Megaconference Jr., now in its fifth year, is a project designed to
give students in elementary and secondary schools around the world the
opportunity to communicate, collaborate and contribute to each other's
learning in real time, using advanced multi-point video conferencing
technology. Presenters design and conduct videoconference-based
presentations and activities focused on both academic and cultural
issues. Participants are able to address questions to presenters and to
collaborate with geographically diverse peers in collaborative learning
activities, thus building international cultural awareness.
Scots College (NSW) will be presenting and joining their peers from across the globe in this twelve hour video conference. Australian participants will be active from around 8:00am on Friday 22nd and can connect for viewing participation with the conference details below:
- AARNet SD MCU: 138.44.1.134
- Conference ID: 61262112646 (from main menu, or dialed through peered gatekeeper)
- AARNet 'Free Love' Gatekeeper: 203.22.212.245
Looking forward to seeing you there!
APAN 25 was hosted by Internet2/University of Hawaii in January 2007, in Hawaii. Photos from the conference are mainly from the HDTV and APAN Middleware WG sessions, these can be found here.
Here are some brief notes from the
conference.
The future Network Architectures session explored dedicated
circuits for research use with three examples shown,
- GENI a robust
facility with a federation focus.
- AKARI a new project examining new
- network
architectures (funded to 2011) and principles based for quality, reliable
networking and future diversity.
- FEDERICA a
European infrastructure project that aims to create an e-infrastructure
for internet research to pave the way for Geant3 by employing a mesh of 1
Gbps MPLS GigE circuits from NRENs and GEANT2 for virtual e2e facilities.
CANARIE presented their zero carbon strategy for research test
beds by procuring more efficient network virtualization equipment and by deploying
new data centres at remote renewable energy sites.
A GLIF talk was given on its lambda facility for researchers
to do e-science collaboration work on a global scale over an optical network. GLIF are broadening its scope to other
science areas and for K-20 education.
GLIF recognises that researchers want high capacity Quality of Service, they
believe that hybrid networks using IP and Lambda networking is key. A GLIF Technical work group has developed a
centralised database of technical information and best practice for hybrid
networking, fault resolutions for GOLEs (GLIF Open Lightpath Exchange). A GOLE comprising of equipment for
termination and switching of lambdas, there's also an open connection
policy. An example is
"NetherLight".
The HDTV session discussed high resolution video. The results of work completed on positioning
4K resolution images stated that uncompressed images and Low latency were
important to minimize delay and to ensure the highest quality broadcast. Olympus
cameras (Octavision) were used; these are currently only available for
lease. Equipment used included i-visto
gateway (uncompressed HDTV over IP) and 10g NIC card (supports 3 protocols and
traffic time stamping with GPS) and i-Visto eXmedia server video server for up
to 16 uncompressed HD streams. A live TV
broadcast trial was done between Boston and Osaka; there was a 90ms
IP packet delay, and a 105ms delay on HD-DSI to HD-SDI due to 15ms i-Visto IP
encapsulation and de-capsulation.
The Australian
National University
presented on Digital Video. Their
development work was based on off the shelf products to integrate content and services
together. They have upgraded satellite feeds on campus to digital, with 6
satellite dishes capturing content using Ether DVB equipment to stream content
onto multicast. Reticulation of content
is restricted to on campus due to Australian copyright issues. Amino equipment is in use for set top boxes,
whilst VideoLAN is used to deliver streaming to the desktop. A web based channel guide within VideoLAN
allows users at ANU to access radio and television channels easily. A VVR (Video recording and archiving
broadcast TV) is being developed; it also supports the generation of reports to
comply with screen rights Australia
(an organisation that regulates copyright).
The ANU is also involved in podcast production based on leopard as part
of a collaborative effort with Berkeley. The objective of this work is to provide a
customizable easy to use service for staff and students.
GIST in Korea
has made improvements in HD streaming over wireless (802.11a) networks. Wireless
networks have limited bandwidth, signal interference and high burst rates. A network-adaptive wireless media delivery
framework has been created to reduce the frequency of picture freezes to a
minimum. Other standards like 802.11e (QoS in WLANs) and next generation WLAN
802.11n are on the way and will also help improve HD streaming over WLANs in
the future. This work is at the border between bleeding edge to leading edge.
ResearchChannel (RC) has a HDTV channel and has been working
to integrate it with the OptiPortal.
Demonstrations at the Annual RC meeting in Oct 2007 with AARNet's were of
an impressive high quality. RC also has 14
hours of content by multicast/unicast feed.
