[P2P-F] Gordon Cook’s Report on the Core Global Research Networks in their relation to the edge

Mon May 23 12:14:55 CEST 2011

thanks to all, the first excerpt is published this morning,
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/book-of-the-week-gordon-cooks-report-on-the-core-global-research-networks-in-their-relation-to-the-edge/2011/05/23

As a more ambitious goal, I am seeking to establish whether or not there can
be a community-of-interest between the high-end research groups and a
rapidly growing grassroots “edge”. These are efforts of small communities of
mostly younger people located currently at the edges of twentieth century,
large, corporate-based society.

** Book / Report: Fast Thinking. a Research and Education Network
Renaissance. Gordon Cook. Volume XIX, No.s 11-12, XX, No.s 1-5 February –
August 2011*

(To receive the URL for downloading the entire book,(twenty dollars US via
paypal) fill out the request
here<http://cookreport.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=22&category_id=1&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=78>
)

Gordon Cook, who is the driver of a network of communications infrastructure
experts via the Internet Cook Report, a mailing list and newsletter, has
published a very in-depth overview of the “other internet”. This is the
internet that is used to drive massive collaboration global innovation in
science and technology. However, it is far from being a technical report,
but poses all the important issues posed by an infrastructure for mass
collaboration, and all the social and political issues that are involved in
building it.

In our first serialization of the summary of this work, we focus on the
first two sections of this remarkable report, which *should be of interest
not just to technical experts, but also to policy makers and the
p2p-oriented open infrastructure movement*.

** Preface*

By *Gordon Cook*:

*“Globally, a small group of people use Internetworked computers for
purposes far more profound than than electronic mail and web browsing. They
are developing what I call a globally connected, collaborative operating
system for scientific research. Few people are aware of the implications of
what they have done. I have written Fast Thinking — a Research and Education
Network Renaissance to explain and celebrate their achievements. The purpose
of this six-part summary is to relate what they have done and get readers to
think how it might be applied to the social, economic and political problems
that threaten our society today.*

*Part I. A Global Collaborative Operating System and Infrastructure as a
Foundation for a Different Internet*

*Fast Thinking — a Research and Education Network Renaissance portrays the
development of what I choose to call “a global collaborative operating
system” based on optical networks which are lit and managed by their
Research and Education owners. This federated system of NREN-lit optical
networks is becoming a global infrastructure that I contend may emerge as
the circulatory system holding civilizations together on all the continents
much is the sea lanes provided the opportunity to do so in the four
centuries between the Renaissance and the replacement of those sea lanes by
airways as a part of the global industrial system in the 20th century.*

*In 2011 the global collaborative OS is in an early operational stage. Fast
Thinking describes its multiple layers and protocols at a technical level as
well as from the operational point of view, where national research networks
are beginning to release collaboration interfaces for their users and to
refine the connective glue offered by the virtual organizations of various
grids that enable researchers to plug into the resources they need to do
their work.*

*Fast Thinking takes a broader view of the global ecosystem than what its
architects may have intended. The new application tools that I describe are
a means to enhance communication and collaboration among researchers and
networked communities as well as social groups. These groups are all trying,
in independent and yet parallel ways, to bring cooperation and collaboration
into research, teaching, and economic activity as a whole.*

*The new OS invites its users to create the new knowledge that others write
about and Google helps still others to find.*

*The work the Research and Education Network architects are doing is
designed to raise the productivity of their university based customers.
However, observing what is happening and trying to make sense of it all as
it happens, is rather like riding the crest of a breaking wave and trying to
figure out how the currents will arrange themselves. Nevertheless, the
effort is one that I believe should be undertaken with the hope that it will
further a more widely-held understanding of the kind of civilized future in
which we should all want to be investing. We all need to become “customers”
of the R and E Network designers.*

*To understand this new world it is necessary to grasp what a full-fledged,
optical-network-based, research and collaboration network ecosystem looks
like. This book describes the Netherlands version in detail. With continued
build outs by Internet2, ESnet and US UCAN, it also shows what it could look
like in the USA. In this context, it becomes important to make more people
aware of what is happening and the possibilities inherent within SURFnet,
the GLIF and, in the United States, Internet2.*

*In my judgement describing just the technology without examining its
possible impact on the world to which it is applied makes no sense.
Therefore the beginning and the end of this work, that is the Preface and
Chapter 1 and Chapters 17, 18 and 19 contain a political and economic
framing for the global optical collaborative infrastructure.*

*The Global R and E Infrastructure*

*A group known as the Global Lambda Integrated Facility has evolved to the
point where it meets twice a year to coordinate the interconnection of most
of the world’s research and education networks. A national R&E network
cannot stop at a national boundary. Therefore the GLIF exists to ensure the
inter connection by means of lightpaths of the world’s R & E networks. What
I call a “global cooperative operating system” has been overlaid on top of
photonic networks that is “lightpath” networks. These photonic (lightpath)
networks operate at layer 1 and 2 and connect to layer 3 on an as-needed
basis. The primary thing being done within the GLIF is the provisioning of
large optical links of 1 Gb and above to members on an as needed basis.*

*The Research and Education Networks of North America, Europe, and Asia are
building an overlay infrastructure designed to facilitate globally diverse
research projects that lie across all disciplines of learning. However not
surprisingly, these are ones that start out needing high-end instruments
like radio telescopes or the Large Hadron Collider and large amounts of
computational power to be applied to massive acquisition of data.
Consequently, the research and education network operators in each country
are doing two things in parallel. First they are providing what they call
collaboration infrastructure systems. Named coManage in the case of
Internet2 and conNext in the case of SURFnet. These systems are designed as
an organizational infrastructure to take the eligible research and education
populations of each country and provide the mechanisms for authenticated
connection and authorized use of the R&E networks. These collaboration
infrastructure systems are covered in Chapters 2, 3 and 4.*

*Processing power, storage facilities and access to instruments*

*In parallel to this, each national research and education network offers
its authorized users an entire ecosystem of computational and storage
facilities. These facilities range from a small computational cluster of two
or three machines in a single university department; to groups of clusters
connected together in such a way as to form computing grids and finally to a
smaller but still vital network of supercomputers ranked at national and
global levels. Grid applications form the vital glue that holds together
access to instruments computing power and storage resources in such a way as
to enable first dozens and then hundreds of smaller more specialized
researchers to access the shared network computational and storage
facilities needed to do their own specialized research.*

*These grids –- described in Chapters 5 through 9 — are organized through
various national and transnational grid projects. This resulting optical
network infrastructure is making possible entirely new approaches to what is
known as fourth paradigm or data-intensive science. “Toolsets” often
referred to as e-science– are being developed to be applied by researchers
within their respective grid infrastructures to make massive data extraction
and manipulation with respect to the scientific discipline at hand possible
in ways that could never before be attempted. Right now the grids require a
considerable amount of intercession by researchers who are skilled at both
in the specific discipline and in the networking and computational aspects
needed to apply high-performance computing tools to the discipline.*

*Most researchers access this global optical infrastructure via their
national collaboration infrastructure to gain access to the network and to
the appropriate tools. They form a range of “virtual organizations.” The
result might range from creating of a small group of a half-dozen or dozen
researchers to an existing international group numbering in the thousands.
For example, consider the high-energy physicists involved in Large Hadron
Collider Private Optical Network, a virtual organization making up a global
grid.*

*In every case efforts are underway to make the connection of researchers to
the network tools as seamless as possible with the analogy that it be rather
like transitioning from the early disk operating system to them much more
user-friendly Macintosh OS X graphical user interface. The ultimate idea is
that the scientist needs to know little, indeed almost nothing about the
network tools underneath that make possible research approaches such as
climate modeling at a level of detail that could only have been dreamt about
a few years ago.*

*Chapters 10 through 15 are discipline-specific case studies of grid-based
scientific networks. The topics range from genomics in molecular biology to
bird migration studies. Chapter 13 covers the humanities and social sciences
in the UK. Chapter 14 explains the Global LHC Grid. Meanwhile, Chapter 12
relates to Brian Hanley’s experience in microbiology at the University of
California Davis. (This link takes you to a May 20, 2011 Washington Post
article on problems faced by recent American microbiology Ph.D’s. It also
references KAUST University in Saudi Arabia having a $10 billion endowment.
What it does not mention is that Tom De Fanti (one of the top 5 people in
the world of Fast Thinking) has a contract with KAUST. As a result of using
a ten g-bit optical link to KAUST, a professor at UCSD can demonstrate
totally immersive protein folding in real-time to students in Saudi Arabia.
Chapter 16 describes an interview with the new CEO of Internet2 focusing on
Internet2’s role building the USUCAN network.*

*Part II The Global High End Infrastructure in the United States has an
Opportunity to be Extended to US Community Anchor Institutions*

*In contrast to my earlier work Building a National Knowledge
Infrastructure, Fast Thinking summarizes what is being done in the United
States as well as elsewhere in the world. It provides a over view of the
late 2010 awards to Internet2 and to the middle mile networks of many states
that for the first time will extend the benefits of these optical
collaborative networks outwards to Community Anchor Institutions in the
United States. These institutions are being defined as schools, libraries,
hospitals, public safety, museums, performing arts organizations and the
like. This is a major step in the right direction. However, since it has
never been attempted in this country before, it need will need a great deal
of inclusive effort that Internet 2 is not well equipped to provide.*

