EPSCoR Grant (Award 9871974) Annual Report January 2000

I. Project Participants

1. What people have worked on your project?

2. What other organizations have been involved as partners?

• Williams Fiber (Salt Lake City, UT)
• Nevada Power (Las Vegas, NV)
• Sierra Power (Reno, NV)
• CENIC(UC/CSU consortium, CA)
• Nevada Department of Transportation (Carson City, NV)
• Nevada State Department of Information Technology (Carson City, NV)

3. Have you had other collaborators or contacts?

• Nevada State Attorney General's Office
• Brooks Fiber (Reno, NV)
• Sprint (Anaheim, CA)
• Qwest (Anaheim and Sacramento, CA)
• NLANR technical group (NCSA, Urbana-Champaign, IL)
• Dan VanBellingham (EPSCoR)
• Ken Bishop (Kentucky)
• William Decker (NSF)
• Russ Hobby (CENIC group, CA)
• Pat Murphy (Cisco, Las Vegas, NV)
• Tom Perkins (Cisco, Las Vegas, NV)

II. Activities and Findings

1. Describe the major research and education activities of the project.

Activities to-date have focused on the engineering aspects of the Nevada Research Network infrastructure and negotiations with service providers for fiber connectivity. All in-state networking equipment was purchased under an EPSCoR grant, and configuration and testing is underway at SCS's Reno office. Equipment is installed at UNR, UNLV, and DRI campuses, and fiber upgrade projects are nearing completion to allow campus connections to SCS.

Negotiations with Williams Fiber, Nevada Power, Sierra Power, Qwest, Sprint, and CENIC are underway for long-haul and last-mile OC3 service between SCS Las Vegas and Reno offices to the CENIC network at Anaheim and Sacramento, California, respectively.The only expeditures on CISE funds so far this Year are for border routers between the long-haul carrier and the NRN infrastructure.

An ad hoc NRN Advisory Committee meets roughly every 6 weeks to monitor engineering and contract negotiation progress as well as necessary on-campus infrastructure improvements and budget tracking.

2. Describe the major findings resulting from these activities.

Network engineering options have been evaluated and most are now finalized.

A signed contract with Williams is eminent. Verbal agreements with Sierra Power and Nevada Power for last-mile connections from Williams' POPs in Reno and Las Vegas, respectively, are developing into signed contracts.

Provisions for vBNS/Abilene connectivity via the CAL-REN network in California have been discussed with the CENIC governing board, and Nevada's membership in this group appears to be likely.

Configuration and testing of the ATM equipment and resolution of routing issues are still underway.

3. Describe the opportunities for training and development provided by your project.

Project co-PIs and support personnel have attended a number of ATM, vBNS, IN2, Abilene, and NLANR conferences and workshops to become familiar with high-speed networking technical and policy issues.

For year one, no training or development activities is planned for campus researchers and their support staff.

4. Describe outreach activities your project has undertaken.

The NRN project has maintained a Web site for informing UCCSN campuses and monitoring agencies since the original EPSCoR proposal was submitted in February, 1998.This site was moved from "www.dri.edu/NRN" to "www.nevada.edu/nrn" and features the original grant proposals, quarterly status reports, partnerships, engineering plans, and a list of contacts which includes the PI and co-PIs of this project.

Regular reports are made to the Vice Presidents for Research from the campuses involved and at monthly System-wide Network Connectivity meetings.

In addition, network and computing staff at the three institutions are updated periodically by their NRN representatives.

III. Publications and Products

1. What have you published as a result of this work?

The first year of this project will result in no publications.

2. What Web site or other Internet site have you created?

The NRN Web site is located at "http://www.nevada.edu/nrn" and contains information related to the EPSCoR-funded state infrastructure as well as vBNS/Abilene connectivity funded by this CISE grant.

This site contains the original EPSCoR and CISE proposals, updated engineering drawings, contact information, quarterly reports, and links to other Internet2 sites.

3. What other specific products (databases, physical collections, educational aids, software, instruments, or the like) have you developed?

None during the first year of this project.

IV. Contributions

Accomplishments, innovations, and successes of your project relative to:

1. The principal discipline(s) of the project

The principal discipline of this project is high-speed network access in support of meritorious research applications. At this time, negotiations with commercial service providers are nearing fruition, and partnerships with local power companies and state agencies beyond those specified in the proposal are well-established.By means of trading state highway right-of- ways for fiber capacity from Williams Fiber, substantial cost savings for the in-state infrastructure are being realized. Partnerships with local power companies in Reno and Las Vegas for last-mile connectivity between Williams and SCS offices are also resulting in substantial cost savings and long-term working relationships. A tentative agreement with the CENIC group to allow connection of the NRN to vBNS/Abilene through the CAL-REN network will result in lower last-mile costs and a potential for closer working relationships between Nevada and California research campuses.

All of these developments result in smaller ongoing costs, ensuring the ability of UCCSN to maintain the research network connectivity after the CISE grant period ends.

2. Other disciplines of science or engineering

A number of campus research programs involving climate research, terawatt physics, and earthquake modeling are posed to take immediate advantage of the high-speed network as soon as it is available. To date, however, no other disciplines have yet benefitted from the groundwork and preparation which were a major focus of NRN activity of the past year.

3. The development of human resources

Co-PIs, members of the NRN support team, and campus researchers have Attended Internet2 meetings and workshops, the Chautagua at Kentucky, the NLANR DAST workshop in Tucson, and Cisco ATM classes in preparation for implementing and supporting the high-speed network covered by this grant. Some of this material (e.g., distributed computing issues) has been disseminated to campus support staff and applications programmers.

4. The physical, institutional, or information resources that form the infrastructure for research and education

The entire goalof this project is to improve the information resources available to Nevada researchers. A secondary benefit is improving collaboration between Nevada research campuses and other computational resources available on the national research networks. At this time, the groundwork is nearly laid for implementing these resources, but researchers have not yet seen the benefits of this work.

5. Other aspects of public welfare beyond science and engineering, such as commercial technology, the economy, cost-efficient environmental protection, or solutions to social problems

The negotiations with Williams Fiber to exchange state highway right-of-way access for bandwidth will drastically reduce long-term costs to the state of Nevada. Using existing right-of-way routes reduces the environmental impact of adding fiber capacity to the state. In addition, other state agencies and departments will benefit from the availability of high-bandwidth fiber capacity at greatly reduced costs under this agreement. Given the normal economic disadvantages Nevada experiences because of geographical distances between its two major population centers, the effect of these reduced costs cannot be overstated.

V. Objectives and Scope

A brief summary of work to be performed during the next year of support if changed from the original proposal.

The remainder of the grant period will see finalization of agreements and contracts with the NRN partners, completion of improved fiber capacity between the campuses, activation of the in-state infrastructure, and activation of two vBNS/Abilene connections (one from Las Vegas to Anaheim, CA, and one from Reno to Sacramento, CA).Fiber activation is scheduled to occur no later than April, 2000.Four of the meritorious research projects cited in the CISE proposal for this grant will be active in the first month of full operation, with the others to follow as project schedules allow. Outreach and educational programs are already being developed to bring outside speakers and technical experts to the research campuses to discuss capabilities and issues with researchers and their support staff.

The NRN Advisory Committee is scheduled to be formalized in October or November, 1999, and will begin work on NRN access policies and reviewing applications For research use of the network.

Because of the time that was required for contract negotiations and the effects on engineering decisions of recent technology changes, the original timeline and engineering drawings in the grant proposal have been modified.

A letter with the revised timeline, engineering drawings, and budget line items will be submitted to the CISE Project Manager in October, 1999.

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