ProNet: ACE (America Connects to Europe)
ACE proposes to provide multi-gigabit bandwidth and services connecting researchers in the US with their counterparts in Europe that will continue to serve current needs well but also extend the transatlantic exchange into further scientific fields and disciplines. ACE will deploy several 10Gbps waves between Europe and the US, starting with 40 Gbps and growing over the lifetime of the award.
Indiana University (IU), as the lead institution, will function as a cooperative partnership with Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe (DANTE), Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA), New York State Education and Research Network (NYSERNet ), and Internet2. DANTE is the operator of the pan-European network GÉANT, which interconnects all of the national R&E networks in Europe, acts as the operating partner in several intercontinental research networking projects across Europe and Asia, and has long provisioned and operated multiple 10Gbps links across the Atlantic to interconnect its European partners with North American networks. NYSERNet is a partner in Manhattan Landing Exchange Point (MAN LAN) and is the optical terminus for many US telecommunications carriers and transatlantic cables. MAN LAN is owned and operated by Internet2 in partnership with NYSERNet and with NOC and engineering services from the IU Global NOC. Internet2 is the leading US research and education networking organization, representing 300 member institutions and connecting thousands of US educational, research, cultural, and related institutions, with partnership agreements with nearly 60 R&E networks around the world. Through cooperative partnership with NYSERNet and the DANET/GÉANT community of more than 34 national R&E networks that will be reachable through these connections, the ACE award will provide the best economies of scale in transatlantic connectivity, supporting a very broad community of users.
One explicit goal of the ACE project is to develop tools and mechanisms to facilitate close operational integration among these network operators. IU and Internet2 have extensive experience in joint software development and deployment centered on the perfSONAR and dynamic circuit networking activities. As a part of DICE, the ACE project will immediately deploy, expand, and enhance services in security, measurement, identity management, and operational integration in coordination with ongoing DICE activities.
Intellectual merit
As part of the DICE collaboration, the ACE partners will expand and enhance services in security, measurement, identity management, and operational integration. Close cooperation among the DICE participants? efforts will maximize US-EU connectivity, increase collaborations (particularly with respect to security), ensure deployment of accurate and useful measurement technology, deploy dynamic circuit services to meet the needs of high-bandwidth applications, and decrease costs by eliminating duplication of effort.
Broader impact
This project will procure significant additional bandwidth between the US and EU to support a wide range of collaboration between scientists and engineers. In addition, it will support collaboration on technical, operational, and planning exercises that are critical in supporting science and engineering research. Through cooperative partnership with DANTE and the GÉANT community of more than 34 national research and education networks, the ACE project will provide the best economies of scale in transatlantic connectivity, supporting a very broad community of users.
Integrating diversity with research and education is a strong component of the proposal. IU will partner with the existing Gerald L. Bepko Internship Program at IU, which has as its goal of identifying, connecting and working with students in populations under-represented in information technology, to extend educational reach and integrate diversity into the ACE program.
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ProNet: Americas Lightpaths: Increasing the Rate of Discovery and Enhancing Education across the Americas
The project team intends Americas Lightpaths (AmLight) to enable research and education amongst the people of the Americas through the operation of production infrastructure for communication and collaboration between the US and Western Hemisphere science and engineering research and education communities. Four links are proposed to tie together the major research networks of five of the larger countries in the Americas: Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and the United States. In addition, this work will enable interconnects between the United States and the Latin American regional network of RedCLARA, which enables connectivity to 18 Latin American national research and education networks.
The effort is fundamentally collaborative, includingg AURA, ANSP, RNP, CENIC, AtlanticWave, PacificWave, ANSP, CUDI, RedCLARA, and REUNA. Through AtlanticWave and PacificWave, there will be production connectivity and peering to North American backbone networks Internet2, National Lambda Rail (NLR), ESnet, and CANARIE. Through RedCLARA, there will be production connectivity to thirteen national research and education networks with plans to expand to eighteen NRENs during the life of the project.
