Description

Official opening of TNC20 by Chairman of the GÉANT Board (Christian Grimm) and CEO of GÉANT (Erik Huizer). Featuring Richard Cooper - Controller, Digital Distribution for the BBC.

Chairs

• N/A

Presentations

Broadcasting in an IP world

The impact of IP is driving an unprecedented rate of change for broadcasters. We’re seeing dramatic changes in the media that people are viewing and the way that they are choosing to view it. We’re able to innovate, like never before, with the services that we provide and the way that we produce them. This keynote will explore the waves that the transition to IP is making from production to distribution, the benefits to viewers, and some of the challenges to come.

Speakers:

• Richard Cooper (BBC)

Description

Lightning Talks are 5 minute presentations focusing on one key point. This can be an idea, successful project, a cautionary story, collaboration invitation, quick tip or demonstration. This session is an opportunity for ideas to get the attention they deserve.

The rules for this session are easy: five minutes and only five minutes.

Chairs

• Nicole Harris (GÉANT)

• Nicholas Mbonimpa (Research and Education Network for Uganda (RENU))

Presentations

N/A

Description

One fundamental element which makes our research and education community quite different from the global commercial world is that we do not usually have a solution or product in search of a problem to solve, but we have a problem, and we try to find a solution or a service to fix it. This bottom up (or if you prefer, reverse commercial) approach is our great way to create innovative solutions, and to make life easier for our members and users. In this session we will see a number of these community driven solutions, why and how they were created and the impact they're going to have on their users.

Chairs

• Claudio Allocchio (GARR)

Presentations

Sustainable Conferences - Virtual Conferences' positive impact on the environment and on knowledge sharing

Universities environmental footprints are partly due to staff mobility needs. The Swedish Higher Education Authority (UKÄ) arranged, together with the Swedish Network for IT in Higher Education (ITHU), on September 27th 2019, a virtual conference on the subject educational development and the impact of using digital tools in education. The conference had around 500 participants and was held in Zoom. Many significant actors within Swedish Higher Education were present at the conference and the response to the conference was overwhelming. In the presentation the success criteria are identified and discussed, such as Guiding principles, Conference Structure, Social activities and Technical platform. The competence is highly requested within authorities in Sweden and from other countries.

Speakers:

• Markus Schneider (Karlstad University, Sunet)
• Birgitta Hemmingsson (ITHU, Mid Sweden University)

On premise email collaborative platform provided to the French Research and Education community: Yes we can !

We will present the Messaging and Collaborative platform provided by RENATER (the French NREN) to the French Research and Higher Education community, which is hosted and operated by RENATER.
This service aims to provide a real alternative to major commercial platforms, and takes into account French government data security recommendations, for example data are stored in France by RENATER.

Speakers:

• Laurent Aublet-Cuvelier (GIP RENATER)

CERN’s journey to Open Source

Over the years, CERN activities and services have become increasingly reliant on commercial software and solutions to deliver core services, often enticed by interesting financial conditions based on recognising CERN statuses as “academic", "non-profit", “research", etc. Once installed, well spread and heavily used, the leverage used to attract CERN service managers to the commercial solutions tends to disappear and is replaced by business models and licensing schemes, that are unaffordable in the long term.

CERN's value of openness aims to deliver the same service to every type of CERN user, from employee to researcher. As a result, a high number of licenses is required to deliver services, and when traditional business models on a per user basis are applied, the costs per product can be huge. More importantly, the Cloud approach adopted by many enterprises introduces a new risk on the data. It is always easy to import data in a cloud system, but always difficult to get data out.

The MALT project was started in 2018 to chart a course towards a different future. We will describe the methodology used to identify suitable alternatives, and the progress towards a future that prioritises Open Source, avoids vendor lock-in, keeps hands on the data and delivers the same service to everyone.

Speakers:

• Hannah Short (CERN)

Description

It's not the technology; it's us, the human beings. We know what we want - faster service provisioning, reliable changes, easier rollbacks - but how we get there is still a big puzzle. We'll hear from three different institutions about how they're solving this tricky problem.

Chairs

• Anna Wilson (HEAnet)

Presentations

Operational Inertia: Overcoming human factors to effect change

In the past, a lack of off-the-shelf software tools to manage the packet network has led to a culture of nodal CLI provisioning and a menagerie of homegrown scripts for assisting in daily networking tasks. In recent years more mature software tools are becoming an increasingly important part of daily operations as many organizations attempt to reduce OpEx costs, get better visibility into their network, and perform reactive analytics. Workflow orchestration and automated provisioning solutions are two examples of where software can help reduce this operational overhead; however, many have found deploying these tools to be fraught with roadblocks. In this talk we present how recent experiences have shown impedance to deploying software-based networking solutions is becoming less due to software issues, and more related to human factors. We will present some thoughts on how to best address these human factors though real-life scenarios from the NREN community.

Speakers:

• John MacAuley (ESnet)
• Hans Trompert (SURFnet)

Integration and automation of the circuit provisioning

The presentation will introduce the work of the WP7 T2 - Network and Network Service Evolution and Future Planning working group within the GN4-3 project. The group builds on the results of the Consolidated Connection Service activity of GN4-2 and its main goal is to deploy, maintain and evolve the set of tools for automated provisioning of Ethernet circuits in GEANT network and integrate with other operation and monitoring tools.
The overview of the GÉANT Connection Service (GCS) and different software tools supporting it will be provided. Overview of the main SW blocks and interactions between them will be explained together with the solutions for the integration of GCS with the NOC tools currently used in GEANT.

Speakers:

• Michal Hažlinský (CESNET, a.l.e.)

Automate All The Things!

