IPv6 panel at Internet2 meeting

Penn is co-hosting the Fall 2012 Internet2 Member meeting in Philadelphia, Oct 1st through the 4th. I'm moderating an IPv6 Deployment Panel at the conference (October 2nd, 1:15pm-2:30pm). Joining me will be John Brzozowski from Comcast, Allie Hopkins from Tulane University, Eric Kenny from Marist College, and Mark Kosters from the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).

The description says: "Several panelists will provide an update on IPv6 deployment activity and plans at their respective organizations, including both network infrastructure and application services. Other topics might include IPv6 security issues, network monitoring, technical support and training, etc"

John Brzozowski is Comcast's chief IPv6 architect. Comcast is one of the industry's leading adopters of IPv6, and I hope that John will share the latest news about IPv6 developments at Comcast. Mark Kosters is the Chief Technology Officer for ARIN. Allie Hopkins is an IT director at Tulane, but was formerly at Louisiana State University. I expect that Allie will be able to talk about the state of IPv6 deployment at LSU. As you may recall, LSU was on the list of the top IPv6 traffic generating sites during World IPv6 Launch. Eric Kenny is a network engineer from Marist College, which also made that list. I'll meet Eric for the first time at the conference. I've known the other panelists for a while.

In addition to deployment details, some combination of us will try to do a little bit of IPv6 evangelism. I'll also be asking Mark to do the usual ARIN update on the state of IPv4 address depletion.

I hope to see some of you at the conference. The panel session will also be netcast (and most likely archived video will be available to view later). If anyone has suggestions on specific IPv6 related topics the panel should discuss or comment on, feel free to let me know.

References:
* IPv6 at Penn
* IPv6 at LSU
* Comcast IPv6 Information Center
* ARIN: IPv4/IPv6 the bottom line
* ARIN: IPv6 Wiki

Yosemite Photos

Some photos from a recent visit to one of my favorite places, Yosemite National Park.  A larger collection of photos is available on my Google Plus page.

The one small disappointment with visiting in late July is that many of the park's famous waterfalls are close to drying up. The rest of the outstanding natural scenery more than makes up for this though. There are few places in the world where you can see such stunning vistas in such close proximity to each other.

The photo below was taken from the Tunnel View turnout, near the Wawona tunnel, and looks eastward towards Yosemite Valley. Many of the valley's most famous landmarks and monoliths are visible in this scene, including El-Capitan, the giant granite block with the vertical face, Half Dome (in the center), the Cathedral Rocks and Bridalveil Fall.

Below: a close-up of El-Capitan (7,569 feet), which rises 3,000 feet above the valley floor. It's vertical face is a favorite challenge for experienced climbers.

Below: Half Dome, perhaps the most famous of the granite monoliths in the park. This view looks at the sheer vertical face; the other three sides are rounded and smooth. The peak (8,835 ft) rises 4,800 ft above the valley floor.

Another view of Half Dome with Cloud's Rest (I can see where that name comes from) to the left. Cloud's Rest at 9,931 feet is actually quite a bit taller than Half Dome.

Many of the famous waterfalls largely dry up by late July, early August.

Bridalveil Fall, below has mostly been reduced to a mist. When in fuller flow, this is an outstanding example of a waterfall leaping from a "hanging valley", a characteristic feature of many glaciated landscapes. The large glaciers that carved out much of Yosemite Valley left tributary streams like Bridalveil creek hanging high above the valley floor once the ice receded, and dropping from a cliff into the Merced river.

Vernal Fall (317 ft) flows throughout the year, but with much less volume in late July.

Yosemite Falls is almost dried up. Up close, some water can be see in the upper and lower portions of the falls.

Below: Half Dome and the Tenaya Canyon, viewed from Olmsted Point just off the Tioga Road.

Tenaya Lake, elevation 8150 ft, 222 acres in area, is a remnant of the Tenaya glacier. which retreated 15,000 years ago.

Below: "Roche Moutonnees" -- glacier and river carved, highly polished, granite domes in Tuolumne meadows. Many of these domes have an asymmetic profile, with a gentle slope on one side, and a much steeper slope on the other, indicating the direction of ice flow. These are geologically quite distinct from the various exfoliation domes seen around Yosemite Valley.

Pothome dome (8,766ft), rises 200 ft above the meadow floor. So named, because its south flank contains numerous deep cylindrical holes formed by subglacial rivers swirling rocks in a tight circle.

Lembert Dome (9,449 ft), another classic roche moutonnee, rises 700 ft above the surrounding meadow.

View from close to the top of Lembert Dome

Unicorn peak from Tuolumne Meadows.

Alpine meadows, strewn with glacial erratics, near the eastern end of the park near Tioga pass.

Tioga Pass, at the east entrance to the park, 9,943 ft.

Below: Giant Sequoia trees at the Mariposa Grove, in the south part of the park. Giant Sequioas are the largest living organisms on earth, and grow only in specific areas on the western slope of the Sierra Nevadas - there are groves in Yosemite, Sequoia, and King's Canyon national parks. The largest known Sequoias are actually in Sequoia national park's Giant Forest. But the Mariposa Grove has some pretty big ones too. The famous "Grizzly Giant" is 209 ft tall and 34,000 cubic feet in volume! California coastal redwoods (which I saw at Muir woods the day before arriving at Yosemite) are the world's tallest trees, but in sheer mass, they are dwarfed by the Giant Sequoias.

Looking north west towards "Taft Point". Apart from a small railing at the point, the cliffs around Taft point are completely unguarded, a 3,400 ft drop to the valley floor. Inching up to the edges, the views are incredible - but not for the acrophobic!

View from Taft Point.

