About Caltech: With an outstanding faculty, including five Nobel laureates, and such off-campus facilities as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Palomar Observatory, and the W. M. Keck Observatory, the California Institute of Technology is one of the world’s major research centers. The Institute also conducts instruction in science and engineering for a student body of approximately 900 undergraduates and 1,300 graduate students who maintain a high level of scholarship and intellectual achievement.
Caltech’s 124-acre campus is situated in Pasadena, California, a city of 135,000 at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, approximately 30 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean and 10 miles northeast of the Los Angeles Civic Center. Caltech is an independent, privately supported university, and is not affiliated with either the University of California system or the California State Polytechnic universities. www.caltech.edu
About CACR: Caltech’s Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) performs research and development on leading-edge networking and computing systems, and methods for computational science and engineering. Some current efforts at CACR include the National Virtual Observatory, ASC Center for Simulation of Dynamic Response of Materials, Computational Infrastructure for Geophysics, Cascade High Productivity Computing System, and the TeraGrid. www.cacr.caltech.edu.
About CERN: CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its member states are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission, and UNESCO have observer status. For more information, see www.cern.ch
About Netlab: Caltech’s Networking Laboratory, led by Professor Steven Low, develops FAST TCP. The group does research in the control and optimization of protocols and networks, and designs, analyzes, implements, and experiments with new algorithms and systems.netlab.cs.caltech.edu
About NIIT: NIIT (NUST Institute of Information Technology) established in 1999 as the IT wing of National University of Sciences and Technology ranks today with premier engineering institutions in Pakistan . It possesses state-of-the-art equipment and prides on its faculty, a team of highly capable and dedicated professionals. NIIT is also reputed abroad for its collaborative research linkages with CERN, Geneva; Stanford (SLAC), USA; Caltech, USA; and EPFL, Switzerland, just to name a few. NIIT continually seeks to stay in forefront as a centre of academic and research excellence. Efforts are under way to seek collaboration with sound Pakistani universities, willing to participate in joint research projects. NIIT is also engaged in close interaction with indigenous industrial entrepreneurs in IT, electronics and communication engineering through NIIT-Corporate Advisory councils. www.niit.edu.pk
About the University of Michigan: The University of Michigan, with its size, complexity, and academic strength, the breadth of its scholarly resources, and the quality of its faculty and students, is one of America’s great public universities and one of the world’s premier research institutions. The university was founded in 1817 and has a total enrollment of 54,300 on all campuses. The main campus is in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has 39,533 students (fall 2004). With over 600 degree programs and $739M in FY05 research funding, the university is one of the leaders in innovation and research. For more information, see www.umich.edu.
About Fermilab: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) is a national laboratory funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, operated by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. Experiments at Fermilab’s Tevatron, the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator, generate petabytes data per year, and involve large, international collaborations with requirements for high-volume data movement to their home institutions. It is also the western hemisphere Tier-1 data host for the upcoming CMS experiment at the HC. The laboratory actively works to remain on the leading edge of advanced wide-area network technology in support of its science collaborations.
About UERJ (Rio de Janeiro): Founded in 1950, the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ; www.uerj.br) ranks among the ten largest universities in Brazil, with more than 23,000 students. UERJ’s five campuses are home to 22 libraries, 412 classrooms, 50 lecture halls and auditoriums, and 205 laboratories. UERJ is responsible for important public welfare and health projects through its centers of medical excellence, the Pedro Ernesto University Hospital (HUPE) and the Piquet Carneiro Day-care Policlinic Centre, and it is committed to the preservation of the environment. The UERJ High Energy Physics group includes 15 faculty, postdoctoral, and visiting Ph.D. physicists and 12 Ph.D. and master’s students, working on experiments at Fermilab (D0) and CERN (CMS). The group has constructed a Tier2 center to enable it to take part in the Grid-based data analysis planned for the LHC, and has originated the concept of a Brazilian “HEP Grid,” working in cooperation with USP and several other universities in Rio and S Paulo.
About UNESP (S Paulo): Created in 1976 with the administrative union of several isolated Institutes of higher education in the State of S Paulo, the S Paulo State University, UNESP, has 39 institutes in 23 different cities in the State of S Paulo. The university has 31,000 undergraduate students from 168 different courses and almost 12,000 graduate students. Since 1999 the university has a group participating in the DZero Collaboration of Fermilab, which is operating the S Paulo Regional Analysis Center (SPRACE). This group is now a member of CMS Collaboration of CERN. See www.unesp.br.
About USP (S Paulo): The University of S Paulo, USP, is the largest institution of higher education and research in Brazil, and the third in size in Latin America. The university has most of its 35 units located on the campus of the capital of the state. It has around 40,000 undergraduate students and around 25,000 graduate students. It is responsible for almost 25 percent of all Brazilian papers and publications indexed on the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The SPRACE cluster is located at the Physics Institute. See www.usp.br
About Kyungpook National University (Daegu): Kyungpook National University is one of leading universities in Korea, especially in physics and information science. The university has 13 colleges and 9 graduate schools with 24,000 students. It houses the Center for High Energy Physics (CHEP) in which most Korean high-energy physicists participate. CHEP (chep.knu.ac.kr) was approved as one of the designated Excellent Research Centers supported by the Korean Ministry of Science.
