In this short video, hear new NLR President and CEO Glenn Ricart talk about his background, interests and why he's excited to have joined NLR.

See NLR's  website for other videos about NLR and its services for the research and education community.      

At SC09, NLR showcased two examples of cutting-edge research on NLR, by inviting distinguished researchers  to talk informally in the NLR booth -- one in person and one via Cisco TelePresence over NLR's TelePresence Exchange -- about their projects, discoveries and where they're headed  next. 

The following are short summaries of these Tech Talks, with links to the presentations.

Ilia Baldine and Yufeng Xin, senior networking researchers, Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI)                                                                                          

RENCI and Duke University are leading the work of Project Cluster D of the NSF GENI initiative, adapting Duke's ORCA distributed resource allocation architecture, originally developed by Duke professor Jeff Chase, to the needs of GENI by applying it to the BEN (Breakable Experimental Network). 

Yufeng Xin, RENCI, speaking via Cisco TelePresence from Chapel Hill, NC

In its first year, the joint team has successfully demonstrated the ability of ORCA to create complex 'slices' of the substrate, which included virtual machines, static backbone links over NLR and multi-layered (fiber/DWDM/VLAN) connections across BEN.

In the next year the team will transform ORCA into a production system capable of hosting cross-layer research activities on BEN and connecting BEN to other GENI 'islands'. The work will include usability enhancements, new user tools and cross-layer experimental capabilities.   ORCA will be enabled to provision dynamic connections across NLR using the Sherpa CGI interface to help tie together member projects of Cluster D. 

In addition to Duke, RENCI will be collaborating with North Carolina State University and Columbia University to enable ground-breaking optical layer research by creating an ORCA-friendly optical layer measurement framework and associated user experiment tools.

Presentation:  http://www.nlr.net/docs/RENCI_DukeORCA-BEN-SC09_NLR.pdf

Tom DeFanti, research scientist, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), University of California, San Diego 

Nearly all universities produce over 25,000 metric tons of CO2e and will thus be required by the U.S. E.P.A.  to report greenhouse gas (GhG) emissions and be subject to carbon cap and trade costs easily running into the several millions of dollars annually for campuses heavily dependent on coal-generated power.

UCSD's Project GreenLight, funded by an NSF grant, is the first to focus on the fast-growing energy use of departmental computer clusters.  Unfortunately almost nothing is known about how to make these shared virtual clusters energy efficient, since there has been no financial motivation to do so. 

Tom DeFanti, Calit2, on Extending Project GreenLight to Networks, at the NLR Sc09 Booth

Project GreenLight is developing ways of providing users with information on energy use of various types of computing clusters and coming up with ways to optimize the work per watt, such as through energy-saving hardware acceleration, reducing DC/AC/DC conversion losses and investigating WAN terrestrial and undersea transmission options. NLR and NLR member CENIC provide 5 x 10Gbps WAN and campus network links for Project GreenLight.

Presentation:  http://www.nlr.net/docs/DeFanti-SC09-NLR-GL4Networks.pdf