September 10-12, 1997, Santa Fe, NM, USA

The meeting was held in the Hotel Santa Fe, which was provided with a T1 connection for the meeting. There were about 50 attendees, about 50% (23) were using laptops in the meeting of which only 4 were Macs. The attendees included the ESSC members plus about 20 attendees from the ICFA-NTF meeting the previous 2 days.

Large scale networks:

• The FNC and FNCAC have gone. Will be picked up by a committee (LSN (Large Scale Networking) WG - falls under NTSC/CCIC under Computing Information & Communications R&D Subcommittee) led by George Strawn & Dave Nelson.
• PSWG/CIS privacy security working group will continue for information sharing among agencies. Report due out end of this month.
• EOWG è JET (Joint Engineering Team) Look at sharing of networking among the agencies will take up work of FNC. Working on getting a common AUP. Proposal to also worry about International AUPs.

ESnet & NGI programmatic Goals

• ESnet progress report early CY 97
• NGI Concept paper/Impl plan Jul 97 complete
• NGI workshop May 13
• ESnet video support re-evaluation mid CY97 complete
• ESnet pgm plan mid CY97
• NGI budget info late CY 97 (DOE got zeroed out, did not lose any money)
• ESnet program review mid CY98
• ESnet follow-on RFP release mid CY 98
• This is a major issue, has to do with follow on contract for Esnet. Esnet has done well, funding is stable
• NGI & DOE funding issues (all 1998)

ESnet Future

FTS2001 Services

• Circuit switched (e.g. ATM), satellite services, video conferencing, EMS, international services etc. so it will need a lot of substantiation as to why Esnet is different and should not use FTS2001

Summary

• Need program reps. To provide input to Program Plan
• Need Program Represeantatives to provide input to the Progress Report
• Need committee to carefully analyze our future requiremengts in light of FTS2001 and NGI
• Need ESSC to provide input on the R&D production futures.

Networks are Critical to the Accomplishments of DOE Missions - good news, and they are free (i.e. no money provided) - bad news.

Short Term Issues:

• ESnet core
• Cost effective, manageable connections to other communities;
• Relationship to NGI
• language in report says DOE should do nothing with/for NGI, got none of $25M new money for NGI, kept $10M that was redirected to NGI,
• NSF got $13M to connect up Universities,
• the issues are not fully resolved but looks doubtful that DOE will get any money for NGI,
• part of the problem of appears to be recognizing DOE as a technology research arm, rather seen as mission oriented, also the Universities distrust of DOE and close connections to NSF).
• Relationship to "DOE Corporate Network", i.e. a network to support DOE's corporate systems/applications, could do as a VPN over ESnet
• International Connectivity

Net R&D Program Foci

• Network monitoring at SLAC & LBNL

DOE 2000 Collaboratory R&D

• Electronic Logbooks
• Collaborative Integration Framework
• Collaborative Session Management
• Shared virtual spaces

Highlights:

• TEN-34, TEN-155, … QUANTUM
• DFN

• Extensive 155Mbps network plus 34 MBps
• Funded by Universities & other clients
• Has 2*T3 (43 Mbps) links to US which are already saturated during the working day

Issues

• Mismatch of access restrictions with partner networks
• Non-reciprocal funding, especially with Europe,
• what traffic should ESnet feel responsible for?
• a European view was that US universities are not paying for their intercontinental connections (there was an article recently in Nature reporting the results of a French study that indicated Europe is paying over $40M compared to the US's ~ $2M), NSF does not feel it is their responsibility (Strawn said networking should be a competitive commercial business and not paid by government, in Europe there is a recognition that academic and research needs to be supported centrally, US view might be that MCI would recognize the importance of being connected to the European A&E nets and so pay for connectivity), maybe Internet 2 also needs to think about this
• International access to US universities
• This is poor and a major concern, and again needs to be raised at the Internet 2 community
• Bottlenecks
• UK MCI bottleneck
• France
• Does not have particular good connections with ESnet, it is impacting BaBar at SLAC
• Special routing arrangements
• Japan-US-Europe
• Action Items
• Access restrictions, US univsersities - Leighton, Liello, Strawn, I2
• ESnet-related traffic measurements - Liello
• VBNS connection to Perryman for international university access, question of peering and AUPs - Price
• CERN (and others?) connection to ESnet - ESSC
• Next Meetings
• Feb/Mar 1998 video meeting on action item
• May/June Paris

Contract with Sprint runs out soon. Looking at negotiating a new contract. Will compete. NASA/NREN interested in collaborating. Will use successful aspects of current contract including advanced communications services, partnership arrangement working within vendor's general strategy, term = 3+1+1 years.

New requirements:

• ATM ABR, SVC,
• hubbing & colocation,
• international support,
• transition from current contract,
• grow bandwidth requirements,
• local loop costs.

Schedule for reprocurement:

• Outline general requirements, approach, schedule - 4Q97.
• Establish working teams, evaluation, procurement - 4Q97
• Do initial vendor visits - 4Q97
• Refine approach, solicitation - 4Q97
• Complete procurement package - 1Q98
• Do vendor briefing - 1Q98
• Release procurement - 1Q98
• Complete evaluation - 2Q98
• Develop transition plan -3-4Q98
• Begin transition - 1Q99
• Complete transition - 3Q99

Research Directions

• QoS
• ATM capabilities
• ABR (Available Bit Rate)- fair sharing of bandwidth
• Esnet ATM users, international
• CBR (Constant Bit Rate) dedicated line emulation

• Video/ISDN replacment
• UBR (Unspecified Bit Rate) no guaranteed service
• Costs effectiveness
• Research support
• RT-VBR (Real Time Variable Bit Rate)- delay & jitter control
• Experimental control (?), video
• SVCs (Switched Virtual Circuits)
• All the above capabilities on demand

• IP capabilities

• Tag switching
• Class Based Queuing (CBQ
• Integrated Services (IETF model), least likely to make it, it tries do all things for all people, but is inordinately complicated

• IPv6 based collaboration with
• Ellemtel ( a non-profit co-owned subsidiary or Ericson & Telia in Sweden) various network trials
• May be willing to pull a T3 into Perryman
• Test beds
• Proposing to establish an alpha Esnet backbone research & trials for emerging technology will use PVC connections on existing ATM infrastructure
• Other project testbeds are being considered

DOE corporate network

• DOE's Information Management Council have tasked the DOE Networking Group headed by Tom Rowlett of HR, to create a business plan for a DOE corporate network.
• The precise nature is not understood, for example security requirements

PR Work

• Brochure updates
• Services, overview, Impact on Science
• Short videos to show impact of networking on research collaboration with US industry, distributed computing support, support for other programs through virtual network support. Will make available over the Web in a variety of formats
• SC97 support (vBNS will not support this year), have been asked to support, will provide OC12 from Oakland hub to SC97 show floor.