headerphoto

UH COT ION

ION, originally Dragon, is a technology that enables dynamic provisioning of network resources developed by Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), the University of Southern California, and others. The dynamic network is divided in control, data and management planes. The data plane runs on a layer-2 network while the control plane and the management run over IP. The Dragon Software Suite, which is installed in the controllers or Virtual Label Switching Routers (VLSR), enables the control over CLI or SNMP of brand switches switching ports on and off for specific periods of time, allocating bandwidth for end-to-end exchange of data of up to 1G or 10G.

Internet2 provides ION and IP connectivity to US regional connectors to their nationwide network as well as to networks in other parts of the world. In Texas, the Lonestar Education And Research Network (LEARN) provides Texas institutions of higher learning such as the Texas A&M University, Rice University, and the University of Houston with ION up to 10G bandwidth. I have been involved with the delivery of ION in Texas and have collaborated with other institutions in their network setup and the installation of VLSRs and Intra-Domain Controller (schedulers) in end-to-end connectivity projects that have spanned as far as Czech Republic.

Google Guava

The Google Guava is what used to be Google Collections is the Google Core Libraries for Java 1.6. The following link gives a good first view of the Google Collections There are a number of new types such as MultiMap and Multiset. There are also ImmutableSet and ImmutableSorted Set that add new possibilities to Java programmers. In terms of performance, there is no much difference between Google Collections and Java Multi-thread libraries but there are definitely advantages in terms of functionality and immutability of data which in some applications are very useful.