AARNet is on a journey.
In the beginning, network engineering was done by old-school artisans. Configurations were lovingly hand-crafted. Routers and switches petted and cared for. Loving attention was paid to each device under monitoring. This was fine…. until it wasn’t fine any more. We’re in 2019 now.
Our systems have become cattle, not pets. Our ‘CloudStor synch&share’ service has grown over the last twelve months from 50,000 to over 78,000 total users, with hundreds of containers across four physical server locations. AARNet network engineers have reluctantly started handing in their CLI licences and learning to navigate Ansible + python + Git + Jenkins.
Our hypothesis is that operator error should be reduced, time to deployment would be minimized, troubleshooting tools would be improved, integration with applications achieved... is this true? Is it all a pipe dream?
AARNet is on a journey towards a new way of looking at how we run our network and services. Tune in to hear what we have achieved to date. What has turned out to be harder than expected? How have we measured success? Are we starting to achieve our long term goals? All shall be revealed…

Speakers:

• David Wilde (AARNet Pty Ltd)

Description

As educators and researchers, we are producing more and more data that needs increasingly sophisticated tools to store, manage, share and protect. As NRENs, we can literally need a bigger boat. The presentation in this session will outline three different approaches to this problem and the innovative solutions that are being put in place globally.

Chairs

• Maciej Brzezniak (PSNC)

Presentations

ACE – The AARNet Cloud Ecosystem – A strategy for frictionless research for our Researchers

A pillar of AARNet’s 2022 Strategic Plan is the Establish a National Collaborative Research Platform. This is leveraging the success of our Cloudstor, a collaborative research data storage platform. To implement this strategic initiative AARNet is collaborating with other e-infrastructure providers in Australia to deploy a distributed open stack community cloud for merit allocation to researchers across Australia. With the aim to launch the first stage of the service in July 2020.

Speakers:

• David Wilde (AARNet Pty Ltd)

CS3Mesh4EOSC – Federated Collaboration Platform for Researchers (and the Quest for a Snappy Name)

There are numerous Cloud Storage Services for Synchronization and Sharing, or CS3, serving the R&E space in Europe. Such services, typically using open-source on-premise solutions, are driven at universities, research institutions and NRENs and in recent years have collectively formed a bottom-up, grassroots community (cs3community.org). These services are often isolated islands and do not necessarily fit with the collaborative nature of many research activities. It is very often difficult to give access to other institutions, share data across platforms and run applications on top of this fragmented landscape. These concerns have led the institutions mentioned above to come together and interlink these services; and they have received the support of EC to do this as a project: CS3MESH4EOSC.

Speakers:

• Jakub Moscicki (N/A)

GARR Workplaces

GARR, the Italian NREN, is actively working to provide the **GARR Workplaces** service to the community as a SaaS in the GARR Cloud. GARR Workplaces allows users which have strict regulatory requirements or concerns on privacy, or on the geographical location of their data, to enjoy the advantages of a web office real time collaborative platform, with a rich set of features and a high usability.

GARR Workplaces is based on OnlyOffice: available as open source software, provides a multi-user online document editor which is 100% compatible with Microsoft Office documents, as well as tools for document management, communication (E-mail, CRM, calendar, chat, forums, blogs) and project management. It is designed to be integrated with pre-existing systems, as it features storage backends for OwnCloud, NextCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. and support for external authentication, through e.g. LDAP. As for the deployment, the preferred OnlyOffice installation method relies on a set of interconnected Docker-based microservices.

Speakers:

• Claudio Pisa (Consortium GARR)

Description

As a technology, federated authentication has been in use in the world for close to 20 years. From one perspective, that means the technology is a wild success! Feedback from research communities, service and identity providers, however, has long suggested that the actual challenges they are facing to adopt federated identity technologies need to be addressed before they can to full extent deliver value to its users. Experience also shows the journey that users are having while encountering federated authentication needs to be significantly improved and simplified. This session will focus on several initiatives related to ease of use and adapting identity federations technologies from aspects of end users, research communities, service and identity providers. It will also show how we interact with EOSC.

Chairs

• Marina Adomeit (SUNET)

Presentations

It’s Not Just a Destination – It’s a Journey: IdP Discovery, Attribute Release, User Experience

User experience with federated authentication starts with users finding their identity provider. That is where projects like the RA21 initiative and its operational successor, SeamlessAccess.org, have focused their guidance. This presentation will introduce the SemlessAccess.org project and will engage the audience with demo how the user experience advice has been implemented. We will also talk about the next steps and about the guidance coming out of the SeamlessAccess.org Entity Category and Attribute Bundles Working group. While SeamlessAccess.org does not itself have anything to do with attribute release, with the improvements in the federated authentication workflow, attribute release becomes a strong area of interest for both service providers and various special interest groups.

Speakers:

• Heather Flanagan (Spherical Cow Consulting)
• Ralph Youngen (ACS)

eduTEAMS: Connecting communities and services in EOSC

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) will enable the digital transformation of research towards more data-intensive, collaborative and cross-disciplinary science. This presentation will introduce the capabilities of eduTEAMS and describe the ways in which eduTEAMS can be used to connect national infrastructures, services and research communities to EOSC. We are going to show how NRENs and research infrastructures can use eduTEAMS to:
Provide VO management platform for their communities and enable them to access EOSC resources.
Deliver services to communities in EOSC following the FAIR principles in various production environments.
Reduce the complexity of implementing federated access and connecting to EOSC for Service Providers.
Implement policy control and enforcement points that meet the GDPR requirements.

Speakers:

• Christos Kanellopoulos (GÉANT)

Running a cloud identity provider platform — technology is the easy part

The Australian Access Federation (AAF) began the journey to build a cloud IdP platform (Rapid Identity Provider) in 2016. Two years later the first customer migrated from their on-site IdP to the AAF platform. This presentation invites Federation Operators interested in cloud IdP platforms to hear about the successes and learnings from the AAF’s journey over the last four years.
The presentation will discuss topics like: the rationale and strategic objectives, high-level architecture, resourcing levels and investment, the things we wished we had known when we started and the challenges that are still to be resolved (hint: none of them are technical).

Speakers:

• John Scullen (N/A)

Description

There are three presentations in this session. They will talk about the value proposition of SURFcumulus including professional cloud services, and share the experiences and lessons of restructuring Norwegian ecosystem of central organisations to support and provide shared ICT services to Norwegian HE&R, and introduce a pilot project led by RNP and ANPROTEC to establish the conditions for the admission and participation of innovation promotion environments to 6 science parks as RNP System User Organisations, and the building blocks to enable the establishment of a long term relationship with this new User Organisation community.