AmLight will enhance global e-Science collaborations through distributed production peering fabrics, as well as any research and education networks present or future that connect to AtlanticWave or PacificWave. AmLight is a network architecture designed to support the needs of U.S.-Western Hemisphere research and education communities in a manner that supports the evolving nature of discovery and scholarship. The capacity and designs are based on collaborative funding over the five-year project plan, and are expected to evolve and continue to match the needs of the community.
Over 40 collaborations that include participants from the Americas are funded directly by NSF and encompass disciplines including physics, environmental science, oceanography, climate change, astronomy, and others. AmLight will serve as the foundational infrastructure to support these collaborations.
Intellectual Merit
AmLight is an approach to solve the problem of interconnecting not just the advanced networks, but the core communities and needs behind them in the Western Hemisphere. Today?s research is being adversely impacted by the lack of networking capacity to and from South America. AmLight provides the structure and the resources to empower researchers and educators. These successes present themselves qualitatively in the creation of geographically distributed research groups using the network, working groups formed through common interests developed on the network, and publications made possible through the network.
Broader Impact
As the network ties together more instruments and research groups at higher speeds, the result will be an increase in the rate of gathering, processing, and sharing data. This will produce an increase in the rate of discovery. The possible impact of this award touches on many areas of collaborative science and engineering. From biodiversity research that will identify specimens faster, to collaborative biomedical engineering that will discover drug treatments more quickly, to nuclear physicists. Scholarship in the Americas will improve through new opportunities for collaborative teaching, technology-augmented student mobility, and an infrastructure for inquiry-based learning. The AmLight project will allow U.S. classrooms to share a window to classrooms throughout the Western Hemisphere.
The NSF designates Hispanic Americans as a disadvantaged community. This infrastructure gives Hispanic Americans a new and unique advantage - the opportunity to leverage cultural and language commonalities with collaborators in Latin America to advance their pursuit of research and education in the US. This award will offer an advantage to not only the Hispanic populations throughout the US, but will cement collaborative relationships throughout the Americas.
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ProNet: GLORIAD (Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development)
The GLORIAD project will include cooperative partnerships with its longstanding partners in Russia (Kurchatov Institute), Korea (KISTI), China (Chinese Academy of Sciences), the Netherlands (SurFnet), the Nordic countries (NORDUnet and ICELINK), Canada (CANARIE), and Hong Kong (HKOEP). In addition, it develops new partnerships with Egypt (ENSTINet and TEGROUP), India (Tata and the National Knowledge Network), Singapore (SINGAREN), and Vietnam (VinAREN), and further cooperation with STARLight, TRANSPAC, National Lambda Rail (NLR), and Internet2. Numerous other research and education networks will be connected in Southeast Asia, Africa, Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus region through the development of open, optical network exchanges in these locations. Expanding the US-China network capacity and providing hybrid, dynamically provisioned services enables a new range of advanced applications, It furthers US-Nordic partnership in cyberinfrastructure development, connects scientifically vital polar parts of the globe that are not yet connected, and provides a new possibility for furtherance of US-Russia science collaboration. GLORIAD will also explore and create new opportunities for network development in Africa.
GLORIAD will demonstrate proactive US leadership in cyberinfrastructure by extending US reach to global scientific communities as it builds a more open, decentralized global network architecture for science and education. This project builds on network measurement, monitoring, and security tools that focus directly on secure networking and on improving individual user performance. It furthers GLORIADs program to create a standards-based, open-source, decentralized method of network operations, the distributed virtual network operations center (dvNOC), and to enable a new approach to governance and management of cyberinfrastructure.
Intellectual Merit
The GLORIAD project advances cyberinfrastructure services and metrics, broadens the global community working on measuring and mitigating customer-based infrastructure performance, and furthers the model of distributed, decentralized management of cyberinfrastructure resources. Additional connectivity and bandwidth allows greater access to cutting edge research in the US, Egypt, South East Asia, Central Asia, Caucasus, Africa, and Muslim-majority countries. It advances research in pragmatic network deployments and operations. The extension of performance tools will have the potential to strongly impact research and education network deployments.