About GLORIAD: GLORIAD (GLObal RIng network for Advanced application development) is the first round-the-world high-performance ring network jointly established by Korea, the United States, Russia, China, Canada, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries, with optical networking tools that improve networked collaboration with e-Science and Grid applications. It is currently constructing a dedicated lightwave link connecting the scientific organizations in GLORIAD partners. See www.gloriad.org
About CHEPREO: Florida International University (FIU), in collaboration with partners at Florida State University, the University of Florida, and the California Institute of Technology, has been awarded an NSF grant to create and operate an interregional Grid-enabled Center from High-Energy Physics Research and Educational Outreach (CHEPREO; www.chepreo.org) at FIU. CHEPREO encompasses an integrated program of collaborative physics research on CMS, network infrastructure development, and educational outreach at one of the largest minority universities in the U.S. The center is funded by four NSF directorates, including Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Scientific Computing Infrastructure, Elementary, Secondary and Informal Education, and International Programs.
About Internet2: Led by more than 200 U.S. universities working with industry and government, Internet2 develops and deploys advanced network applications and technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the creation of tomorrow’s Internet. Internet2 recreates the partnerships among academia, industry, and government that helped foster today’s Internet in its infancy. For more information, visit: www.internet2.edu.
About National LambdaRail: National LambdaRail (NLR) is a major initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications. NLR puts the control, the power, and the promise of experimental network infrastructure in the hands of the nation’s scientists and researchers. Visit www.nlr.net for more information.
About StarLight: StarLight is an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications. Operational since summer 2001, StarLight is a 1 GE and 10 GE switch/router facility for high-performance access to participating networks and also offers true optical switching for wavelengths. StarLight is being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, in partnership with Canada’s CANARIE and the Netherlands’ SURFnet. STAR TAP and StarLight are made possible by major funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation to UIC. StarLight is a service mark of the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. See www.startap.net/starlight.
About the Florida LambdaRail: Florida LambdaRail LLC (FLR) is a Florida limited liability company formed by member higher education institutions to advance optical research and education networking within Florida. Florida LambdaRail is a high-bandwidth optical network that links Florida’s research institutions and provides a next-generation network in support of large-scale research, education outreach, public/private partnerships, and information technology infrastructure essential to Florida’s economic development. For more information: www.flrnet.org.
About CENIC: CENIC (www.cenic.org) is a not-for-profit corporation serving the California Institute of Technology, California State University, Stanford University, University of California, University of Southern California, California Community Colleges, and the statewide K-12 school system. CENIC’s mission is to facilitate and coordinate the development, deployment, and operation of a set of robust multitiered advanced network services for this research and education community.
About ESnet: The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet; www.es.net) is a high-speed network serving thousands of Department of Energy scientists and collaborators worldwide. A pioneer in providing high-bandwidth, reliable connections, ESnet enables researchers at national laboratories, universities, and other institutions to communicate with each other using the collaborative capabilities needed to address some of the world’s most important scientific challenges. Managed and operated by the ESnet staff at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ESnet provides direct high-bandwidth connections to all major DOE sites, multiple cross connections with Internet2/Abilene, and connections to Europe via GEANT and to Japan via SuperSINET, as well as fast interconnections to more than 100 other networks. Funded principally by DOE’s Office of Science, ESnet services allow scientists to make effective use of unique DOE research facilities and computing resources, independent of time and geographic location.
About AMPATH: Florida International University’s Center for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment (CIARA) has developed an international, high-performance research connection point in Miami, Florida, called AMPATH (AMericasPATH; www.ampath.fiu.edu). AMPATH’s goal is to enable wide-bandwidth digital communications between U.S. and international research and education networks, as well as a variety of U.S. research programs in the region. AMPATH in Miami acts as a major international exchange point (IXP) for the research and education networks in South America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The AMPATH IXP is home for the WHREN-LILA high-performance network link connecting Latin America to the U.S., funded by the NSF and the Academic Network of Sao Paulo.
About the Academic Network of S Paulo (ANSP): ANSP unites S Paulo’s University networks with Scientific and Technological Research Centers in S Paulo, and is managed by the State of S Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). The ANSP Network is another example of international collaboration and exploration. Through its connection to WHREN-LILA, all of the institutions connected to ANSP will be involved in research with U.S. universities and research centers, offering significant contributions and the potential to develop new applications and services. This connectivity with WHREN-LILA and ANSP will allow researchers to enhance the quality of current data, inevitably increasing the quality of new scientific developments. See www.ansp.br
About RNP: RNP, the National Education and Research Network of Brazil, is a not-for-profit company that promotes the innovative use of advanced networking, with the joint support of the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Education. In the early 1990s, RNP was responsible for the introduction and adoption of Internet technology in Brazil. Today, RNP operates a nationally deployed multi-gigabit network used for collaboration and communication in research and education throughout the country, reaching all 26 states and the Federal District, and provides both commodity and advanced research Internet connectivity to more than 300 universities, research centers, and technical schools. www.rnp.br
About KISTI: KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information) is a national institute under the supervision of MOST (Ministry of Science and Technology) of Korea and is playing a leading role in building the nationwide infrastructure for advanced application researches by linking the supercomputing resources with the optical research network, KREONet2. The National Supercomputing Center in KISTI is carrying out national e-Science and Grid projects as well as the GLORIAD-KR project and will become the most important institution based on e-Science and advanced network technologies. See www.kisti.re.kr.
About the National Science Foundation: The NSF is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense….” With an annual budget of about $5.5 billion, it is the funding source for approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities. In many fields such as mathematics, computer science, and the social sciences, NSF is the major source of federal backing.
About the DOE Office of Science: DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the nation and ensures U.S. world leadership across a broad range of scientific disciplines. The Office of Science also manages 10 world-class national laboratories with unmatched capabilities for solving complex interdisciplinary problems, and it builds and operates some of the nation’s most advanced R&D user facilities, located at national laboratories and universities. These facilities are used by more than 19,000 researchers from universities, other government agencies, and private industry each year.