thanks to all, the first excerpt is published this morning, <a href="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">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</a><br>
<br><br><br><blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>* 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</strong></p>
<p>(To receive the URL for downloading the entire book,(twenty dollars
US via paypal) fill out the request <a href="http://cookreport.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=22&category_id=1&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=78">here</a>)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In our first serialization of the summary of this work, we focus on
the first two sections of this remarkable report, which <strong>should
be of interest not just to technical experts, but also to policy makers
and the p2p-oriented open infrastructure movement</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>* Preface</strong></p>
<p>By <strong>Gordon Cook</strong>:</p>
<p><em>“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.</em></p>
<p><em><strong>Part I. A Global Collaborative Operating System and
Infrastructure as a Foundation for a Different Internet</strong></em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>The new OS invites its users to create the new knowledge that
others write about and Google helps still others to find.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em><strong>The Global R and E Infrastructure</strong></em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em><strong>Processing power, storage facilities and access to
instruments</strong></em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em><strong>Part II The Global High End Infrastructure in the United
States has an Opportunity to be Extended to US Community Anchor
Institutions</strong></em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em><strong>Building a Community of Interest between the High End and
Grass Roots Edge</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>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</strong>.
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.</em></p>
<p><em><strong>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.</strong> 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.”</em></p>
<p><em>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.”</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<p><em>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?</em></p>
<p><em>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.” </em></p><br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
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