Former ESnet Head Steve Cotter Named CEO for GÉANT

2015-08-172015-08-17 ~ ESnetComms

GÉANT, Europe’s leading collaboration on e-infrastructure and services for research and education, has appointed a new CEO, former ESnet head Steve Cotter, to complete the restructuring of the organisation and take on the challenges of a rapidly changing global science environment.

Cotter is presently CEO of REANNZ, New Zealand’s NREN (National Research and Education Network). He will assume his new role at GÉANT in November, where he will be responsible for developing and fulfilling the organisation’s strategic vision, through management of GÉANT’s day-to-day operations, strengthening relationships with NRENs and the European Commission; and developing major international collaborations.

Formerly Department Head of ESnet, and having also worked for technology companies in Europe and the U.S. including Google, Internet2 and Cisco, Cotter brings a track record of working with government funders and research and academic users.

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Steve Cotter
Read the full story here.

ESnet’s Zurawski Helps Advance Campus Cyberinfrastructure in Pennsylvania

2015-08-052015-08-05 ~ ESnetComms

Jason Zurawski of ESnet’s Science Engagement Team gave presentations on the Science DMZ architecture and perfSONAR network measurement toolkit at a two-day workshop held last month at Penn State. The workshop, which aimed to strengthen campus cyberinfrastucture, drew more than 30 higher education network engineers representing 11 higher education institutions.

The workshop was a collaboration of ESnet, the Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER) and Penn State with funding from the National Science Foundation. Zurawski and other members of ESnet’s Science Engagement Team regularly participate in similar workshops and give webinars to share ESnet’s expertise and experience with campuses and regional networks as they handle increasingly large data flows.
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Jason Zurawski

NSF Funds Upgraded Network Linking Labs, Universities and Research Networks Based on Science DMZ

2015-08-032015-08-03 ~ ESnetComms

For the last three years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a series of competitive grants to over 100 U.S. universities to aggressively upgrade their campus network capacity for greatly enhanced science data access, with many incorporating ESnet’s Science DMZ architecture. NSF is now building on that distributed investment by funding a $5 million, five-year award to UC San Diego and UC Berkeley to establish a Pacific Research Platform (PRP), a science-driven high-capacity data-centric “freeway system” on a large regional scale.

The PRP is basing its initial deployment on a proven and scalable network design model for optimizing science data transfers developed by ESnet. “ESnet developed the Science DMZ concept to help address common network performance problems encountered at research institutions by creating a network architecture designed for high-performance applications, where the data science network is distinct from the commodity shared Internet,” said ESnet Director Greg Bell. “As part of its extensive national and international outreach, ESnet is committed to working closely with the Pacific Research Platform to leverage the Science DMZ and Science Engagement concepts to enable collaborating scientists to advance their research.”

In the PRP the Science DMZ model will be extended from a set of heterogeneous campus-level DMZs to an interoperable regional model. Read more.