May / June 2005


ONTARIO R&E SUMMIT PARTNER PROFILE

At 12-year mark, what's next for CANARIE?

CANARIE - Canada's advanced Internet organization - is still pushing the frontiers of research and education networking.

Established in 1993, CANARIE Inc. has been introducing a steady stream of network innovations and new applications for more than twelve years now, helping to transform the way science, research and learning are designed and delivered in Canada. It has also been providing support and technical expertise to ground-breaking collaborative initiatives in such areas as e-health, e-science, e-business and e-learning, and even in helping launch new enterprises in these areas. In total, CANARIE has supported over 300 development projects, providing both funding support and acting as a facilitator and catalyst in bringing ideas, partners and organizations together to develop and expand applications and technologies in these areas.

In the networking arena, CANARIE helped CA*net, which started as a "modest 56 kbps network" in the early 1990s, to evolve into one of the leading national research and education networks in the world. Now in its fourth-generation, CA*net 4 is an optical infrastructure that reaches from coast to coast to coast (with the recent addition of points of presence in Yellowknife and Whitehorse), and has grown in capacity to 30 billion bits per second (with more to come in the near future). It is an indispensable infrastructure for research and science innovation in Canada, connecting universities, colleges, research labs and regional advanced networks across the country to each other and to research and education networks around the world.

CA*net 4 is also a remarkable innovation in itself, embodying a unique hybrid architecture that makes it the world's first "customer empowered network", providing dedicated lightpaths to individual research projects as well as a traditional routed intranet. Even more innovative is the User-Controlled LightPath (UCLP) software that will enable researchers to actually configure and manage these dedicated lightpaths for themselves without the involvement of CANARIE engineers. Still experimental, UCLP is being adopted by research networks around the world and could become a key standard for the management of optical networks.

At the helm throughout these and other milestones has been Andrew K. Bjerring, President and CEO, who has led a team of professionals that has established Canada as an acknowledged leader in global R&E networking.

Since his early days as faculty member and senior administrator in academic planning and information technology at the University of Western Ontario, Andy has contributed to the very beginnings of advanced networking in Canada and is among the pioneers whose vision and commitment led to the creation of ONet Networking in Ontario and CA*net and then CANARIE at the national level.

As a recipient of the very first ORION Award for Leadership, Andy looks back to the earliest days in the development of this technology, when the Internet itself was in its infancy.

While the extension of CA*net 4 to the Yukon and Northwest Territories fulfills a long-held dream, and the provision of a common, high-capacity network infrastructure for Canada's research community remains a priority, the most lasting contribution of CANARIE and research networks in general might well derive from their enabling effect in changing how research and education are undertaken.

"We're still in the early stages of a fundamental social transformation brought on by the development of advanced information and communications technologies," says Andy. "In the business environment, networks, together with ever more powerful computers and shared repositories and data bases, are having a profound effect on the processes that underlie how organizations function and relate to one another; similar changes are beginning to be seen in research and education," he observed. "Our job is to work with pioneers in all these areas to design and build the next-generation 'intelligent infrastructure' that will support this transformation."

Among CANARIE's strongest champions is Phil Baker, ORION's President/CEO and chair of the R&E Networks of Canada, which represents Canada's provincial regional advanced networks.

"CANARIE is vitally important to us and to our country," he says. "If not for CANARIE's leadership, we would not have a national research and education network driving innovation and discovery across Canada. This is as critical for Canada in the 21st Century as the railways and highways have been in the 19th and 20th Centuries. We need CANARIE as a national resource," he said.

Learn more about CANARIE and CA*net 4 at www.canarie.ca.


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