The CENIC conference brought together a richly diverse community, with participants from all education segments, including public and private research universities; public libraries; scientific, cultural, and performing arts institutions; private sector technology businesses; public policy and government; healthcare; and R&E partners from across the country and around the world. The event took place on September 27-28, 2022 in Monterrey California.

The conference included several topics:

  • State-of-the-art and future network technologies including wireless technologies
  • Innovative applications in areas such as teaching, research, and public engagement
  • Cybersecurity and privacy
  • Strategies to ensure all California communities have equitable access to high-speed broadband
  • New statewide, national, and global collaborations supported by an interconnected R&E world
  • Development of the Pacific, National, and International Research Platform

Dr. Vasilka Chergaorva presented “AmLight Express and Protect (ExP) Network: Supporting collaborative astronomy projects in the Americas and South Africa” at the CENIC annual meeting.

Abstract: AmLight has a long history of supporting astronomy. The Vera Rubin Observatory is a large-aperture, wide-field, ground-based optical telescope located on Cerro Pachón in Chile that starts operations in 2023. Its mission is a 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) that will deliver a 500-petabyte set of images and data products that will address pressing questions about the structure and evolution of the universe and the objects in it. The 8.4-meter telescope will take a picture of the southern sky every 27 seconds and produce 13 Gigabyte data which must be transferred to the U.S. Data Facility at SLAC, in Menlo Park, CA, within 5 seconds, inside the 27-second transfer window.

This presentation will cover the techniques employed by the AmLight-ExP consortium of multiple network operators and technologies to meet the mission needs. Provision coordination and operation of this multi-domain network are complex, especially when addressing inter-domain path redundancy. The AmLight team is extending the network from Boca Raton, FL, to Atlanta, GA, to meet ESnet for data transfer to the US data facility at SLAC in CA.

More about the event can be found here: https://events.cenic.org/september-2022/program