Chairs

• Jie An (China Education and Research Network Center)

Presentations

Enhancing customer value of the SURFcumulus cloud proposition

“Enhancing customer value of the SURFcumulus cloud proposition” is about value creation of cloud services for Research & Education by a structured and community serving approach. The first wave of SURFcumulus delivery was a simple transactional type of service. In the past few years the SURFcumulus proposition has evolved and now is moving towards a new value proposition including professional services for cloud implementation, governance & operations and a community SaaS solution for Virtual Research Environments.

Speakers:

• Carl Reitsma (SURFnet)
• Michel Wets (SURFnet)

Expanding the Brazilian NREN to build the National Innovation Network

RNP and ANPROTEC are moving together to leverage a National Innovation Network by offering RNP cyberinfrastructure and services as an innovation platform to science and technology parks amongst other players. To achieve such a goal, RNP and ANPROTEC have decided to undergo a pilot project inviting 6 science parks to establish the conditions for the admission and participation of innovation promotion environments as RNP System User Organisations. This presentation will focus on results of the pilot and on the building blocks to enable the establishment of a long term relationship with this new User Organisation community.

Speakers:

• Fausto Vetter (RNP)

Restructuring Norwegian HE&R shared service delivery

The Norwegian ecosystem of central organisations supporting and providing shared ICT services to Norwegian HE&R went through a major restructuring during 2017. This restructuring has lead to a changed role for the Norwegian NREN Uninett, and the establishment of a new governmental agency (Unit) with a strong, decision-making mandate for a central shared services portfolio for Norwegian HE&R.
The dust of this major operation is now starting to settle which gives an opportunity to tell the NREN community about the reasons for the restructuring and the envisioned benefits, explain how Norway now has organised its HE&R ICT support and reflect on lessons learned so far.
The lessons learned so far are likely to be of interest to others, especially NREN management.
In addition I hope this talk will help the NREN community understand who does what in Norway and how to engage with us.

Speakers:

• Jan Meijer (Unit - The Norwegian Directorate for ICT and Joint Services in Higher Education & Research)

Description

NRENs have a remarkable opportunity not just to provide a new service to our clients, but to integrate our way of working with them, and perhaps even overcome the historical challenges we've had in providing services end-to-end. How do we get this right? We'll hear two presentations from four speakers in this area, and then engage in a full discussion with everyone in the room invited to contribute.

Chairs

• Anna Wilson (HEAnet)

Presentations

Funet Campus Network as a Service in University of Helsinki

CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd has launched a new Funet Campus Network as a Service (Funet CNaaS). Funet backbone router network administration has been automated with Ansible, and Funet CNaaS will use the same automation methods as in the backbone.

Speakers:

• Matti Laipio (CSC - IT Center for Science)
• Matti Saarinen (University of Helsinki / IT Centre)

User experience and network performance monitoring for CNaaS

NREN taking charge of managing their customers’ networks need to have powerful, versatile and easy to deploy tools that can scale to networks of different sizes. This talk will present an automatically deployed measuring infrastructure using perfSONAR on small devices, paired with an ELK based easy to read dashboard that is monitoring both user experience and network performance.

Speakers:

• Antoine Delvaux (Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center)
• Tsotne Gozalishvili (GRENA)

Description

Collaborations among NRENs are driving innovative data-driven projects that strengthen our networks, transform how R&E data moves across international connections, and help us visualize the tangible value of the GREN. ​

Chairs

• Nancy Carter (CANARIE)

Presentations

Mapping the Global Research and Education Network

Previous maps of the global R&E network helped visualize its reach in a one-time snapshot but until now, showing the real-time, global reach of the GREN - at the level of individual institutions - was unfeasible. Enter the GREN Mapping Working Group, who are making waves by building a dynamic, real-time visualization of the value and reach of the global R&E network.
This talk will update the global community on the evolution of the GREN Map, the challenge of making the map a reality, and the steps the Canadian NREN is taking to launch a pilot implementation.

Speakers:

• Ryan Davies (CANARIE Inc.)

Transforming US and European Science Collaborations through better data movement using NetSage

The Networks for European, American, and African Research (NEAAR) collaboration, led by Indiana University (IU) and GEANT, has been working closely with the NetSage project to better understand network usage and data transfer performance of international circuits operated by the NEAAR partners.
This talk will provide an overview of NetSage and walk through several live examples of how the NEAAR partners are using NetSage dashboards to investigate the use of international links. We will highlight practical use cases centered on US/European science collaborations and show how network engineers, research users, network planners, and CIOs can use NetSage to understand network usage and data transfer performance.

Speakers:

• Jennifer Schopf (Indiana University)
• Edward Moynihan (Indiana University)

Supporting international science applications through Software Defined Exchange points

Science applications are dependent on international research network connections This talk will describe what a Software Defined Exchange points (SDX) is and why SDXs are relevant to scientific workflows in the global R&E network (GREN). The AtlanticWave-SDX project and its SDX controller will be presented as a novel distributed programmable controller along with use cases for two science drivers. Results from experiments conducted in an international testbed alongside a production SDN environment will be presented. Finally, future work on the development of SDX will be described to improve support of international science applications, such as programming application requirements into the SDX.

Speakers:

• Julio Ibarra (Florida International University)

Description

When we have our heads down in code or in cables, sometimes it is easy to forget the impact of what we do. As keynote presenters in this plenary session, Tanya Reilly and Paulo Artaxo will each remind us in a different way that our work makes waves that can change society, the environment and people’s lives, and challenge us on what our obligations are as a result.

Chairs

• N/A

Presentations

The History of Fire Escapes

Circuit breakers. Fire partitions. Sprinkler systems. Smoke alarms. Modern buildings are very good at preventing, isolating, slowing and detecting fire. But it took a lot of work and a lot of fires to get there. Let's look at the evolution of the New York City fire code and compare it to our own path as we evolve the rules for software reliability.

Speakers:

• Tanya Reilly (Squarespace)

Climate Change: Sharing large scale data and knowledge to help save the world

Few research areas show the need to globally share large data sets and knowledge as much as climate change. From ground-based observations, satellite remote sensing products and large modeling results from all Earth compartments (atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere) we collect and store large amounts of data and information that needs to be shared. This is specially true for developing countries, with a need to integrate these countries in global climate research and educate the population. The challenge is vast: We need a big and global strategy that includes science and education, in addition to public policies based on science at all levels.

