NLR Member -- Front Range GigaPoP / University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
About Front Range GigaPoP / University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (FRGP / UCAR)
The Front Range GigaPoP (FRGP) is a consortium of universities, non-profit corporations, and government agencies in the region encompassing Colorado, Utah and Wyoming that cooperate in an aggregation point called the FRGP in order to share Wide Area Networking (WAN) services, access to the commodity Internet, access to NLR as well as to Internet2.
The FRGP is one of several GigaPoPs in the US. GigaPoP members typically enjoy reduced costs, shared expertise, shared services, increased buying power, and economies of scale.
UCAR provides the engineering and Network Operations Center support for the FRGP.
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) promotes partnership in a collaborative community dedicated to understanding the atmosphere in the air around us and the interconnected processes that make up the Earth system, from the ocean floor to the Sun's core.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and UCAR's community programs provide research, observing and computing facilities, and a variety of services for the atmospheric and Earth sciences community.
NCAR and the UCAR Community Programs are managed by UCAR, a nonprofit consortium of research universities on behalf of the National Science Foundation and the university community.
FRGP/UCAR Research Highlights - Over NLR
- Modeling the Oil Spill's Trajectory
Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and collaborators released in early June a detailed computer modeling study showing oil from April's Gulf of Mexico disaster might by the summer extend along thousands of miles of U.S. Atlantic coast and in to the open ocean. The study was made possible in part by NSF funding. NCAR is managed by NLR member the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). Additional model studies are currently under way, looking further out in time, that will indicate what might happen to the oil in the Atlantic.
The scientists are using the Parallel Ocean Program, which is the ocean component of the Community Climate System Model, a powerful software tool designed by scientists at NCAR and the Department of Energy. They are conducting the simulations at supercomputers based at two NLR members, the New Mexico Computer Applications Center and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
For more info: http://www2.ucar.edu/news/ocean-currents-likely-to-carry-oil-spill-to-atlantic-coast
- Improving Internet Security
Colorado State University and collaborators at the University of Arizona, RouteViews/University of Oregon, University of Memphis and UCLA are developing a watchdog system for the Internet to address DNS root server hijacking and related challenges to Internet security. With national, wide-area connectivity provided via the FRGP by NLR, the researchers are working on improving available routing data (ie Who is originating a route to your system? Which routes changed during a major event?) and developing a prefix hijack alert system to provide near real-time messages to users in the event of a likely hijack scenario.
In order to better prevent prefix hijackings, the research team has focused on enabling large-scale, real-time BGP monitoring. Under Project BGPmon, data can be collected from a large number of peers with data collectors run at multiple locations/exchange points. Users are able to see a single, coherent monitoring infrastructure and BGP update messages are delivered to users in seconds. A pilot BGPmon deployment is in place today at Colorado State, UCLA, University of Memphis and RouteViews/University of Oregon.
For more info:
- New Spam Detection Capabilities
Another group of researchers at Colorado State University (CSU) is using the FRGP as a trace infrastructure to correlate spam with IP address characteristics. With the goal of providing empirical means of distinguishing between spam and legitimate email messages, the group is studying data from eSoft as well as ping surveys generated by six pinger machines at CSU that constantly ping the entire IP space, including FRGP traffic flowing over NLR.
Member URLs: http://www.frgp.net/ 
and http://www.ucar.edu
NLR Participants:
