RedCLARA News - 2004/2010

Name: Western Hemisphere Research and Education Network Linking Latin America - WHREN/LILA
Began on: 2005
Finished in: 2007
Funding: Connection Programme for International Research Networks – NSF, and the Fapesp n° 04/14414-2 Project by the Sao Paulo Academic Network

General Objective:  To increase the rate of discoveries and improve education in the Americas through the creation of an infrastructure which enables the exchange, based on a hybrid network of services which support both specific disciplines and high-performance network services, distributed computing and service networks across large geographical distances.

Participants: USA: FIU – Coordinator, CENIC, StarLight, Internet2; ANSP and RNP (Brazil); CUDI (Mexico), REUNA (Chile), RedCLARA (Latin America).

The WHREN/LILA Project - Western Hemisphere Research and Education Network Linking Latin America - started in 2005, and is founded by the National Science Foundation (NSF - United States) by means of its Program of International Networking Research, with US$5 million to be distributed in five years of execution, and by the Fapesp Project nº 04/14414-2 of the Academic Network of Sao Paulo (ANSP).

The mission of WHREN/LILA is to increase the rate of discovery and enhance education across the Americas through the creation of a distributed exchange infrastructure to provide a hybrid of network services to support discipline-specific and general-purpose high-performance distributed-computing and networking services over wide geographical distances.

Goals

• Improve network connectivity between North and South America through the deployment, operation and evolution of LILA links.
• Foster collaborative research and advance education throughout the Western Hemisphere and other world regions.
• Develop a cogent plan to support evolving researchers' needs and to foster new inter-regional inter-disciplinary communities of researchers and learners.

WHREN/LILA Connections

Pacific Wave

Pacific Wave is a joint project between the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), and is operated in collaboration with the University of Southern California and the University of Washington.
It has been defined as a state-of-the-art international peering exchange facility designed to serve research & education networks throughout the Pacific Rim and the world-
Designed to enhance efficiency of IP traffic, PW peering services offer outstanding opportunities to: pass IP traffic directly with other national and international networks; reduce costs associated with IP traffic that would otherwise transit multiple circuits; and, increase efficiency by directing traffic as quickly as possible to the target network/organization, reducing the number of 'hops' required to complete for the data to get to its destination.

CLARA joins PW through one of the three nodes that are placed in Los Angeles (California, USA) at 1GbE (Gigabit Ethernet). But to get to that node, CLARA had the assistance, actually the huge help of CENIC. To explain this better, let's go a little bit back in time, to July of 2005, when the link between the RedCLARA node in Tijuana and the CalREN (the California Research and Education Network, which was designed and implemented and actually operated by CENIC) node in San Diego was established in the framework of the WHREN-LILA project.

WHREN-LILA funded the fiber infrastructure between these two nodes and this gave RedCLARA the access (an entry point) to the USA networks. Now, to reach PW, RedCLARA needed to go from San Diego to Los Angeles, and this is were CENIC plays a fundamental role, because it is by CENIC's optical network capacities, by CENIC's infrastructure, that RedCLARA access to the PW exchange point in Los Angeles.

The agreement with CENIC, that allows CLARA to extend the connection of RedCLARA from San Diego to Los Angeles, it is of main importance, it let us to enhance our network capacities, by using CENIC's infrastructure without any additional cost.

Pacific Wave's shared exchange is a layer 2 exchange comprised of local and intersite VLANs for IPv4, IPv6 and multicast packets. There are VLANs for jumbo and non-jumbo enabled sites as well". "Each participant is provided with IP addresses for its local VLAN and all necessary intersite VLANs. For example, if a participant is connected in Los Angeles, it would be able to peer with participants that are located in Seattle and the Bay area as well", this last is exactly the case of the RedCLARA connection, which is of 1GbE for real.

This implies two benefits for the CLARA Community:

1-. The ability to exchange traffic directly -and he underlines this "directly"- with other regional networks that have presence there, before that we were receiving the announcement of these networks prefixes through our peering with CalREN, meaning that CalREN was giving transit to RedCLARA to get to other networks. From the technical point of view we go to and from other networks using the same paths, meaning that essentially we are passing through the same links, and nothing changed regarding delays or capacity, but the major advantage is that now we can define our own policy to exchange

2-. In such a short period of time, RedCLARA has already established traffic exchange agreements, and configured direct BGP peering (Border Gateway Protocol) with several networks that are present in the Los Angeles-PW exchange point: Pacific Northwest Gigapop, Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), NASA Integrated Services Network (NISN), Australia's Research and Education Network (AARNet), and National LambdaRail.

Atlantic Wave

The AtlanticWave services are for existing networks that currently interconnect at key exchange points along the Atlantic Coast of North and South America, including MAN LAN in New York City, MAX GigaPOP and NGIX-East in Washington D.C., SoX GigaPOP in Atlanta, AMPATH in Miami, and the São Paulo, Brazil exchange point operated by the Academic Network of São Paulo (ANSP). It is from the Brazilian exchanging point, that RedCLARA will be connected to the AW facility.

AtlanticWave supports the GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility - www.glif.is) Open Lightpath Exchange (GOLE) model.

The organizations collaborating in establishing and operating AtlanticWave include SURA, FIU, FLR, Southern Light Rail (SLR), MAX, Internet2, and the International Educational Equal Access Foundation (IEEAF).

For the CLARA Community the future connection to AW, plus the already existing connection to Pacific Wave and, of course, to GÉANT2 in Europe, enhances enormously the network capacity and therefore what the NRENs connected to RedCLARA can obtain from these connections it is a new horizon for their collaborative projects and applications development.