Friday, 19 October 2007 Entries

The main highlights from the event were that the APAN community in conjunction with other networks around the world created an e-VLBI view of the southern hemisphere (More info).  and that live DVTS video feeds enabled surgeons at the eight sites to share valuable insights about their surgical experiences (More info)

William Chang (NSF) gave a keynote on “new frontiers in Science” from Pacific Rim Cyber Environment and Virtual Organisations.  William confirmed that the highest % of R&D to GDP was in the Asia Pacific region.

Internet2 presented an update on their activities. New infrastructure has a dedicated fibre pair on Level3, it’s operated by I2 NOC, and 10 waves have been lit.  A Dynamic Circuit network has been provisioned on top of the I2 network to support dedicated circuits can be switched on for 50 Mb/s to 10 Gbit/s for up to 2 weeks.  Dynamic circuit networking is still being figured out in an international context to peer the control plane.

An APAN Network Security workshop covered URL filtering systems at Kasetsart University (to protect against phising).  Their proposed solution handled 268 million URLs using a system with 8 Gb memory to manage requests based on an average search time of 350 milliseconds.    A test bed is being developed to scale the filter to accommodate 10 Gbps. 

APAN-JP NOC are using grey listing to block spam where unrecognized senders emails are temporarily rejected, with conditions based on sender IP address and envelope sender and receipt addresses.  

The APAN Agriculture/Sensor Networks session covered details on a national agricultural research centre that has been created to address biomass fuels for transportation; the presentation concluded that biomass was the most available source for fuel.  Another project was looking at developing a highly efficient waste cooking oil refinery plant using portable energy stations in non-electric areas to deliver carbon neutral solutions using biomass fuels.  Production costs were 0.4 Euros per litre excluding personnel and material costs.  The process was known as STING and is being developed on a larger scale. This session also showed how China’s nature reserves in China (2349 reserves of 880Km squares of land) have little or no monitoring at all.  Wireless sensor networks are being deployed to monitor in real time (a) environmental protection, (b) assess the growth procedure of rare plants and trees and (c) activities of endangered animals. One such reserve is Hupingshan national nature reserve, designed to protect and monitor endangered species. 

The APAN Digital Archives Session covered “The Silk Road” with presentations on the use of technologies to accurately map the ancient silk road trading route.  The Cambodian LARP project is studying ancient roads, modern roads and cultures that have disappeared between Angkor to Phimai because this was an important ancient road in Asia.  The project looked at ancient texts, old maps, aerial photos, with archeological remains archived. Many of the ruins contain carvings that help explain ancient daily life. A database of ancient information is contributing to a better understanding of human works, it is being extended to local schools.  The Living Angkor road project is a multi disciplinary project collating local ancient knowledge. 

The APAN SIP Working Group held a number of presentations from Sri-Lanka, Thailand Taiwan, China and Malaysia.  This group will be working on SIP peering to connect SIP between countries/networks, NRenum.net was also mentioned as a possible place for NRENs to peer enum trees.

The APAN Middleware Working Group held presentations from Australia, Europe, China and Japan.  The EU have a range of initiatives including next generation eduroam type projects (edugain, DAME projects) where work is underway to create a single sign on federated solution that can integrate a range of AAIs including eduroam and shibboleth.  China has created a testbed for eduroam, it is under development, they would like to see an additional regional tier of proxy servers to enable eduroam to scale.  Japan is developing finer grain authorization controls to enable users to access eduroam via specific subnets. Japan also presented an update on the UPKI project.  China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia decided to start monthly meetings to see what we can do as a subgroup of the middleware WG under the global eduroam work group mailing list.  Observers from the EU and USA are also involved.