Below: The upper chamber of Yosemite Valley (sometimes called Little Yosemite), from Washburn Point off the Glacier Point road. Half Dome is prominent in this view, as are Mt Broderick, Liberty Cap, Vernal and Nevada Falls, the Panorama cliffs, and in the distance, the vast panorama of the Sierra Nevadas.

Below: Also from Washburn Point, a zoomed in shot of the "Giant Staircase". The Merced river descends this staircase via two waterfalls that are at right angles to each other, Nevada Fall (594 ft) and Vernal Fall (317 ft), flanked by Libery Cap and Mount Broderick.

Yosemite Valley and the Tenaya Canyon from Glacier Point.

The Royal Arches - a collection of arches carved into the rock face by large sheet joints. Above the arches are several smoothly shaped granite domes, North Dome & Basket Dome. To the immediate right of the Arches is Washington Column, an enormous natural rock pillar.

Yosemite Valley from the Valley View turnout - another very popular photo-op.

More photos (including larger versions) are available on my Google Plus page.

Stanford Linear Accelerator tour

At the recent Joint Techs conference, our host Stanford University arranged a lunch time tour of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) for a small group of attendees. I signed up early as I knew it was going to popular with this crowd. SLAC is a 50 GeV electron-positron accelerator operated by Stanford on behalf of the US Dept of Energy.

(SLAC is now officially known as the "SLAC National Accelerator Lab".)

This is the second particle accelerator site I've visited. In the summer of 2007 (also during a Joint Techs conference), I saw Fermilab and the 2 TeV Tevatron, at that time the world's most powerful particle accelerator. My annotated photos from that visit are on flickr. The Tevatron ceased operation in late 2011. One of these days, I hope to visit the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Here are some photos from the SLAC tour. The full set is also available.

Bebo White, a noted SLAC computational physicist, was our tour guide. He's an entertaining and jolly character, who by his own admission looks like Santa Claus :-)

How the LINAC works:

Hmm, Science has a long way to go!

SLAC had the first website in North America (the first in the world of course was at CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee worked). Seeing a NeXT Cube brings back memories. That was my main computer for most of my undergraduate years at Penn, when I worked for NeXT as a campus consultant.

Mock-up of accelerator components just outside the end of the Klystron gallery:

Facilities photo/map:

The Klystron gallery along the nearly 2-mile long building that houses the main linac. Klystrons are the key driving force for the accelerator and produce amplified electromagnetic carrier waves that help boost the electrons along the beam line. The Klystrons are to the left of this photo, and sit above the main accelerator beam line which is situated 25-feet beneath the ground.  There are 240 Klystrons in total. The particles are injected at the other end of this tunnel.

Our merry tour group ...

A Look at World IPv6 Launch Traffic Measurements

The World IPv6 Launch website has compiled a set of measurements at  http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/. I'll take a quick look at some of them here, with a focus on universities.

The "Network Operator measurements" include data collected by Google, Facebook, and Yahoo! for access to their services on June 6th 2012 from the various network operator participants registered for the event. There were only 77 networks in total registered. I'm sure there are a number of other qualified networks that could have provided significant numbers of IPv6 users and traffic. I suspect the initial requirement that network operator participants be able to demonstrate that at least 1% of their traffic constitute IPv6 prior to the event likely dissuaded some potential participants from registering.

Different views of the network operator measurement charts require manipulating javascript controlled knobs at the website, so I can't provide a direct URL link to them. Instead, in the discussion below, I'm including the relevant screen captures.

View by Total Traffic 

The default view presents the participating networks sorted by total volume of IPv6 traffic measured, although the absolute volume number is not disclosed. Several large ISPs lead the list, with Free Telecom (France) occupying the top spot. AT&T (US), KDDI (Japan), RCS & RDS (Romania), Comcast (US), and Verizon Wireless (US) round out the next five. There is a significant disparity in the proportion of IPv6 traffic generated by those networks though, with Comcast seeing only 1.47% and Free seeing 17.35%. I suspect the numbers for Comcast will go up significantly as they turn up IPv6 on more of their home network customers during the coming year (the number was 1.5% on June 6th).  The US wireless carriers should also see their numbers go up as more of their users switch to IPv6-enabled 4G/LTE cell phones.

It's great to see a number of US universities (including my own) feature prominently in the top part of this list also - in ranked order: Indiana University, University of Pennsylvania, Virginia Tech, Louisiana State, and University of Iowa.

View by IPv6 Traffic Percentage

Sorting the table by the "IPv6 traffic percentage" column (the 3rd column below) produces some very impressive looking numbers. In this measure, universities start to dominate the rankings. The top two spots are held by Virginia Tech and Louisiana State, for which close to 60% of traffic constituted IPv6. Other notables include Marist College (53%), Indiana University (49%), RPI (47%), Penn (32%), University of Iowa (31%), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (20%), & University of Phillipines Diliman (12%).  The effect of many of these universities having large parts of their campus networks IPv6 enabled and presumably large numbers of IPv6 enabled computers on those networks undoubtedly had a lot to do with these results.

It would be interesting to see more detailed measurement data from some of these extensively IPv6 enabled campuses about what proportion of their total traffic is IPv6 (as opposed to the subset of traffic only to a set of popular IPv6 enabled services). I hope to be able to share some data from Penn in the near future - we're currently dealing with some IPv6 traffic accounting bugs with a router vendor first. But our initial calculations are that we were seeing IPv6 account for 8 to 10% of the total traffic traversing the campus border during peak hours of the day. Even though the vast majority of the Internet is not IPv6 enabled, the existence of a number of popular and high-traffic generating services (Google, YouTube!, Netflix, etc) are likely skewing the numbers in favor of IPv6.