Speakers:

• Paulo Artaxo (Universidade de Sao Paulo)

Description

Lightning Talks are 5 minute presentations focusing on one key point. This can be an idea, successful project, a cautionary story, collaboration invitation, quick tip or demonstration. This session is an opportunity for ideas to get the attention they deserve.

The rules for this session are easy: five minutes and only five minutes.

Chairs

• Nicole Harris (GÉANT)

• Anna Wilson (HEAnet)

Presentations

N/A

Description

Our three presenters in this session will take us on a whirlwind tour of NREN service delivery, starting from the beginning of a service, when onboarding new users, through to when it becomes neccessary to redevelop or reconsolidate an existing service and finally what happens when a service needs to reach it’s end. They will cover the mix of technical and organisational considerations which influence these decisions we all face.

Chairs

• Ann Harding (N/A)

Presentations

On the shoulders of giants: no-brainer service deployment

As NRENs, we've always struggled with takeup. Not the really core stuff, like packets on the wire. But further up the stack, and beyond a special few (say, eduroam and eduGAIN) many of our services are used by relatively small, relatively specialised pockets of researchers. Everyone else often uses commercial "freemium" services, even when we have something superior: "But [insert favourite service] gives me [insert favourite feature] for free!"
And yet, we have technology, infrastructure and a global federated login that Facebook would kill to have. What are we missing?
It turns out that we're _really close_, and by using federated login and the DNS, we have a trojan horse that could make our services many times easier to adopt.

Speakers:

• Anna Wilson (HEAnet)

Rebuilding foundations: Automating VM and Service deployment in NORDUnet

From 2017 to 2019, we overhauled most of our VM and Service infrastructure. Taking it from mostly manual configured to fully automated provisioning and configuration. We will present the situations we was in, and the decisions that led us to build our automation system. Naturally we
will also go over the actual automation system, which is mostly build around Puppet. However the most interesting part, is not the automation itself, but the testing setup, as it is almost not possible to build good automation without a good testing setup. Finally we will reflect on the changes that automation has brought to the organisation, and what we have learned from it.

Speakers:

• Henrik Thostrup Jensen (NORDUnet)

It's not you, it’s me - but let's stay friends! Or why we are having a hard time to get rid of services

This talk is about getting rid of services. Usually we try to keep them alive as long as we can. And if we try to shut them down, we cannot. Because suddenly it is people’s most favourite service or some important person is relaying her life on it or without that service a baby kitten dies. Like Tom Petty says in Learning to Fly: "But what goes up, must come down". But he also figured: "Coming down is the hardest thing". Learn how we can get rid of services. Let us find out how to successfully bring the wave down.

Speakers:

• Renato Furter (SWITCH)

Description

Traditional solutions locked networks into vendor specific hardware. Do we now have an opportunity to do things differently in the White Box for R&E? With the challenges at line rates of 400G and beyond, is conventional SNMP based monitoring still our best option? We will explore decoupling the network operating system from the hardware; innovation and programming at the data plane for alternative monitoring and DDoS mitigation; and conclude with use cases for the 400G NICs from ESnet.

Chairs

• Nicholas Mbonimpa (Research and Education Network for Uganda (RENU))

Presentations

Stateful Edge Computing, Use Cases and a Path to 400G Line Rate FPGA Processing

ESnet has successfully developed Precision Network Telemetry using P4-programmable NICs. In this talk, we generalize our cases from network telemetry to scientific edge computing, and describe a common platform that can perform Stateful Edge Computing at rates enabled by emerging 400G network interfaces. The same hardware and middleware can be used for WAN networking, as well as DSP and RISC-style processing on scientific workloads for radio telescopes, beam lines and other large scientific instruments.

Speakers:

• Yatish Kumar (ESnet)

There’s plenty of programming space at the network data plane

The lower network layers are facing the innovation of programmable chips, ushering the capability to perform user programming in the data plane. The Software-defined Networking paradigm started the waves disaggregating network nodes, which now have reached the data plane for packet switching and also the optical layer. The presentation elaborates on the scenario and brings first hands-on experience gather in the GN4-3 project on In-Band Telemetry and DDoS mitigation. Great improvements in monitoring and innovation are possible, however data plane programming is not programming as usual.

Speakers:

• Mauro Campanella (GARR)

White Box for Research and Education

The networking industry landscape is evolving fast, driven by cloud market. The new router type called white box, is not only very competitive in comparison with traditional router but also decouples the network operating system from the hardware in order to remove the lock market effect. Is the network in the same situation now as when Linux appeared in the UNIX world? Is white box a real opportunity for research and education networks? In order to suggest a first answer, the performance analyses, the use cases investigation and the feedback from the first white box deployments in production will be presented.

Speakers:

• Xavier Jeannin (RENATER)

Description

To date there are thousands of Identity Providers around the world, which offer the potential to greatly simplify digital life for students and researchers. This session focuses on use cases where Federated Identity can (or already does!) have a direct, positive impact on those individuals; online voting registration, electronic matriculation, cross-border access for exchange students and lifelong identity.

Chairs

• Hannah Short (N/A)

Presentations

Enabling students to vote in government elections… What? Why? How?

Jisc has launched a SAML-based service running on auto-scaling hybrid cloud infrastructure that allows students in the UK to register themselves on the electoral roll to vote in national and local elections. In this talk we’ll discuss the reasons for doing this, how it’s deployed and managed, the joys of dealing with central and local government about such a political service, how the service is being utilised so far, and lessons learned.

Speakers:

• Rhys Smith (Jisc)
• Phil Smart (Jisc)

MyAcademicID: connecting services, building trust, empowering students

MyAcademicID aims at developing a European student eID scheme for higher education by bridging eduGAIN, eIDAS and the European Student Identifier. Students will be able to authenticate and register themselves electronically at higher education institutions and to gain cross-border access to different online student services through a single sign-on when going abroad on exchange. Within the project timeframe, four e-services will integrate MyAcademicID: the Online Learning Agreement, the Erasmus+ Dashboard, the Erasmus+ Mobile App and the PhD Hub Platform, showcasing how mobile students under the Erasmus programme will benefit from this scheme.

Speakers:

• Licia Florio (GÉANT)
• Victor Aguilar (European University Foundation)

EduID - Forging one student identity

SURF is working with institutions on the organisation of student mobility and removing the barriers that exist. We are developing the concept of an eduID to not only uniquely identify students across institutions but to provide them with a lifelong identity, to be used in the context of education and research. EduID is potentially a disruptive concept that needs broad support from all stakeholders. We will present our eduID vision, showcase our current status, including our current practical experiences, international context and discuss the next steps in realizing the shared vision of an eduID that contributes to the seamless mobility of students.

Speakers:

• Maarten Kremers (SURFnet)
• Peter Clijsters (N/A)

Description

Let us help you navigate a journey through the research data lifecycle as we showcase projects finding new ways to improve the lives of researchers: from innovations in the field of geo-informatics to pain-free publication.

Chairs

• Carina Kemp (N/A)

Presentations

Data cubes: taking analysis from a trickle to an ocean

The emergence of data cubes has caused waves in the field of geoinformatics. This presentation provides an overview of the technology as well as its potential impact on researchers lives. This presents an opportunity for NRENs to engage with this technology, to boost science collaboration globally for the benefit of humanity.

Speakers:

• Christopher John Atherton (GÉANT Association)

DataSuds : an open repository for research data in southern countries.

Within the French open science plan and more generally based on open science paradigm, IRD is implementing an institutional policy aiming at controlling data life cycle. This policy is focused on the long tail of data, namely the many small, inaccessible and unorganized datasets. The open research data repository DataSuds, should make it possible to provide a better knowledge and management of the sustainable development research data, and thus to better assess the impact and quality of the scientific productions. This data dissemination will make it possible to better serve the southern community and manage the resources allocated to digital science, in particular thanks to connecting to RREN and NREN.

Speakers:

• Michel LABADIE (IRD)
• Jean-Christophe DESCONNETS (IRD)

Pain Free Publication and Preservation

An exploration of the pain points associated with the publication and preservation (by non specialists) of the research underpinning scholarly publications and the steps Jisc took to address that pain. particularly in relation to the Research @ Risk programme and the Jisc Open Research Hub service.
In this presentation we intend to outline:
• the background to the project ​
• the processes we undertook to bring this project together​
• the underlying data model and the messaging layer it facilitates​
• the current service offering​
• the direction of travel for future development of the service. and​
• Spin-off initiatives (Such as PAR – Preservation Actions Registries)​

Speakers:

• Paul Stokes (Jisc)
• John Kaye (jisc)

Description

Three mayor R&E Networks have recently tendered and committed the build of their new Optical Fleet; ESnet, GÉANT and Internet2 will give an update on their ships, crew and routes. With the help of Optical Vendors we will then draw a rough outline of the 7 Seas and where they meet the end of known Networking world.

Chairs

• JP Velders (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

Presentations

Optical Network Updates

ESnet, GÉANT and Internet2 will give an update on their experiences in tendering and building new optical networks for the research and education community

Speakers:

• Chin Guok (ESnet)
• Chris Wilkinson (Internet2)
• Guy Roberts (GEANT Association)

Optical Challenges

Optical vendors supplying our community will give an overview of the challenges they face in support roll-out of optical networks, including a look at the far-out boundaries of current optical tech and stretching 100GE.

Speakers:

• Marc Lyonnais (Ciena)

Description

Give us an 'e'...give us a 'd'...

eduroam has been the poster child of innovation in the NREN space for a number of years, but we are not done yet. Join this session to hear how eduroam continues to evolve its footprint across the globe.

Chairs

• Paul Dekkers (N/A)

Presentations

Enhancing Trust and Reliability for eduroam

Worldwide footprint and more than a decade of successful operation have moved the eduroam service to its maturity stage. Today, focus is on supporting services - tools and procedures that enable further easier deployment, enhance the trust and assure that eduroam is delivered in a reliable and quality manner. Activities planned and realised in GEANT4-3 project that have the objective to ease the deployment for institutions and National Roaming Operators (NROs), improve the end user experience and ensure the quality of eduroam service will be presented.

Speakers:

• Miroslav Milinović (N/A)

The evolution of eduroam

eduroam today is a very well-known service in the community. It is deployed across thousands of education and research organisations in over 100 countries, and serves billions of roaming end-user authentications each year.
The consortium had to constantly adapt to growth, both proactively and reactively changing its policies, procedures, governance structures, technologies, and support services to enable it sustaining its tremendous growth rate, sometimes 300% per year. The presentation will provide an overview of the major milestones in eduroam technical development over time, along with a deeper look at the most recent addition: the upcoming eduroam Managed SP service.

Speakers:

• Stefan Winter (RESTENA Foundation)

Extending eduroam in the US to K-12 and Beyond

Extending eduroam in the US to K-12 and Beyond: Lessons from a pilot program.
While eduroam enjoys broad ubiquity in many parts of the world, uptake in the US has been slower outside of higher education. A pilot program between InCommon (the national operator of eduroam in the U.S.) and the Utah Education and Telehealth Network has explored ways to extend eduroam to K-12 and throughout a community. This session will discuss the experiences from that pilot and Internet2’s plan for a program to expand eduroam usage via similar partnerships with other regional networks in the US.

Speakers:

• Mike Zawacki (Internet2)

Description

In security we see all kind of ‘signals’ passing by. Some are intentional, meaningfull traffic, some seem meaningless, noise, random scans. Quite a bit of this apparently meaningless traffic is bad traffic: bad guys doing intelligence gathering on your network, a ddos attack in the making or a slowly running advanced attack and data exfiltration.
How do you make sense of all these signals? In this session we will be looking at different angels of signal analyses and intelligence gathering with surprising results to better protect our networks and our data.

Chairs

• Alf Moens (SURFnet)

Presentations

Prioritization and decision aiding for better network security monitoring and incidents handling

Network data flow is constantly increasing. Large volume of noisy data hides the threats, usually difficult to be recognized at the first glance. Automated systems can support decision-making process to deal with incidents efficiently.
Within H2020-Protective project we studied the possibilities of combining data from variety of sources to improve alerts correlation and provide better prioritization for handling attack attempts.
In the presentation we want to share our experience in implementation of multicriteria decision aiding approach (MCDA) based on rough set theory and try to predict what is the future of decision aiding systems in automation of monitoring systems.

Speakers:

• Maciej Miłostan (PSNC, PUT)
• Michał Muras (PSNC)

Automatic DDoS detection and mitigation using XDP

GRNET provides high speed interconnection for numerous large networks and thus it can be a target for large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Therefore DDoS mitigation is important to GRNET and we will showcase our journey deploying a modern approach using eXpress Data Path (XDP)

Speakers:

• Thanos Giannopoulos (GRNET)

Time Series Analysis of Threat Intelligence Feeds

In the past years, Threat Intelligence (TI) has become an important part to detect cyber attacks and incidents. TI data is publicly provided by different sources, including the widely known Internet Storm Center (ISC) of SANS.
A large number of contributions from research has proven that this data can be effectively used to detect global incidents on the Internet such as worms, large-scale DDoS attacks, and activity scanning for new vulnerabilities. We will demonstrate how time series analysis (ARIMA) can be applied to detect such malicious activity and provide exemplary results.

Speakers:

• Jan Kohlrausch (DFN-CERT Services GmbH)

Description

N/A

Chairs

• Klaas Wierenga (GEANT)

Presentations

OCRE – driving waves of commercial digital services adoption across the research community

OCRE, the Open Clouds for Research Environments project, serves to provide the European research community with easily accessible digital services driving innovation and agility across research disciplines and region. The second ambition is to assist the community with driving the adoption by means of a series of funding initiatives.

OCRE provides researchers with the opportunity to adopt a cloud-first approach to research support and move towards a flexible, agile environment in terms of solution interoperability, collaboration and sustainability with regards workload hosting.

Speakers:

• David Heyns (GEANT)

Community Cloud Offerings

This presentation will look into the GÉANT cloud team efforts on community clouds. Cloud infrastructure comes with three basic delivery models - public, private and community clouds. Hybrid clouds are an increasingly prevalent trend and the GÉANT collaboration aims to scale up national service offerings to a pan-European level. The European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) collaborate on the development and delivery of a portfolio of online application services, through a hybrid, multi-cloud approach, making available sector-specific community services, as well as commercial offerings. Through this pan-European aggregation of demand and expertise, the GÉANT cloud team provides NRENs with a service delivery ecosystem that can be applied domestically to enable their research and education member institutions to adopt the offered services in a safe and seamless manner.

Speakers:

• Dan Still (CSC)

Description

For a long time, the only questions National Research and Education Network operators have asked about optical transmission systems is how much data they can transfer, and over how big a distance? Not every application of fibre optics is about data transfer speeds though, and making use of national, and international, fibre footprints for other purposes is increasingly important. In this session we will look at two of those applications — firstly the distribution of accurate time and frequency signals, which is already in service on RENATER, and then talking about Quantum Key Distribution and how it might apply to GÉANT and the NREN community.

Chairs

• Rob Evans (Jisc)

Presentations

First industrial grade optical frequency link deployment over RENATER network for ultrastable frequency transfer

Within the last decade, optical atomic clocks have shown to be outperforming the best Cesium clocks, which are used to realize the unit of time. Being able to connect those new clocks has shown tremendous potential that would stimulate multitude of domains (fundamental research, GNSS, dissemination of the SI second, smart grid…) leading to the emergence of new Time and Frequency services. We report here on first long-haul bidirectional industrial implementation operating @1542.14 nm and co-propagating with data-traffic, Paris-Lille (2018) and Paris-Grenoble (2020). Service is fully integrated in RENATER day-to-day procedures (commissioning, operating, monitoring) as any other standard service.

Speakers:

• Paul Eric Pottie (LNE-SYRTE)

CLONETS-DS – Clock Network Services-Design study; Strategy and innovation for clock services over optical-fibre networks

CLONETS-DS is a potential European Union-funded research and innovation action intended to facilitate the vision of a sustainable, pan-European optical fibre network for precise time and frequency reference dissemination, by bringing together expertise from national metrology institutes (NMI), academic groups and research infrastructures (RI), research and education networks at the national and European level (NREN, GÉANT) and innovative high-technology small and medium enterprises (SME).

Speakers:

• Harald Schnatz (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Braunschweig, Germany)

Quantum Key Distribution

This presentation describes work planned within the Network Technologies and Services Evolution work package (WP6) of the GÉANT GN4-3 project on emerging quantum key distribution (QKD) technology and its potential applicability to the GÉANT and NREN community.

Speakers:

• Piotr Rydlichowski (Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry Poznan Superecomputing and Networking Center)
• Guy Roberts (GEANT)

Description

With research and education becoming increasingly global and collaborative, access to cost effective and user-friendly services is essential. To keep the networking community able to serve the current and more significantly, future needs of global science and education, secure remote services are the ’place you want to be’. Robustness and safety of a collaborative environment is a subject a lot of NRENs are looking into or working on these years. In the first talk we will learn about what eduVPN is, not as much from a technological perspective but from the perspective of providing value to NRENs. The second talk looks into practical and technical experiences with deploying an ‘on demand remote vulnerability scanning service’ that GARR community and many other organisations exploit to detect critical issues in their network assets, receiving detailed information on the treat fundamental causes and suggestions on their remediation. Finally, the last talk underlines the powerful impact of interconnected projects between the NREN partners and the Canadian universities in enhancing the cybersecurity stance of the entire higher education ecosystem.

Chairs

• Giorgos Konnis (CYNET)

Presentations

eduVPN: just when we thought it was going so well, we met some end users…

eduVPN is a VPN solution targeting the research and education community. The service provides secure access both to private institutional networks (as in typical corporate solutions) as well as to public networks. Since it started, eduVPN has focused on user friendliness. The use of client apps aims to reduce the costs associated with configuring VPNs. But it was always a rather deductive approach, implementing the ideas of the developers. This talk focuses on the lessons learned from a co-creation process the eduVPN team engaged in with their targeted audience, within a project funded by the first NGI_Trust Open Call.

