ISOC Engages with R&E Networking in the Asia-Pacific Region

Kevin Meynell April 16, 2018

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The APAN 45 meeting was held on 25-29 March 2018 in Singapore, where Kevin Meynell presented the MANRS routing security initiative during the Network Engineering Workshop.

We’ve previously discussed the underlying trust-based issues of BGP that MANRS attempts to address in a number of blogs, but we’re particularly interested in partnering with R&E networking communities for the reasons that National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are often early adopters of new technologies and initiatives, they’re interested in distinguishing themselves from commercial operators, and the R&E community is a collaborative one.

This engagement resulted in significant interest from a number of NRENs in becoming MANRS participants, with AARNet (Australian Academic and Research Network) signing-up shortly afterwards (AS 7575). The presentation is available on the APAN 45 website, and may be freely used by those interested in promoting MANRS to raise awareness of routing security issues and promote the initiative.

APAN (Asia Pacific Advanced Network) supports the R&E networks in the region to help them to connect to each other and to other R&E networks around the world, allows knowledge to be exchanged, and coordinates the activities, services and applications of its members for their common good. APAN and the preceding APNG (Asia-Pacific Networking Group) has been instrumental in establishing and developing the Internet in the region, and currently holds two meetings each year.

Asi@Connect is an associated initiative involving 24 NRENs and a number of research institutes coordinated by TEIN*CC, that’s providing and coordinating connectivity across the region. This is jointly funded by the European Union and the Asi@Connect partners, with the network core and links to Europe running at 10 Gb/s, with other links typically in the order of 622 Mb/s – 2.5 Gb/s. There’s also a 10 Gb/s link to the US partly funded by the National Science Foundation.

We’ve noticed increasing interest in Artificial Intelligence over the past year, so it’s worth pointing out a couple of excellent presentations on the subject at APAN 45.

The opening keynote was provided by Goh Eng Lim from Hewlett Packard who discussed the relationship between High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
HPC applications have typically been used to predict the behaviour of complex systems using established equations with initial conditions used as inputs, but they’re increasingly able to learn how to do this using decades of accumulated records.

Following on from this was Satoshi Sekiguchi from Japan Department of Information Technology and Human Factors who talked about building the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI). This will allow HPC Centres to be linked together along with data repositories to better facilitate machine learning, and serve as a reference architecture for AI innovation.

There was also a session devoted to FIWARE that offers a set of open standardised APIs to facilitate the connection and management of IoT devices. In particular, Porto (Portugal) has been an FIWARE pioneer and has a network of fixed and mobile units deployed for industrial control and environmental monitoring purposes across the city. Other potential use cases in Asia were additionally presented.

Within the R&E community there’s other ongoing activities looking at how AI can be used to configure and manage networks, as well as provide seamless and non-location-specific access to compute and storage resources. Some of these developments were covered during the Asia-Pacific Research Platform and Global Network Architecture sessions.

The next APAN meeting will be held on 5-9 August 2018 in Auckland, New Zealand, hosted by REANNZ.

Further Information

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