexity of self-service registration, authentication of clients and users and sophisticated authorization work flow, Feide Connect is offering API Authorization as a Service.

As scientific and campus collaborations have discovered, identity management is as important for a virtual organization as it is for a "brick and mortar" institution. Over the past several years, the COmanage project, funded by the US National Science Foundation and Internet2, has developed a solution for VOs to easily handle their identity management needs. Layering VO attributes on top of federated identity, COmanage provides customizable enrollment workflows, self service attribute management, and identity lifecycle support via an easy to use, internationalizable interface. COmanage integrates with common identity management components such as Shibboleth, LDAP, and Grouper to facilitate access management, and can be integrated with OpenConext, the open source collaboration platform created by SURFnet. COmanage is now in production at LIGO, a large international scientific collaboration, and is designed to run as part of a VO's infrastructure or as a hosted service. This session will discuss how COmanage works and how it might be of use in your organization.