HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM THE CAAREN TEAM
As 2016 comes to a close, I wanted to take a moment to wish you Happy Holidays and give you an update on the busy year we’ve had at the Capital Area Advanced Research and Education Network (CAAREN). Now in its fourth year, CAAREN has added a new member to the network (The World Bank Group) and received an award from the NSF for the grant “Substrate for Cybersecurity Education; a Platform for Training, Research and Experimentation (SCEPTRE)” to extend the Michigan Cyber Range over Internet2 to GW’s Virginia Science and Technology Campus. This effort provides a regional high performance software defined network exchange (MSX) that is currently being used for research and education in cybersecurity, Internet of things, and smart city strategies. The MSX portal will be available over CAAREN to member institutions interested in connections with community based public-private partnerships in Northern Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC.
CAAREN staff continues to improve and expand our 100 Gig optical network infrastructure, and collaborative research opportunities for our members are more abundant than ever through participation in the MetroLab Network, Global Cities Team Challenge, Smarter DC, Gramercy District and SCEPTRE Initiatives. We are looking forward to another active year as we add new staff and services, and establish the cyber range hub as a regional cybersecurity education and training center. Next year will provide new opportunities for CAAREN members; please let me know if there is anything I can do to assist your institutes’ participation in any of the regional network R&E programs described below.
Best wishes for 2017,
Donald DuRousseau
Director, CAAREN
CAAREN JOINS 22 CAPITAL PARTNERS AND CENTER FOR INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY ON SMART CITY INITIATIVE
In August 2016, a new smart city initiative was announced by 22 Capital Partners, a venture builder and private equity company. Along with the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) and the George Washington University (GW), the partnership will lead the development of an ecosystem to create smart city technology, education and innovation in the Gramercy District in Virginia. The Capital Area Advanced Education and Research Network (CAAREN) will provide advanced networking, and serve as a liaison between 22 Capital Partners and GW researchers for the project.
As the first smart city in the region, and one of the first in the country, the Gramercy District will create an environment that continuously adapts to meet the needs of business partners and guests who are working, living, shopping and playing in the smart city. The partnership between GW, 22 Capital Partners and the Center for Innovative Technology will help to facilitate access to and use of a working smart city development, connecting areas along the Washington, D.C. and Washington Dulles International Airport corridor.
GW's Virginia Science & Technology Campus located in Ashburn, Va., brings professional educational innovations in areas such as cyber security and data analytics along with entrepreneurial development and technology transfer education through the NSF funded iCorps program. GW is working with the D.C. government's Office of the Chief Technology Officer on the Pennsylvania Avenue 2040 Environmental Sensing Project in Washington, D.C. and is part of the MetroLab Network, a national smart cities initiative for municipalities and research institutions to cooperate on key city-wide issues.
This partnership with GW, the Gramercy District and CIT will support new research opportunities and scale up regional job training activities around Internet of Things (IoT), cybersecurity, city planning and entrepreneurship. The Gramercy District will be the test bed that provides individuals, businesses and researchers with opportunities for hands-on learning in a smart city environment built to foster the use of new IoT technologies and methods, leading to a repeatable process for smart city experimentation and innovation.
Read more in the Washington Business Journal.
CAAREN COLLABORATES ON METROLAB PROJECTS TO BRING INNOVATION TO D.C.
On September 14, 2015, President Obama announced a newly created MetroLab Network as a part of a $160 million Smart Cities initiative to help communities tackle local challenges and improve city services. The MetroLab Network has expanded to include several city-university partnerships focused on bringing data, analytics, and innovation to city government.
The Smart Cities Initiative will invest in federal research and leverage these technology collaborations to help local communities tackle key challenges such as reducing traffic congestion, fighting crime, fostering economic growth, managing the effects of a changing climate, and improving the delivery of city services. The MetroLab Network will work to strengthen and create partnerships between metro areas and their respective universities.
The District of Columbia, Georgetown University, The George Washington University, and Howard University have partnered to join the Network, which will provide the opportunity to share successes, address challenges, and build shared platforms for experimentation and data between cities and universities necessary to increase the tangible results of new innovations. GW's contribution to the MetroLab Network also includes leveraging the power of the Capital Area Advanced Research and Education Network (CAAREN), to help connect the city, engage the community and foster innovation.
