General

The MREN community participates in and organizes numerous events of various types, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. These events include technical showcases, application and technology demonstrations, meetings of standards groups, interoperability tests, formal agreement signing ceremonies, trade shows, network conferences, technology workshops, science workshops, network planning events, meetings of network associations, and other forums. The application demonstrations are those that utilize high performance networks. Some of these applications are described in the "Applications" section of this web site. The MREN Executive Committee meets three times each year (Fall, Winter and Spring), and the Technical Committee also attempts to meet three times per year, e.g., during the Joint Techs workshops..

Events

 Some of the events in which the MREN community frequent participates are:

Asia Pacific Advanced Networking Conferences and Special Events

 MREN has worked closely with the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network Consortium (APAN), since it was established on 3 June 1997 for research and development in advanced networking application and services in the Asia-Pacific region.   (www.apan.net)

Access Grid Retreats

The Access Grid (AG) is the ensemble of resources that can be used to support human interaction across Grids. It consists of multimedia display, presentation and interactions environments, interfaces to grid middleware, interfaces to visualization environments. The Access Grid supports large-scale distributed meetings, collaborative work sessions, seminars, lectures, tutorials and training. The Access Grid design point is group to group communication (thus differentiating it from desktop to desktop based tools that focus on individual communication). The Access Grid environment must enable both formal and informal group interactions.  Large-format displays integrated with intelligent or active meeting rooms are a central feature of the Access Grid nodes. Access Grid nodes are "designed spaces" that explicitly contain the high-end audio and visual technology needed to provide a high-quality compelling user experience. (www.accessgrid.org)

CANARIE's Annual Advanced Networking Workshops

CANARIE, a member of MREN, is a Canadian consortium that promotes the concept that a national broadband infrastructure serving all Canadian communities is critical to Canada's ability to innovate. Information technology infrastructure is one of the most important vehicles for promoting innovation and improving Canada's productivity, leading to increased wealth and economic growth. CANARIE develops advanced national networks, and has led the world in large-scale advanced optical networking. CANARIE organizes an excellent annual advanced networking conference.

Open Grid Forum

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community-initiated forum of individual researchers and practitioners working on distributed computing, or "grid" technologies. OGF is the result of a merger of the Grid Forum, the eGrid European Grid Forum, and the Grid community in Asia-Pacific.  These initial forum efforts included five major workshops. OGF efforts are also aimed at the development of a broadly based Integrated Grid Architecture that can serve to guide the research, development, and deployment activities of the emerging Grid communities. Defining such an architecture will advance the Grid agenda through the broad deployment and adoption of fundamental basic services and by sharing code among different applications with common requirements. Wide-area distributed computing, or "grid" technologies, provide the foundation to a number of large-scale efforts utilizing the global Internet to build distributed computing and communications infrastructures. As common Grid services and interoperable components emerge, the difficulty in undertaking these large-scale efforts will be greatly reduced and, as importantly, the resulting systems will better support interoperation. (www.globalgridforum.org)

Globus Forum

The Globus Project is developing fundamental technologies needed to build computational grids.  Grids are persistent environments that enable software applications to integrate instruments, displays, computational and information resources that are managed by diverse organizations in widespread locations. (www.globus.org)

iGRID98, iGRID2000, iGRID2002, iGRID2005

Started in 1998, the biennial iGrid (International Grid) event showcases application advancements and middleware innovations enabled by globally connected, high-performance networks. In September 2002 in Amsterdam, iGrid 2002 challenged scientists and technologists to optimally utilize 10Gbps experimental networks, with special emphasis on e-Science, Grid and Virtual Laboratory applications. Grid and Virtual Laboratory technologies are crucial prerequisites to a future, flexible e-Science infrastructure. Grid computing is increasingly perceived as the main enabling technology for facilitating multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary collaborations, enabling researchers to share unique resources and to have uniform and ubiquitous access to these facilities. Grid technologies are enabling the development of Virtual Laboratories, or science portals, for distributed analysis in applied scientific research. Groups worldwide are collaborating on Virtual Laboratory/Grid research projects, creating experimental platforms upon which e-Science and large-scale distributed-computing experiments can take place. , (www.igrid2005.org)

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual. The actual technical work of the IETF is done in its working groups, which are organized by topic into several areas (e.g., routing, transport, security, etc.). Much of the work is handled via mailing lists. The IETF holds meetings three times per year. The IETF working groups are grouped into areas, and managed by Area Directors, or ADs. The ADs are members of the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Providing architectural oversight is the Internet Architecture Board, (IAB). The IAB also adjudicates appeals when someone complains that the IESG has failed. The IAB and IESG are chartered by the Internet Society (ISOC) for these purposes. The General Area Director also serves as the chair of the IESG and of the IETF, and is an ex-officio member of the IAB.

Internet Society Conferences, Including INET200X Conferences

The Internet Society, which is the sponsoring organization of the IETF sponsors several types of events, including a major annual international conference.

International Engineering Consortium Conferences

The International Engineering Consortium (IEC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to catalyzing positive change in the information industry and its university communities. (www.iec.org)

Networld+Interop (National and International)

Networld+Interop organizes various trade shows and conferences.

MREN Events

MREN has organized various types of technical and showcase events, local, national and international. MREN has participates in sponsoring many application demonstrations at various conferences.

National Laboratory for Advanced Networking Research Events

In prior years, National Laboratory for Advanced Internet Research, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, organized several Joint-Tech Workshops each year, with the UCAID organization. (www.nlanr.org) MREN participated in these workshops.

Supercomputing Conferences Organization

The Supercomputing conference organization is a voluntary consortium of persons acting together to advance the science and application of high-performance computing technology through the offering of technical meetings and in particular, through the offering of, The Supercomputing Conference (SC, e.g., SC2010), the annual conference on high-performance computing and communications, at which all aspects of supercomputing can be considered. (www.supercom.org)

StarLightConferences

The StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility provides advanced services based on leading edge optical networking technologies. StarLight is the successor to the previous international exchange, the Science, Technology, And Research Transit Access Point, or STAR TAP, which was implemented as a persistent infrastructure for international R&E networking funded by the National Science Foundation (awards ANI-9712283 and ANI-9980480) to facilitate the long-term interconnection and interoperability of advanced international networking. StarLight is managed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Math and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University. StarLight provides a wide range of services that support support global science applications, specialized performance measuring,technology evaluations, and multiple network research testbeds. (www.startap.net/starlight)

Global Lamda Grid Workshops (GLIF)

The annual Global Lamda Grid Workshops are the international meetings organized for the designers and operators of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF), a world-wide distributed facility based on optical networking and trans-oceanic fiber. (www.glif.is).

TERENA

MREN members participate in conferences organzized by TERENA - Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association - formed in October 1994 by the merger of RARE (Réseaux Associés pour la Recherche Européenne) and EARN (European Academic and Research Network). "...to promote and participate in the development of a high quality international information and telecommunications infrastructure for the benefit of research and education." (TERENA Statutes). TERENA carries out technical activities and provides a platform for discussion to encourage the development of a high-quality computer networking infrastructure for the European research community. (www.terena.nl)

University Corporation for Advanced Internet Research (UCAID) Conferences

University Corporation for Advanced Internet Research (UCAID) is a consortium being led by over 200 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies (www.ucaid.edu). UCAID has developed, and manages, the national Abilene network that provides high performance connectivity for the US higher education community. UCAID member conferences are held twice each year.

© 2010 MREN

12-1-10