Broader Impact
GLORIAD's broadest impact lies in contributions as an infrastructure for research and education. The project will foster collaborations among disciplines and institutions. The network provides unprecedented bandwidth and dedicated services for US researchers to collaborate with counterparts in India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Egypt, Vietnam, South East Asia, Africa, and Central Asia/Caucasus region. GLORIAD has a long track record of fostering partnerships between public-private entities that address major science problems and can potentially reach tens of thousands of people.
GLORIAD is committed to diversity in all activities, and aims to support US national interests by providing network access to Muslim-majority countries and underserved regions of the world. GLORIAD?s broad dissemination of information will enhance scientific and technological understanding by offering tools and information for new users. GLORIAD will bring this information to a diverse group in various languages and levels of expertise, from expert to student to the policy community and the general public.
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ProNet: TransLight/Pacific Wave
The TransLight/Pacific Wave (TL/PW) project builds on close and effective collaborations built over the last decade among the University of Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), and the Corporation for Educational Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) to create and operate a unified distributed exchange service for Research and Education (R&E) networking in the Asia-Pacific hemisphere. TL/PW will present a unified connectivity face toward the West for all US R&E networks including Internet2, National Lambda Rail and Federal agency networks, enabling general and specific peerings with more than 15 international R&E links, including those funded by other NSF IRNC projects, serving scores of countries. Distributed peering services at network Layers 1, 2 and 3 will allow the project to seamlessly support domain-specific projects while remaining committed to equitable shared global R&E network services. TL/PW will work with Internet2, National Lambda Rail, the other IRNC awardees and international networks to provide seamless evolutionary production networking services to the international research community. The value of TL/PW to the nation and the world is demonstrated by the fact that TL/PW is not proposing to buy new international links. Rather, TL/PW funding will be used to provide domestic backhaul, hosting, support and facilitation for those engaged in R&E networking in the region.
TL/PW will provide domestic support for AARNet's SX-TransPORT project, which provides two 10Gbps circuits from Australia to Hawaii to the West Coast of the U.S. on the Southern Cross Cable Network submarine fiber system. This project not only connects Australia's R&E networking community but also provides connectivity for the world's premiere setting for astronomical observatories, the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The Mauna Kea observatories comprise over $1 billion of international investment by 13 countries in some of the most important cyberinfrastructure resources in the world. TL/PW will also continue to advance and support research network connections in the Australasia and Pacific regions.
The Intellectual Merit of TL/PW derives from its championing of end-to-end connectivity and network advancement that stimulates innovation among leading domain scientists and cyberinfrastructure engineers. TL/PW has innovated to create the world's model distributed exchange serving the global R&E networking community, and will continue to advance reliable and cost-effective global cyberinfrastructure to meet broader research and education needs. TL/PW will focus on emerging network-enabled sustainable services, like cloud computing, and will take on a special leadership role to support major international scientific cyberinfrastructure in areas unique to its service area: astronomy and ocean observatories. TL/PW will enable the advancement of scientific discovery, and in so doing, advance the state of cyberinfrastructure-empowered research and education.
The Broader Impact of TL/PW will result from its sweeping enablement of US researchers to easily collaborate with their colleagues in many of the fastest-developing parts of the world. TL/PW is superbly positioned to support global access to large-scale international sensor networks like the NSF-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative and the substantial international investment in telescopes that comprise the Mauna Kea Observatories. Working with major commercial players, including Amazon and Microsoft, TL/PW will actively advance the state of cloud computing services that investigators will increasingly apply in their research as a greener and more cost-effective approach to cyberinfrastructure deployment. TL/PW also plans to leverage its unique positioning to extend R&E networking into the Pacific Islands, which are central to understanding the global phenomena of climate change, sea-level rise and ocean acidification.
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ProNet: TransPAC3 - Asia-US High Performance International Networking
TransPAC3 is a continuing project building on the existing TransPAC2 cross-organization project. It will provide multi-gigabit bandwidth and services connecting researchers in the US with their counterparts in Asia and utilizing the current technological advances in those areas.
