Community Report 2022-2024

Innovation, Inclusion, and Competitiveness

All of the achievements you’ll read about in this Community Report are natural extensions of both facets of our CENIC mission: to ensure broadband equity for all Californians; and to put advanced network capacities within reach of every community in California — urban, rural, and tribal — to advance their collective goals and to ensure that every community can compete in a rapidly changing global economy.

The most powerful current driver of that rapid change is the dawn of artificial intelligence and machine learning, highlighted in 2023 by the National AI Research Resource Task Force report as needing a national-level infrastructure. Happily, CENIC provides an excellent organizing principle through which an AI/ML-focused cyberinfrastructure can rapidly coalesce in California, the CENIC AI Resource (CENIC AIR). As well as being the most powerful and heavily used section of the National Research Platform (NRP), CENIC AIR also provides a smooth transfer path for network and big-data science between educational member segments, important in a state with an integrated master plan for education.

All this research will reflect back on the network itself of course, meaning that the network must advance to keep up with it – and the CalREN backbone is now operating at 400 Gbps, with the groundwork laid for an even more energy-efficient 800 Gbps backbone in the near future. CENIC also initiated an upgrade program to accept native 400 Gbps handoffs from members at key backbone node sites as well as ongoing network automation and security upgrades – and of course circuit upgrades for all segments as well.

We also stepped outside of our historical focus on community anchor institutions only and were asked to partner with the State of California to help design and deploy the most ambitious middle-mile network in US history. It has been an exciting, vexing, and consuming effort, and with strong support from the CENIC Board of Directors, and from the team at CENIC, we created a bespoke organization, CENIC California Middle Mile Broadband Initiative (dba GoldenStateNet), building on CENIC’s mission, talent, and experience.

As our R&E colleagues and Louis Fox highlighted in a publication entitled “The Minds We Need”:

“We cannot know where the next Edison, Carver, Curie, McClintock, Einstein, or Katherine Johnson will come from, and if we are to address the many global existential threats we face — including the decline of natural resources; the collapse of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity; global warming and human-induced climate change; chemical pollution of the Earth system, including the atmosphere and oceans; rising food insecurity; and pandemics and untreatable diseases — we need to enable R&E infrastructure broadly.”

In this report, you will read about many CENIC and community initiatives supporting the innovative, inclusive, and competitive environment that we commit ourselves to every day for California and the nation. From all of us at CENIC, it’s an honor and inspiration to pursue this mission with you, our associates and partners.

You may view the report below by clicking through the pages or download a copy here.