More than 60 people, including two members of Congress and dozens of staffers, turned out for a special one-hour briefing on the critical role of networking in advancing scientific discovery in academia, industry and national laboratories. ESnet Director Greg Bell was joined in the panel discussion by Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist and a father of the Internet, University of Hawai’i President David Lassner and Susan Gregurick of the National Institutes of Health. Chip Elliott, Chief Engineer of Raytheon BBN, moderated the July 28 session, which was organized by Don Medley, head of the lab’s Government and Community Relations Office.

Speaking at the briefing were from left to right: Greg Bell (ESnet), Susan Gregurick (NIH), Vint Cerf (Google), President David Lassner (University of Hawai’i) and Chip Elliot (Raytheon BBN).

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This week ESnet is hosting a three-day workshop to develop a “Roadmap to Operational Software Defined Networking-based networks,” with participants from other research and education networks, universities, government agencies, international networks and networking equipment vendors. Software defined networking, or SDN, is an approach that allows network administrators to manage network services by decoupling various levels of network functionality, enabling more flexibility in moving data and meeting application requirements.

The July 14-16 workshop at Berkeley Lab will include short presentations on the “state of the union” of various SDN deployments at universities, networks and national labs, as well as at ESnet. After a day-and-a-half of presentations, attendees will form breakout groups to assess how can the community work with the open source software community and vendors to tackle the SDN operational gaps and to develop a roadmap to SDN deployments. The third day of the workshop will focus on security related issues to SDN.

Organized by ESnet, Internet2, DOE, the National Science Foundation and the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program, the workshop is expected to draw 70 attendees in person. Those not attending can access the workshop via Zoom at https://go.zoom.us/join, and joining # 510 486-4100.

Inder Monga, ESnet’s chief technology officer, will give a keynote talk on “SDN Opportunities in Smart Cities” at a July 7 workshop on The Software Defined Network – Programmable City. The workshop, to be held in Bristol, England, is sponsored by Bristol Is Open and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open software-defined networking (SDN).

According to the organizers, the emergence of smart technology in cities such as Bristol, is generating many Internet of Things (IoT) requirements that industry organizations like ONF will implement in future protocol development. As one of the leaders in liveable smart cities, Bristol will be an important resource for ONF, as a source of information in the development of future IoT specific standards.

Monga is an internationally recognized leader in SDN and has given talks on the subject at meetings around the globe and is an ONF research associate. In recognition of ESnet’s leadership in SDN, Monga was asked to organize a two-day workshop in Washington, D.C. in December 2013 to plan a path forward to develop, deploy and operate a prototype SDN network.