The research and education networks included in the TransPAC3 collaboration cover all of Asia excluding only North Korea, Brunei, Myanmar, and Mongolia. Indiana University will lead the TransPAC3 Collaboration in a cooperative partnership with the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN), Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe (DANTE), and in coordination with Internet2 and other research and education networks that are interconnected through the project. The collaboration in Asia will connect to the APAN XP in Tokyo directly, and from there to 15 countries in Asia. TransPAC3 will connect to China via Hong Kong and the CNHI Exchange Point and to the Trans-Eurasian Information Network (TEIN3) network via Singapore. The TEIN3 network currently provides connectivity to 12 Asian countries and Europe with 7 additional countries soon to be connected. DANTE is the operator of the TEIN3 network in North, South East, and South Asia and connects almost all countries in those parts of Asia.
TransPAC3 will initially deploy 20 Gbps of bandwidth between Asia and the US using 10G carrier service offerings. TransPAC3 will deploy one 10 Gbps link between Pacific Wave and Tokyo in years 1 and 2. A second 10 Gbps link will be provided by NICT, Japan, at no cost to NSF. In Year 3 of the award this will be expanded as demand and pricing evolve. As 40Gbps and 100Gbps become available and affordable at trans-Pacific distance they will become part of the provided service.
Intellectual Merit
This proposal rests well within the guidelines of the IRNC solicitation and will expand and enhance services in security, identity management, measurement, and operational integration. US ? Asia connectivity requires close cooperation between the participants, and this project will consist of a collaborative team. Security is a major issue for all concerned and is a focus of the proposal. The PI has proposed and intends to provide deployment of accurate and useful measurement technology as well as leading edge circuit services to meet high bandwidth applications. Eliminating duplication of expensive links should decrease overall costs.
Broader Impact
As with the previous IRNC award, it is expected that the awardee?s TransPAC3 collaboration will provide highly expanded opportunities for US researchers to interact and collaborate with their fellow researchers in Asia. The PI?s recent cooperation in connecting Pakistan to the global R&E infrastructure continues to show fruitful results.
Integrating diversity in research and education is a strong component in this proposal. The PI has plans to partner with the Gerald L. Bepko Internship Program at Indiana University to extend educational outreach and integrate diversity into the TransPAC3 project, with the goal to identify, connect, and work with underserved students and advance their knowledge and ability in information technology.
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ProNet: TransLight/StarLight
The Translight/Starlight team will be pursuing application experiments on international networks with 6 different activity areas. These areas are:
- Greenlight International - TL/SL will investigate monitoring for energy consumption in selected international-reach experimental networks.
- SCCSnet - TL/SL will support the Science Cloud Communication Services Network by assisting projects that are developing high-performance communication services tailored for computational clouds used by data-intensive scientific applications. These projects are addressing the high-volume, high-performance national and international communication requirements of scientific computational clouds versus general consumer and enterprise clouds, which use the commodity Internet.
- CineGrid - TL/SL will help enable the production, use and exchange of very-high-quality digital media, including scientific collaborations and visualizations, over photonic networks. UCSD will serve as the lead on CineGrid activities. TL/SL funding will offset personnel time involved in conducting international trials, and for partial participant costs for the annual CineGrid conferences in 2010, 2011, and 2012, held at Calit2.
- High-Performance Digital Media Network (HPDMnet) - TL/SL will work with international partners to develop new services based on high-performance optical transport (i.e., optical multicast) of large-scale data streams, including high-resolution digital media streams, as well as new capabilities for high-volume scientific data.
- iGENI (International GENI) - TL/SL will connect existing StarLight resources with current GENI backbone transport resources.
- SAGE - TL/S will help transition SAGE from a transformative research prototype to a hardened technology that provides production-quality, community-driven open services for visualization and collaboration utilizing shared national and international cyberinfrastructure, for the advancement of scientific research and education. Partners sites are in the US, Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan.
