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Colleagues,

Alex Szalay suggested that I write you. My name is David Turkington and I work for the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The NCDM is working with Alex Szalay and his team at Johns Hopkins University to distribute the Sloan Digital Sky Survey BESTDR3 dataset to collaborators worldwide. We will distribute the data using NCDM's Teraflow Testbed and various U.S. and international high-speed networks.

Our current plan is to house the data at UIC, in Chicago, USA and to transport the data to you using high-speed networks. Because these networks do not always extend to your lab, in most cases the initial transfer will be a two-step process.

Using high speed networks, the data will be transported to, and stored on, regional data repositories located at:
  • UIC in Chicago, USA,
  • JGN II in Tokyo, Japan,
  • CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, and
  • Future other locations to be arranged as necessary - perhaps in Beijing, Seoul, and Australia.

If you have direct access to one of the high-speed networks listed below, the data will be sent directly to your lab. If you don’t, you will be given access to one of the regional data repositories and can FTP the data the last remaining distance from there to your lab.

For our planning purposes, please have your network engineers provide the following information as soon as possible.
  1. Do you have connectivity to any of the following networks: JGN II (Japan), GLORIAD, CSTNet (China), APAN (Pacific Rim), CANet4 (Canada), Abilene (USA), or StarLight (USA).
  2. If so, which network and what is the highest bandwidth connection that you have to it?
  3. If not, what networks can you connect to and what is your highest bandwidth connection to that network? If this is the public internet, please tell us that and your connectivity.

As soon as we get this information from each of you, we can finalize our plans and set up your access. I can be reached at dturk@uic.edu.

Thank you for your help. We look forward to hearing from, and working with, each of you.


Daviid Turkington
National Center for Data Mining