CAAREN is involved in several MetroLab projects in the Washington D.C. area, including Urban Living Labs, which is focusing on creating a network of sensor hubs at several university campuses in D.C. The sensors will collect environmental data on air quality and other ambient information such as air temperature, humidity, wind, pollutants, CO2 and other barometric pressure. The data will be stored in a shared repository, accessible by researchers from each university.
D.C MAYOR. BOWSER HIGHLIGHTS MILESTONE IN PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE 2040 PROJECT
The Division of IT’s Research Technology Services (RTS) in connection with GW’s Capital Area Advanced Research and Education Network (CAAREN) are working in collaboration with the D.C. government and the National Capital Planning Commission on the launch of the Pennsylvania Avenue 2040 initiative.
PA 2040 is a project to actualize today what Pennsylvania Avenue might look like in 2040. In this effort, RTS is working with GW researchers to develop and install environmental sensing hubs across the city, starting with Pennsylvania Avenue. CAAREN will be used to aggregate live sensing data, provide access to city-wide data repositories and establish an Open Science Data Platform where users can analyze and share environmental sensing, and other data, such as traffic video from sensors built into the modern low-energy street lights.
These lights also house WiFi nodes that will be available for visitors to the PA 2040 area to use. The on-the-pole WiFi will be used to stream some of the environmental sensing data over to CAAREN, while other sensors will be connected using Ethernet, Cellular or Low Frequency Wireless methods, depending on their location.
Initially, the sensing hubs will be used by researchers and applications developers that want to measure air quality and pollutants, and monitor light and noise pollution, or vehicle and pedestrian traffic flows and incidents, to provide real-time information for rapid response by emergency services.
In combination with the PA 2040 effort in DC, Leona Agourdis, Executive Director of the Golden Triangle Business Improvement District said “The Golden Triangle businesses will be using data from the PA 2040 sensors, as well as from our building’s temperature and climate sensors to improve the efficiency of our own operation.”
Mayor Bowser highlighted the PA 2040 initiative in a speech on October 20, 2016. Along with D.C. Chief Technology Officer Archana Vemulapalli and Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, Mayor Bowser introduced D.C. as the first in the country to become a “Lighthouse City,” part of a Cisco initiative to pioneer smart city infrastructure through pilot programs and government partnerships.
“With this partnership, we will provide new opportunities to increase economic development, create jobs and provide innovative education across public and private sectors,” Mayor Bowser said in her speech.
RTS is working with researchers and sensor developers at GW, like Dr. Houston Miller in the Department of Chemistry, to deploy new sensors, while CAAREN is being employed to provide the high-speed network infrastructure that will facilitate collaboration between GW researchers and the PA 2040 project team.
Watch the full announcement video here.
CAAREN BRINGS CYBERSECURITY EDUCATION, TRAINING, RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION TO GW AND SURROUNDING COMMUNITY THROUGH $0.5 MILLION GRANT
GW and CAAREN are teaming up with the Michigan Cyber Range (MCR) to bring a cutting-edge cybersecurity training environment to GW’s Virginia Science and Technology Campus (VSTC). Made possible by a half-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the SCEPTRE project will create a platform for training, research and experimentation.
The two-year grant, awarded in August, will provide the GW Cyber Academy’s students and faculty with access to an advanced cybersecurity training facility through the new GW Cyber Hub – an expansion of Michigan’s Cyber Range. This new facility will become a regional hub for cybersecurity training by extending its offerings to other universities and businesses in the region and Commonwealth. GW will also develop and share educational and research resources.
GW’s goal is to create a steady supply of traditional and non-traditional cybersecurity students at GW and regional institutions, as the demand for highly trained cybersecurity professionals is at an all-time high. Without training in a realistic, adaptable environment, these professionals are unprepared for the demands of protecting cyber infrastructures for organizations, institutions and businesses in the real world. The complexity of cybersecurity requires hands-on learning, a step beyond lectures and presentations.
The Michigan Cyber Range provides a real-world environment to help train future cybersecurity professionals, with a virtual environment for cybersecurity research. The Cyber Range runs on the Merit Network, a regional research and education network infrastructure providing high-performance services for education, government, health care, libraries and nonprofit organizations.