Speakers:

• Tangui Coulouarn (DeiC)

A safe harbor against the network's risks tsunami SCARR, the new network vulnerability scan service by GARR

A single breach in the security perimeter can have devastating effects on your network services.
We will present GARR’ SCARR service for on-demand repeated security scans. SCARR is a flexible, secure, remote vulnerability scanning service that enables GARR network Access Point Managers to detect issues in their network assets, providing also treat root causes suggestions and remediations.
SCARR is available to the GARR community since October 2019: 130+ organizations used SCARR to scan 360+ public IP networks in the first month.
In this contribution we will discuss the GARR community feedback. We will present SCARR design and introduce next evolutions.

Speakers:

• Fabio Farina (Consortium GARR)

Cresting the Wave of Collaboration and Surfing Towards a Cybersecure Future!

Canadians know something about waves, living in the country with the world’s longest coastline. And we know a few things about collaboration, which is why we’re excited to share the details of a series of cybersecurity collaborations – among NREN partners, among NREN partners and universities, and among institutions. Each collaboration is focussed on a different dimension of cybersecurity, but as a collective they contribute to an overall framework that strengthens the cybersecurity stance of the entire ecosystem. Join us and learn how to ride the wave without getting swamped!

Speakers:

• Barb Carra (Cybera)
• Bala Kathiresan (BCNET)

Description

The “E” in “NREN” will be the heart of this session by showcasing how NREN activities in Slovenia and Croatia and the Up2University (Up2U) project are contributing to the development of digitally aware youngsters, from primary age to entry into university. The deployment of network and ICT infrastructure in schools, to the provision of e-services and e-content will be discussed, demonstrating how NRENs can play a key role in ensuring today’s youth will be digitally prepared for the future.

Chairs

• Tom Fryer (GÉANT)

Presentations

Infrastructure and services for the education sector across Europe

The Up2University (Up2U) project is the first attempt at a pan-European interaction involving schools, universities and NRENs. With numerous European NRENs already engaged with schools nationally, and universities interested in contributing to content and on-line tools to attract future students, Up2U has developed a software toolbox, adapting and bringing together twelve software tools into an integrated portfolio hosted by a small number of European NRENs, including PSNC. The presentation will focus on how a service offering was created from the toolbox, and discuss the delivery model proposed by PSNC as well as new extensions for the educational sector in Poland.

Speakers:

• Michał Zimniewicz (PSNC)

Services for Schools: An integrated adapted approach using Policy-led Multi-Criteria Analysis

In 2015, following the connection of Croatian schools to the national R&E backbone in 2005, CARNet began the e-Schools project with the aim of creating digitally mature schools and preparing pupils for the job market, further education and lifelong learning. Using the Policy-led Multi-Criteria Analysis, the project has focused on two main types of service, user-oriented and technical prerequisites. The presentation will set out how the services were conceptualised and will describe the challenges of scaling the services to the whole education system. It will conclude with an evaluation of the impact of the pilot phase and the services provided.

Speakers:

• Dragana Kupres (CARNET)
• Damir Regvart (CARNET)

Strengthening education at Slovenian schools through Improved ICT infrastructure (SIO-2020)

In 2016 Arnes started the SIO-2020 programme to strengthen education through three activities for improved ICT infrastructure at Slovenian schools: building wireless networks at all schools; buying ICT equipment; developing e-services and e-educational content. The programme relates to the Knowledge, Skills and Lifelong Learning axis of the European Cohesion Policy 2014-2020, focusing on “improved competences and improved achievements of young people and increased competence of educators through greater use of modern ICT in teaching and learning.” The presentation will describe Arnes’ approach to the project, the successes so far, what still needs to be done, and user feedback.

Speakers:

• Alenka Starc (Arnes)

Description

In this session, we will hear about the important layers of cloud computing, going from monitoring and self-organizing based on specific thresholds, learning from real experience, how to deliver a high-quality Storage As A Service using Ceph to universities, colleges and other educational and research environments, and concluding hearing how to deploy a massive amount of cores, painlessly.

Chairs

• Leandro Guimaraes (RNP)

Presentations

Adding 4,000 cores to GRNET OpenStack cloud during lunch break

Scaling out an OpenStack cloud can be a time-consuming and tedious task. During our mission to deliver the first OpenStack cloud offering by GRNET, we designed and implemented a set of tools and processes to make deployment and operation of OpenStack-based clouds at scale as effortless and errorless as possible. After months of refinement, this is our current solution.

Speakers:

• Stamatis Katsaounis (GRNET)
• Alexandros Soumplis (GRNET)

Ceph in the real world - what have we learned

Safespring delivers backup, large-scale cloud storage and infrastructure as a service through agreements to all universities, colleges and other educational and research environments connected to the national research networks, SUNET in Sweden and UNINETT in Norway.
Safespring has been operating Storage as a Service running on Ceph clusters for the last three years, targeting higher education in Sweden and Norway. In this session, it will be sharing some of their experience. In this presentation will be shared some lessons they have learnt about how to build a good team, how to organise development and operations, share a little about some incidents they have had.

Speakers:

• Bruvik Anders (Safespring)

Openstack performance and tenant-based network monitoring with dockerized ELK stack

Although cloud computing has many advantages enabled us to manage such a large e-infrastructure, it brings some challenges in security, dynamic resource allocation and use of shared physical resources that need to be addressed carefully. A customized monitoring tool is, thus, critical to operating cloud services efficiently without service downtime and to interactively visualize usage activities, resource allocation, performance measurements and network flow aggregated by each tenant. I will talk about our customized monitoring tool deployed for ULAKBIM cloud services and share our experiences.

Speakers:

• Emrah Akkoyun (TUBITAK ULAKBIM)

Description

This session will include presentation from three different research and education networks. The topics covered in this session relate to monitoring, troubleshooting and design of a scalable and user-friendly monitoring and management system. The session will provide insight on how to build a scalable software architecture of NetFlow capture/analysis tool, managing mesh of small-node at scale and a new user-friendly graphical interface for perfSONAR on-demand measurement.