Intellectual Merit
Contributions from this project have the potential to strengthen activities in network modeling, exploring leading edge green technology research, simulation, advanced imaging transmissions enabling the IRNC program to play a formative role in the emerging discipline of network science, and enhancing NSF's leading role in sustainable stewardship of cyberinfrastructure.
Broader Impact
The proposed work will help IRNC operators better understand their networks by making more effective use of data they already collect as well as newer technologies for measurement and visibility of their networks. The data will have broad applicability to other researchers and pragmatic network operations.
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SP: 6Watch: Routeviews Infrastructure for Monitoring, Tracking and Diagnosing IPv6 Deployment
This project is to develop a global scale IPv6 monitoring system that will track IPv6 address allocations, IPv6 routing announcements, the topological connectivity of IPv6-capable networks, and IPv6 reachability in the data plane, all at the global scale. Each of these metrics is useful in tracking IPv6 deployment, but the right combination of control plane metrics and data plane metrics has the potential to provide a comprehensive overview of IPv6 deployment successes and obstacles. Lessons learned in monitoring IPv4 infrastructure will be applied, but monitoring IPv6 deployment poses a number of unique challenges and unknowns. At this early stage of IPv6 deployment, it is particularly important to provide data plane information that can complement the control plane information. This project will develop an innovative technique that measures IPv6 coverage and reachability by using active probes to DNS servers. This approach leverages our existing DNS monitoring infrastructure and will allow us to test reachablity in both IPv6-IPv6 and IPv6-IPv4 scenarios. If successful, the results will provide detailed information for researchers and operators faced with specific measurement questions and also provide a global perspective that is meaningful to those searching for IPv6 deployment challenges. The results will not only provide the latest snapshot of IPv6 rollout but will also help identify open issues and potential obstacles to facilitate IPv6 deployment.
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SP: Cultivating the International Research and Education Network Fabric: An Essential Underpinning of Cyberinfrastructure
The Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) develops and enhances network infrastructure for collaborative research, education, and international partnerships, while promoting teaching and training via the transfer of technology. This IRNC project focuses NSRC activities on cultivating cyberinfrastructure via technical exchange, engineering assistance, training, conveyance of networking equipment and technical reference materials, and related activities to promote network technology adoption, and enhanced connectivity in R&E sites around the world. The end goal is to enhance and enable international collaboration via the Internet between U.S. scientists and collaborators in developing countries.
The broader impacts of NSRC's activities are global in scope -- helping to establish and improve underlying cyberinfrastructure, both physical (network connectivity) and human which are necessary to allow international scientific endeavors to flourish. Such resources are crucial to engage researchers in developing areas of the world. As an additional benefit, the NSRC's work builds goodwill for U.S. scientists, the NSF, and the U.S. government in universities, research institutions, and network operator groups throughout the developing world.
Regarding intellectual merit, NSRC's work advances knowledge and understanding within the fields of networking, telecommunications and information technology through the clarity of its focus: working to solve specific problems with people in the research and education environments of developing economies that seek to work together with their counterparts in the U.S. Improved infrastructure and increased available bandwidth enable international researchers to document and publish more local, indigenous data and publish more co-authored papers with U.S. scientists. The improved communications resulting from these efforts enhance collaboration between scientists and engineers on both ends of the connectivity spectrum; this ultimately helps attract a wider variety of ideas, information, talent, and resources to solving problems.
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SP: DyGIR (Dynamic Gateway for International Research)
The Dynamic Gateways for International Research (DyGIR) project will provide well-tested, production-ready solution for scheduling dynamic circuits on IRNC ProNet infrastructure. DyGIR will help IRNC ProNet projects meet the requirements of the IRNC solicitation to provide production hybrid network services including dynamic circuit services and to do so in a way that is interoperable with emerging production dynamic switching network services in the US (e.g. ESnet, Internet2) and in other countries (e.g. GÉANT3, JGN2).
DyGIR will advance the state of the art of dynamic circuit networking in support of international science and engineering by developing new functionality, particularly for international exchange points - critical pieces of the overall global R&E network infrastructure.
