CENIC 25TH Anniversary

On March 15, 2022, CENIC’s 25th anniversary brought together some of the country’s brightest luminaries not just in the world of big-data research but also from the fields of education, digital equity, and cultural institutions in a celebratory webinar. Participants discussed not only the history of CENIC but also the difference it’s made through its foundational commitment to innovation and collaboration among diverse disciplines and communities, functioning as a role model in the global networking community, and remaining aware at all times that a network only makes a difference in people’s lives when the larger world empowers us all to make use of it.

Participants were also quick to note that CENIC’s commitment to an interdisciplinary, global, and equitable future has positioned California well in the current atmosphere of federal broadband investment. Central to this and mentioned by many speakers is CENIC’s participation in the CENIC California Middle-Mile Broadband Initiative, LLC dba GOLDENSTATENET made possible by Senate Bill 156 to create a statewide GOLDENSTATENET under the administration of the California Department of Technology. When completed, this network will finally reach into the state’s last pockets of un- and underserved communities, bringing everyone together at and beyond Gigabit speeds to meet and prevail over these and other profound challenges.

Webinar participants include the following, and below each, you’ll find some of their best memories of CENIC’s first 25 years and what they look forward to for the future.

CENIC CEO Louis Fox concluded the webinar by thanking the speakers and attendees, and reminding everyone that even more interesting topics would be raised at CENIC’s annual conference, coming to Monterey in September 2022.

Watch the webinar on YouTube Here

• Jeff Weekley, Naval Postgraduate School

  • After his very first experience at a CENIC annual conference, Jeff was advised by NPS Chief Information Officer Christine Haska to participate in CineGrid where he was as he put it, swept up in the world of networking super-users Tom Defanti and Larry Smarr, who “have never steered me wrong!”

• Celeste Anderson, Pacific Wave

  • As someone who was involved with CENIC “before there was a CENIC,” Celeste was able to shed light on the very first conversations and decisions that would shape CENIC’s development, such as how important it was to think beyond just the traditional big-data research universities – that it not be “a clique of the three major private universities and UCOP.”

• Deborah Ludford, North Orange County Community College District

  • Deborah’s position within California’s Community Colleges gave her a window into the difference that CENIC has made for the state’s largest higher learning student community, and she raised the point that CENIC also functions as the one arena in California where all educational institutions come together, developing intersegmental relationships and collaborations that would never have been conceived otherwise.

• Matthew Rantanen, Southern California Tribal Technologies LLC, Southern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association

  • Matt referenced the success of the Tribal Digital Village, a testbed for connecting Tribal Californians made possible by CENIC and which made an enormous difference to 17 southern California Tribal Nations by providing robust, affordable access at capacity to serve tribal needs. With this successful proof of concept under their belts, GOLDENSTATENET now presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to address the broadband needs of all California Tribal Nations.

• Ann Kovalchik, UC Merced

  • As a representative of the nation’s youngest research university, Ann offered a unique perspective on the process of building the foundations of network capacity from the ground up at a “young institution, under-resourced in a very large state in a very large system.” Ann praised CENIC CEO Louis Fox and the CENIC team, which reached out immediately to her and helped her understand where to start.

• Jen Leasure, The Quilt

  • The Quilt’s Jen Leasure was not the first speaker to mention CENIC’s ability to forge unique, successful partnerships with a wide range of entities as part of its “special sauce.” She also mentioned CENIC’s willingness to function as a role model for other network projects, referring to the Pacific Research Platform workshops which sparked a wave of similar projects and platforms around the world.

• Rich Fagan, J. Paul Getty Trust

  • Rich has had a long relationship with CENIC and all four CENIC leaders from Stuart Lynn to Tom West, Jim Dolgonas, and current CEO Louis Fox. Rich started at Caltech and brought his awareness of broadband connectivity with him to the Getty. Rich also mentioned the profound cultural changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, which created a fully distributed workplace of not just resources or storage but people as well.

• Tom Defanti, EVL Founder and Principal Scientist at Qualcomm Institute/Calit2

  • Tom Defanti became aware of CENIC while he was still in Chicago as the founder of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago and still remembers the warm reception and support of CENIC luminaries Tom West and Ron Johnson when he presented them with the idea that would become the NSF-funded StarLight “half my career ago.” He described this as CENIC “[taking] the NO out of NOC.”

• Larry Smarr, Founder of National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Calit2/Qualcomm Institute

  • Larry Smarr, as Jeff remarked, needed no introduction to the webinar’s attendees and was quick to praise CENIC not just professionally but for the personal benefits, he reaped by being exposed through it to a far wider gamut of broadband-enabled communities than he would normally have been exposed to at a research university. Libraries, Tribal nations, K12 schools, and cultural institutions all became a significant part of his life, which gave him a much broader view of the impact of CENIC and networking in general.

He also raised the topic of the Pacific Research Platform, stating that it would never have happened if not for his 15 years of experience with CENIC, the collaborative example of which gave him “the courage to [propose] to the federal government that [the PRP] could be what is now the largest distributed system in the United States [and the world].”

Finally, he stated that central to all of this for not only California but the US and the world was the CENIC constituency and CENIC itself, thanks to their leadership and expertise in blending the digital and physical worlds long before the term “metaverse” came into common use.