GW will use its own network infrastructure, the Capital Area Advanced Research and Education Network (CAAREN) to pair with Merit to bring the capabilities of the Michigan Cyber Range to the Campus. CAAREN will operate the GW Cyber Range, the test bed and research platform, and the new training facility, a hub on the MCR. GW’s Cyber Academy will develop and deliver courses and certificates.
GW’s team includes the principal investigator, Dr. Jaroslav Flidr, the principal architect for Research Cloud Computing in GW’s Division of Information Technology (IT), along with co-principal investigators, Don DuRousseau, director, Research Technology Services, also in the Division of IT, and Dr. Frederic Lemieux, professor and director of Homeland Security and Police and Security Studies programs in GW’s College of Professional Studies. Flidr will be in charge of the system architecture, as well as the technical team and project activities, while DuRousseau will oversee partner relationships. Lemieux will be responsible for new curriculum development.
The grant will also bring on a cybersecurity engineer who will act as a liaison between the education community and cybersecurity professionals. The cyber engineer will work with faculty to help them develop courses based on the new platform. “The partnership will allow us to develop additional customized training through scenario simulations,” said Lemieux. “I plan to develop coursework on Intrusion Detection and Remediation using access to the Michigan Cyber Range. Students will be better able to integrate practice with theory in both the undergraduate and graduate cybersecurity programs.”
As soon as the Cyber Hub is up and running, anticipated to be in early 2017, the existing robust training resources on the Merit Network will be available, including a secure sandbox with a virtual city. According to Flidr, principal investigator on this grant, “The Michigan Cyber Range’s virtual city of Alphaville is a critical resource for students because from the cybersecurity perspective it is real. Its virtual municipal and organizational components - the hospital, the power plant and its schools - are configured the same way their real-world counterparts would be. In fact, it is so real that when someone successfully hacks Alphaville’s power plant, the city goes dark in its 3D visualization engine presentation!“
Community partners, including universities and businesses in the region and Commonwealth, will also be able to create content and use CAAREN’s high-speed network to access the training environment. GW professors will develop new cybersecurity curriculum using these resources, which will be available to the larger community as adult education classes through the Northern Virginia Community College system.
GW researchers will also have access to the Cyber Range to test studies in a repeatable environment with advanced networking on an open science platform.
For more information about cybersecurity training opportunities, please contact [email protected]. For more information on CAAREN, please contact [email protected]. For information on partnerships in connection with this grant, please contact Don DuRousseau.
CAAREN COLLABORATES WITH A*STAR COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH CENTER TO HELP CREATE A GALAXY OF SUPERCOMPUTERS
The Division of IT Research Technology Services (RTS) team, led by Don DuRousseau, has collaborated with A*STAR Computational Research Center (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) in Singapore on the Long-haul InfiniCortex project. The major concept of InfiniCortex involves connecting separate InfiniBand sub-nets with different net topologies to create a single computational resource: a galaxy of supercomputers that have the ability to provide a level of concurrent supercomputing necessary for supporting Big Data and Exascale computing. Enabled by the InfiniBand extension technology supporting transcontinental distances with Obsidian’s Longbow range extenders and a high bandwidth (10 to 100Gbps) intercontinental connectivity such as Internet2, the current InfiniCortex infrastructure is comprised of computing resources residing globally at multiple locations in Singapore, Japan, Australia, USA, Canada, France and Poland.
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For this project, Dr. Jaroslav Flidr from RTS has set up a four-nodes compute-cluster at GW to connect to the InfiniCortex at A*STAR in Singapore via CAAREN and Internet2. In addition, Dr. Adam Wong also from RTS has preformed a benchmarking of a real MPI parallel application: mpiBlast on the InfiniCortex infrastructure using computing resources distributed over two countries – USA and Singapore. An experiment demonstrating the use of the MPI parallel application on InfiniCortex was shown recently in the Supercomputing Conference (SC16) in November. The promising preliminary result of executing MPI parallel applications over a Long-haul InfiniBand network has illustrated the potential of the InfiniCortex platform for global supercomputing.