There is a standard definition satellite feed and a Live HD 1080i HD at
233.0.73.26 (MPEG2 (20 Mbps). There a
VOD service for oceanographic HD video which will become part of Research1, a new
collaboration portal. Future work will
be based on either 10 Gbit/s network cards or an infiniband solution to deliver
HD content to the network. RC are
working on iHDTV - HD video conferencing on uncompressed HD over IP with data
rates up to 1.5 Gbps, with support for two displays - a Brady bunch of all
participants with second one as full screen for the primary speaker both over multicast. RC are currently looking at rendering video
to the desktop.
The e-Science session yielded two talks on Research1 and
NorStore. Research1 is an outlet for researchers based on an easy toolkit to
create a project space for video, pictures, text with social networking tools
for collaboration and support for raw video assets including HD. Its “You-Tube” for researchers with support
for grid applications and raw video support.
The Research1 application was demonstrated and a beta will be released
for feedback within a few weeks. Next
steps are to simplify access and sharing with existing portals, existing
platform suites and existing communities such as COmanage, GridShib, VO. The ResearchChannel team are also looking at
integration to computational and data grids for visualization, with video
conferencing, and with PDA services.
NorStore is a Norwegian Storage solution that was funded to
collect e-research data, to separate long term storage from High Performance Computing
facilities, and to have a space for strategy, policy and practice for creation,
management and data curation. In 2007, Norway
conducted a survey for requirements to build a storage solution with
sustainable infrastructure for the curation, preservation and curation of
data. This is being achieved by
operating equipment, research support; by promoting standards/best practice,
and providing easy, secure and transparent access to end users. The infrastructure must extract further
meaning from the masses of data stored and deal with non-technical issues of
security, privacy, ownership, provenance, authenticity and integrity. Access by
researchers to storage is determined by National Research Council of Norway.
There are challenges in constructing a distributed infrastructure that has
heterogeneous infrastructure, data and usage.
The initial deployment uses 2 storage elements of 600TB each via a tape
robot with core services of backups, mirrors, archives. The challenge is to drive take up and use in
the research community.
The Middleware session had a variety of talks covering
eduroam, shibboleth and PKI topics.
Jan Meier (UNINETT) presented on TERENA’s Community SSL/TLS service. Roll out
took longer than expected but saved a lot of money. The service was so compelling that policy
issues disappeared to one RA policy for all participants. This model may be a way forward for the APAN
region.
Ken Klingenstein (Internet2) presented on managing the core
business of improving effective collaboration performance. Two models exist today
for middleware, there’s federated model (Shibboleth) and peer-to-peer identities
model (OpenID), both are growing and are starting to combine. Today, the focus is on attributes, not identities,
there are lots of policy issues. The Trend is towards user and collaborative ID
not tool based identity. COManage uses
Shibboleth, Grouper, Signet and applied to applications. It is similar to
IAMSUITE developed by MAMS in Australia. COManage is in early development and is
expected to pave the way towards a personalized secure console of applications
and content. Internet2 are looking for
people to play with COManage.
Licia Florio (TERENA) covered Identity Federations in Europe. Eduroam
was the first “federation” in Europe;
requirements grew beyond network access to application access. Europe has
many federations (Shibboleth, PAPI, A-Select, Sun Fed. mgr, all recognize SAML
and converging to SAML2.0). eduGAIN is a
repository for metadata for federation communications/peering (a pilot
service), DAMe is about eduroam/shibboleth integration by adding authorization
credentials for finer grain access to resources, looking at SAML signed tokens
for user info to apply for resources via eduGAIN, its in development. TERENA are looking at OpenID as an extension
to national federations for greater application support.
CARSI (China)
are developing Federated Identity and Resource Sharing over CERNET. Infrastructure is being developed using
Shibboleth to access resources, with a federation provider registry and a
virtual resource directory to discover shibboleth protected web
applications. CARSI online services
include Blackboard, content mgt systems, network mgt systems, campus IP
gateways and PKU exquisite courses; they are looking at video conferencing and
library resources. Currently wireless
access is via a web portal and could be a good federation candidate.
The Japanese UPKI project are optimizing their RA service
and customizing it for local campuses.
Start-Pack creates a shared RA system for authentication to services
such as wireless. They are also
examining Shibboleth with PKI infrastructure to broaden access to a wider range
of resources. A test bed will start tests with a small number of service
provider services. NII (Japan) are
using UPKI via SINET for administrators and end users to use middleware for
access to virtual organisations and resources.
Tohoku University is introducing eduroam to Japan,
guest access to visited institution IP addresses is not acceptable and policies
restrict use by guests. These issues are
being resolved by secure tunnels to home institution as an alternative to VPN
only policy. It relies on a proxy VPN
connection to a home institution. There
is also work at Kyoto
University to extend attribute
exchange in Shibboleth to protect privacy using true/false to answer thus
confirming the condition without releasing privacy information unnecessarily.