ICCN News Briefs
May 2008
In this edition
I. An interview with Tracy Smith, operations manager for the ICCN
In the second edition of the ICCN news briefs, ICCN operations manager Tracy Smith discusses her vision for the ICCN.
Question: First of all, what is the ICCN? There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about what it is. Could you clear those up?
Tracy Smith: Chances are you’ve probably already used the ICCN and didn’t even know it. UIUCnet, the Urbana campus’s connection to the commercial Internet, connects to the ICCN, which, in turn, connects all UIUCnet traffic to the commercial Internet. So, if you’ve used UIUCnet, you’ve already used the ICCN.
At its simplest, the ICCN is a connection to the Internet. At home, you have to pay a commercial Internet service provider (ISP) – usually your cable company for broadband access or a DSL line – in order to connect to the Internet. Your home doesn’t just automatically connect to the Internet for free (although we all certainly wish it could!), and neither does the University of Illinois. We have to pay for it, just like everyone else.
For many years, we paid local ISPs for our Internet connection, but we were beholden to their rates, service outages, and bandwidth limitations. Now, with the ICCN, not only do we have a fiber optic connection to the Internet that is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than the one we had just one year ago, we have the freedom to shop around for the best available rates, as any consumer would. So, we’re not limited to what local ISPs have to offer anymore. We can take advantage of the better connectivity rates in Chicago with the ICCN.
In fact, with the ICCN, the University itself has become an ISP, serving both the Springfield and Urbana campuses. Eventually, we’ll be able to deliver Internet access to underserved areas throughout the state and help bridge the digital divide.
But – and this is a big “but” – that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The ICCN does, can, and will do a lot more than function just as an Internet connection for the University system.
Q: Like what?
TS: For example, if you need to share a large set of data about atomic collisions with colleagues at the Fermilab in Batavia, or even further afield to CERN in Switzerland, you can now upload that data in the blink of an eye with the ICCN, which allows for numerous, simultaneous large streams of data both coming in and going out of the campus network. If you’re a researcher, you won’t have to hit the “send” button at night and hope it’s transferred by morning. Those days are over with the ICCN.
If you’re a biologist who needs to share or download vast amounts of genetic data with colleagues in Singapore; if you’re a biochemist who needs to videoconference with colleagues in Berkeley or Cambridge (Massachusetts or England); if you’re a medical student who needs to advise on a surgical procedure in India in real-time; or if you’re an ethnomusicologist who wishes to share the latest in world music with fellow scholars from around the world, the ICCN has the necessary network capacity to make that type of research, scholarship and collaboration possible.
Q: What do you mean by a large set of data?
TS: Terabytes and petabytes – how’s that for a start? And with 915km of fiber with an average latency of 3.5 ms, the ICCN has the scalability to accommodate more, if necessary.
Since we also manage the ICCN’s fiber, the University -- not any commercial ISP -- is in control of its telecommunications future.
Q: Why should anyone care about the ICCN?
TS: President White has outlined a strategy for Illinois to become the best public research university in the world. World-class research universities require world-class networking capabilities.
Thanks to the ICCN, we now have that world-class network to help us build the richest, most fertile environment for research and discovery.
II. ICCN peering with Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and NCSA
Thanks to the ICCN, CITES engineers have upgraded Illinois’s direct connection to the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) by a factor of ten, migrating from a one gigabit per second (Gbps) connection to a 10 Gbps Ethernet connection via the ICCN and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) OmniPop.
With several research projects on campus in need of high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity to sites such as the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, this upgrade in connection speed will help to facilitate collaboration and new applications between research partners and campus.
The ICCN also allows researchers at Illinois a very fast connection to CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory and home of the Large Hadron Collider. Illinois scientists are participating in the search for the Higgs boson, an elusive particle that Nobel laureate Leon Lederman has also called the “God particle” and is thought to contribute the property of mass to all matter.
CITES engineers are also in the process of connecting NCSA to the ICCN at 10 Gbps. Previously, NCSA had been linked to the rest of the Urbana campus at only one Gbps.
III. Peering with WiscNet comes online
ICCN engineers successfully established a bilateral peering connection to WiscNet, the state of Wisconsin’s research and education network. The ICCN connects to WiscNet through the CIC OmniPoP, and the path from UIUCnet (via the ICCN) to WiscNet is comprised entirely of 10 Gbps Ethernet connections.
This peering provides the Urbana campus with direct, fast access to the entire University of Wisconsin system, and for Wisconsin users, respectively, access to Illinois and NCSA resources.
The transit time from the Urbana campus to the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin is about 13 milliseconds, with about 8 milliseconds of that the result of the finite speed of light in fiber.
Comments and Questions
CITES welcomes your feedback regarding both the news briefs and the ICCN itself. Please send your comments and questions to Tracy Smith (tracys@illinois.edu), operations manager for the ICCN.