The broader impact of the DyGIR project for the international science and engineering research community will be significant. DyGIR will increase the opportunity for scientific collaboration between distributed research efforts by enabling the predictable network performance required to effectively share large data sets. DyGIR will also enable these collaborators to schedule their use of the network, permitting the sharing of costly network resources between institutions and scientific disciplines.
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SP: IRIS (International Research Instrumentation System)
The International Research Instrumentation System (IRIS) is a proposal to provide a software framework to simplify the task of end-to-end network performance monitoring and diagnostics and thereby improve support for international science and engineering collaborations. IRIS will deliver a comprehensive monitoring package that will benefit each IRNC awardee as well as the entire project as a whole by delivering instant access to information that will reveal the status and health of any participating network.
IRIS facilitates a broader deployment of perfSONAR enabled resources significantly increasing the likelihood diagnostic resources will be available along the end-to-end paths needed by researchers relying on high-performance international network connections. As a result, NSF-funded science efforts, such as those within Very Long Baseline Interferometry (eVLBI), the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), are more likely to be able to exploit available network resources by improving their network performance.
This proposal will have significant impact on the broad international science and engineering network user community by providing key measurement tools with global applicability. IRIS will advance the state of network measurement and monitoring by working with IRNC projects to research and implement solutions to challenging network measurement problems. This to have a broad impact among multiple scientific disciplines involving global collaboration and exchange of large data sets.
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SP: Sustainable Data-Handling and Analysis Methodologies for the IRNC Networks
Measurement of operational Internet infrastructure involves navigating more complex and interconnected dimensions (logistical, financial, methodological, technical, legal, and ethical) than measurement in most scientific disciplines. These challenges impede the collection, coordination, curation, and sharing of data sets to support network architectural, engineering, security, and operations research.
This project will make three contributions to the IRNC community's measurement efforts: hosting structured discussions of how to most effectively share IRNC data and statistics; adapting exiting traffic and topology measurement technologies for IRNC community needs based on the resulting feedback; and applying two innovations in data stewardship to IRNC measurements. The measurement software improvements will include support for emerging IPv6 and DNSSEC, anonymization and aggregation for privacy protection, and data formats used by the majority of the IRNC operators, such as netflow output from routers. It will also (optionally) install, deploy, and manage IPv6-capable active measurement nodes at each interested IRNC site.
The data stewardship contributions include:
- Experimentation with a recently developed framework for privacy-sensitive data sharing
- Prototyping a dissemination (reporting) format aimed at incenting broader participation in globally coordinated Internet measurements.
Intellectual Merit
The proposed work will help IRNC operators better understand their networks by making more effective use of data they already collect as well as newer technologies for measurement and visibility of their networks. The data, tools, and distillations resulting from this effort will be made available to researchers using a privacy-sensitive sharing framework and will advance research in a number of sub-disciplines of network science.
Broader impact
Contributions from this project promise to strengthen activities in network modeling, simulation, analysis, and theoretical research, enabling the IRNC program to play a formative role in the emerging discipline of network science, and enhancing NSF's leading role in sustainable stewardship of cyberinfrastructure.
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IRNC Kickoff Workshop
Indiana University proposes to hold an International Research Network Connections (IRNC) Program Workshop in Washington, DC. The Workshop will be held on July 13, 2010. The current planned location is the Ballston Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC. The workshop will bring together key international research and education network service providers and the IRNC Principal Investigators. The group will discuss current and future network developments, future science activities and collaborations and how to work together to ensure that global network cyberinfrastructure is available to support and encourage existing and proposed science collaborations.
Intellectual Merit
The intellectual merit of this workshop proposal is to develop a roadmap for project interoperation within the IRNC program and to expand this roadmap to the US interoperation with national research and education networks worldwide. The workshop will bring together network cyberinfrastructure practitioners with key science communities dependent on that infrastructure in a way that will lead to ongoing, sustainable global scale interactions.
Broader Impact
The workshop will set the initial agenda for US international networking efforts for the IRNC funded networks and will help insure smooth inter-operation among the funded projects and with the auxiliary services.
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