*What is most significant is that scarcity model of bandwidth has the
potential to vanish in this new world in which the high end,
university-based center could transfer its technology to the local economies
via circulatory system of US UCAN.*

*I have covered the organization known as the GLIF [Global Lambda Integrated
Facility] in great detail because the GLIF is both a skillfully constructed
federation of interests that makes it possible for independent national
networks to develop so as to inter-operate with each other as completely as
possible. The mutually-agreed-on goal of the resulting virtual organization
is that the participants can cooperatively shape and then use a rapidly
spreading global system of interoperable lightpaths. These networks are
creating an infrastructure that will enhance the ability of members to
communicate, cooperate, and assist each other other not only in their
research but also to do this in difficult political and economic
circumstances.*

*I show in some detail how these new systems will work. Federated mechanisms
of identity management will connect ultimately millions of users with
software and tools that they are authorized to use. They will be enabled to
set up and tear down globally based virtual organizations to accomplish
their agreed-upon tasks.*

*Building a Community of Interest between the High End and Grass Roots Edge*

*As a more ambitious goal, I am seeking to establish whether or not there
can be a community-of-interest between the high-end research groups and a
rapidly growing grassroots “edge”. These are efforts of small communities of
mostly younger people located currently at the edges of twentieth century,
large, corporate-based society. The viability of this worn out corporatist
center is being challenged by Deloitte’s Center for the Study of the Edge
that finds a 65% decline in Return on Equity of the nation’s largest
publicly owned corporations since 1965 and by Douglass Rushkoff in Life Inc.
How Corporatism Conquered the World. Umair Haque in his The New Capitalist
Manefesto points out that corporations need to create “thick value” and
Chris Hedges in his 2009 Empire of Illusion shows how corporatism is
transforming the middle class in the US into a class of serfs. I begin this
discussion with my Preface and Chapter 1 where I explore the undermining of
the political and social infrastructure of the United States, Europe and
most of the developed world by largely corrupt financial elites.*

*To do this I use the analysis of John Robb and his blog Global Guerrillas,
as well as the broad community-of-thought represented by Michel Bauwens in
his Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, which seeks to organize a
globally-based effort on behalf of the open-source
knowledge-commons.Increased awareness of the impact of these new
technologies has spread in
such a way as to place the future locus of economic and political
sustainability within local communities rather than where they are currently
located namely in the capitals of what Robb calls the “hollowed-out nation
states.”*

*These are states where the political classes have given in to the interests
of globally based corporations and a global banking system. Both banking and
corporate and military-industrial sectors — One need only read Chalmers
Johnsons’ last four books on the military — exist to increase the wealth of
their executives and shareholders at the expense of the society on which
they depend. The banks, by capturing the political system within the
boundaries of each state, have, with the collapse they brought about in
2008, made it no longer possible to maintain the economic and social
safety-net by which their respective governments have established their
legitimacy among their respective peoples. It seems likely that the enormous
debt buildup within these states will lead to breakdowns of their central
authority and may leave the world fragmented in such a way that long-term
sustainability may be found only in what many thinkers are beginning to call
“resilient communities.”*

*Such local communities may well come to depend on what they can provide,
build, and provision for their own members. It is here that I suggest that a
confluence of interest may exist between the university-based researchers
and their high-end networks and what programs such as the United States
Unified Community Anchor Institution Network will offer locally on a much
more widespread basis. Will the offering be a foundation for schools,
libraries and local civic institutions that can move local self-reliance
away from the increasingly bankrupt and hierarchical, political, and
corporate sectors into the hands of local communities having their own
self-interests at heart? This seems to me to be the most critical question
we face going forward.*

*The critical question: can the edge-based low-end and university-based
higher-end can establish a mutually beneficial dialogue whereby the people
can work with each other to build a more humane and sustainable
civilization?*

*As Kevin Carson – author of The Home Brew Industrial Revolution asked me:
“Might we have the means for establishing a society where exchange of
CAD/CAM files, teleconferencing, etc., replaces most of the physical
movement of goods and people?” Kevin continued “In general, I think most of
the solution will be automatic, as this is a sort of perfect storm given the
crisis conditions of capitalism. People are becoming underemployed and being
thrown back on the informal economy, looking for means of self-provisioning
through networking with their neighbors, etc, at the very same time that
we’re experiencing a singularity in the possibilities of low-cost
small-scale production technology. So networked local micro-manufacturing
economies will emerge from this “time of troubles” because it’s the only
solution possible given the tools at hand.” *

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