About LEARN: Activities & Accomplishments

During the past year, LEARN has continued to build partnerships to enhance the strategic value of LEARN to Texas. LEARN is a very diverse and talented consortium with a history of success, but a focus on the future. Highlights from the past year include:

Expanding Access

LEARN's network footprint now covers over 3,000 miles throughout Texas. Expanding access to high performance network enabled services to areas of unmet need is one of our major priorities. During the past year, we completed Phase 2 of the collaboration with the Department of Information Resources (DIR), the Texas Tech University System, and the Texas Lone Star Network (TLSN). TLSN is a private sector telecommunications group comprised of 38 independent telephony companies in Texas. Phase 2 provides a fiber path from San Angelo to San Antonio. This is strategically important, because it creates a protected optical loop throughout much of West Texas that serves the needs of our members, TLSN's affiliated telephone companies and their customers, and connects DIR's data centers in Austin and San Angelo. The West Texas loop, which connects to LEARN nodes in Dallas and San Antonio, has points of presence in Lubbock, Midland and San Angelo.

LEARN also completed its Dallas to Tyler and Houston to Beaumont network segments. These two segments are important in meeting the needs of our members in East Texas, and in creating a statewide optical backbone for Texas. LEARN's key private sector partners on these two segments of the network were AT&T and SuddenLink.

LEARN also connected its network to a network created by a public and private sector partnership that extends optical network services into the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. This partnership between the University of Texas, Texas A&M University and Valley Telephone Cooperative, connects Corpus Christi, Brownsville, Harlingen, Laredo and San Antonio. The Rio Grande Valley network connects to the LEARN network in Corpus Christi and San Antonio.

TIGRE

The Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education (TIGRE) is a collaborative project that brought researchers from a number of institutions together to develop a statewide grid computing infrastructure. The grid computing initiative provides researchers the capability to transfer large data sets and share computing and storage resources. LEARN has been an integral part of the success of the TIGRE project by providing high capacity bandwidth connections for researchers. Ongoing grid computing projects include energy exploration, atmospheric modeling, biosciences and medical, high energy physics and the large hadron collider.

GENI

The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a National Science Foundation initiative to support experimental research in networking and distributed systems that will be the foundation for future generations of scalable global interconnected networks. Dr. Deniz Gurkan, a researcher at the University of Houston’s College of Technology is actively involved in the GENI project. LEARN helped Dr. Gurkan create a research relationship with Infinera Corporation to provide loaner optical systems for use in Dr. Gurkan's lab. Creating these types of public and private sector research collaborations and enabling access to LEARN's optical networks are essential to Dr. Gurkan's research in data plane measurement.

Connecting Through Videoconferencing

The high capacity LEARN network enables our members to use high definition video conferencing to extend the reach of their services, collaborate, share resources and save money. At Baylor University, access to the FastBacc nursing program provides a 12 month accelerated RN certification program designed for students desiring a career change after they had completed a Bachelor's Degree in a non-nursing discipline.

Baylor also uses high definition distance education video conferencing to support classes in its Honors College and School of Business, and to host guest lecturers and special events.

College sports are important to our member institutions. Athletic programs are an integral part of students' college experience. They also keep our institutions connected to their alumni and supporters. The LEARN network is used by our members Athletic Directors, administrators and coaches to hold meetings in the Big XII and other conferences, share tapes of games to aid in scouting, and broadcast live athletic events.

To protect our freedom, the armed forces of the United States are deployed throughout the world. In May of this year, Texas A&M University used the LEARN network to connect its College Station campus with the 25th Infantry Division Multinational Division at Camp Speicher in Iraq. This high quality two-way interactive videoconferencing enabled a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel stationed in Iraq to administer the ROTC new officer commissioning oath to his son and other young men upon their graduation from Texas A&M University.