Chairs

• Mian Usman (GÉANT)

Presentations

Monitoring NREN with netflow

An in-house monitoring Netflow monitoring tool is developed in ULAKBIM to replace current netflow capture/analysis tool. The monitoring tool, namely FLOWCU, can achieve 200K EPS capture rate with dockerized scalable architecture and provide real time analysis of netflow data using text based distributed stream analytics architecture.

Speakers:

• Onur BEKTAŞ (TUBITAK ULAKBIM)

Managing the small-node mesh at scale

Managing a small node mesh at scale comes with its own challenges, especially when the management system is run by another organistion to which both sides must, by design, remain untrusted. How do you manage updates, configuration changes and even system rebuilds from several firewalls away? How can you test changes when your primary testlab needs to remain trusted to allow for other projects? Come along and find out how to solve* these problems and more! (*Note Chocolate TimTams may be involved)

Speakers:

• Stephen Walsh (AARNet)

A GUI to enable network troubleshooting with perfSONAR on-demand measurements

Debugging a network performance issue using perfSONAR tools on the command line interface might be challenging to some users. In this presentation, we will discuss two common use cases that would benefit from the introduction of a new graphical user interface. We will present the design and architecture and demo this new GUI that helps network engineers trigger on-demand measurements in an easy to use visual front-end.

Speakers:

• Antoine Delvaux (Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center)
• Ljubomir Hrboka (CARNET)

Description

Session Wave patterns invites you to observe three different network research related patterns, which can be adaptable in an extensive range of innovative applications. Topics in this session will shine some light on the Quantum Communications overviewing the investigations from quantum networking testbed, and how successfully developed optical time & frequency network techniques are a catalyst to emerging new time & frequency services. Moreover, there will be given examples of successful partnership between researcher in high performance networking and communication vendors.

Chairs

• Ieva Muraškienė (LITNET)

Presentations

Challenges and Opportunities In Quantum Communications and Networking

This presentation is an overview of research in quantum communications and networking using testbeds. Quantum communications and network are particularly important research areas for a wide range of innovative applications. Recently, Northwestern established a new initiative, INQUIRE, to advance quantum science. Northwestern, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility consortium, the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN), and other university research collaborators formed a partnership to create a metro scale quantum networking testbed to investigate fundamental issues in quantum communications and networking, especially interconnecting quantum computers.

Speakers:

• Joel Mambretti (International Center for Advanced Internet Research Northwestern University)

How to better collaborate with Industry and tap in to $Billions in Networking R&D Intelligence.

Network Researchers are to be congratulated on results derived from funding invested by their government agencies. The diversity and depth of research in High Performance Networking is visionary and significant. However, projects do not always align to Industry needs, nor do they leverage Investments made by for-profit researchers. The top 5 communications vendors collectively invest $8.306B annually in R&D. 5-10% of this money is invested in forward looking “advanced” research. This talk shines a light on, what motivates Industry researchers, how academic R&E net researchers can better tap into Industry R&D and offers examples of successful approaches, projects & Public-Private-Partnerships.
Mr. Wilson is Ciena’s Executive Leader of a multi-million-dollar External Research program that funds academic and advanced “experimental” network projects in Europe and around the world. His TNC20 content is drawn from over 20 years of active, productive, exciting collaboration with NREN’s, select university partners and competing vendors.

Speakers:

• Rodney Wilson (Ciena Corporation)

Optical Time & Frequency Network

Time and Frequency (T&F) services are critical to many civilian and industrial sectors, like positioning, energy, finance, advanced science use case. Therefore T&F services become of major interest. During the past few years, National Metrology Institutes have successfully developed non-standard fibre-based techniques. These new techniques are showing unmatched stability performances – three orders of magnitude better than the best commercial services. Once again, NRENs are in a strong position to undertake applied research in a way that commercial companies would find difficult. OTFN is catalysing the emergence of these new T&F services in Europe by creating new opportunities and raising awareness. Therefore, will proudly present early achievements together with recommendations.

Speakers:

• Xavier jeannin (RENATER)

Description

This lively and interactive session will provide updates from three EOSC Working Groups with major relevance to the NREN community: Architecture, Sustainability and Landscape.

Chairs

• Sabine JAUME-RAJAONIA (RENATER)

Presentations

Hoist the Sails … EOSC at TNC

Speakers in this session are the EOSC Executive Board members and an NREN representative who are chairs or members of the EOSC working groups and they will present their work to date and their planning towards the end of 2020, when the current EOSC Governance ends. In the second part of the session these speakers will be joined in a panel by three representatives from our community: from an NREN, from GÉANT, as well as a university leading Europe in digital curation.

Speakers:

• Alberto Perez Gomez (RedIRIS)
• Cathrin Stöver (Executive Board member/GÉANT)
• Edit Herczog (GÉANT)
• Jan Hrusak (EOSC Executive Board Member)
• Jean-Francois Abramatic (EOSC Executive Board member)
• Ronan Byrne (HEANET)
• Sarah Jones (EOSC Executive Board member/Digital Curation Centre)

Description

Closing of TNC20, featuring a keynote from Dr Adam Lewis, Managing Director, Digital Earth Africa Establishment Team.

Chairs

• N/A

Presentations

Research infrastructures: transformative capabilities on a global scale

Research infrastructures are transformative capabilities on a global scale. They can create waves of deep change in the way in which scientific data and models are applied to benefit society. They typically sit at the leading edge of capabilities and concepts, and can play a unique enabling role for innovations such as the Open Data Cube (opendatacube.org), allowing them to scale from an idea to a reality and massively increasing the impact of science. The Open Data Cube has grown from innovations in Australia and is transforming the way satellite images are being used to map, monitor and manage land and water resources – not just in Australia but in America, Asia, Europe and Africa. Digital Earth Africa will be the world’s largest operational platform for the exploitation of satellite imagery. In an era of accelerating global change and unprecedented challenges for humanity, enabling ‘impact at scale’ may be a core strategy for the NREN community.

Speakers:

• Adam Lewis (Digital Earth Africa )