Highlights from the recently held IXA Education Summit in Santa Clara, California on September 18 and 19, 2003.
The Intel® IXA University team routinely gathers professors, students and Intel specialists once a year to review the work done by the program schools as well as to review the latest news from Intel. This year, we held our conference in Santa Clara and we brought in Matt Adiletta, Intel fellow in the Communications Infrastructure Group (CIG), for a keynote presentation as well as presenting the IXP425 Network Process as another possible research and learning platform.

Below is a brief overview of the Conference. We have also attached links to the relevant presentations made.

Opening remarks - Jim Finnegan General Manager, CIG Group Technology
Office (Intel). Participants were happy to know that Intel will continue supporting this program and value the work of these universities. Jim’s presentation is available here.

Strategic Update and the latest news on IXA Software Tools - Dr. Raj Yavatkar (Intel).
Raj is the "Godfather" of the IXA University Program, well known and highly respected by the academic community. Many professors and students were extremely enthused with the upcoming development tools, especially IXP-C. Raj also highlighted the new RadiSys ENP-2611 IXP2400-based PCI board that we are purchasing to update our program schools.

Keynote - Matt Adiletta - Intel Fellow and Senior Silicon Architect, Communications Infrastructure Group (Intel).
Matt gave a compelling and extremely interesting talk highlighting the future direction of Intel’s network processors as well as reviewing the IXP2XX architecture and proposing interesting research ideas. Matt’s presentation was very well received. Due to the proprietary nature of this presentation, we are unable to offer it for public viewing at this time.

Presentation - UCLA (Dr. Peter Reiher)
Peter talked about their teaching program at UCLA as well as the network security work he's doing with his IXA lab. It was interesting to note that many of the difficulties he's had in teaching students to program the IXP have already been solved by some of our other schools and they were eager to provide help. Dr. Reiher’s presentation is available here.

Oregon Graduate Institute (Dr. Wu-chang Feng)
Wu-chang and OGI have been one of our most dedicated schools and they presented a brief overview of both their work on puzzles for user authentication and security as well as their teaching work. Wu-chang’s presentation is available here.

Georgia Institute of Technology (Dr. Karsten Schwan and Team)
Karsten and his team have a very wide variety of work on the IXP as well as offering regularly scheduled classes. It's worth noting that these folks are working with us to write enhancements to the ENP2611 Linux driver that will enable functionality not available with the standard driver that ships with the board. Karsten’s presentation is available here.

Rice University (Dr. Ashutosh Sabharwal)
Rice is very likely a great candidate to use the IXP425 for a variety of research projects. Dr. Sabharwal’s presentation centered around the university’s interest in deploying secure wireless throughout their campus. Presentation available here.

Innovative uses for the IXP processor - Dr. Doug Palmer (UCSD)
We were treated to a wonderful presentation from Dr. Doug palmer, founder of www.path1.com. Dr. Palmer is an expert in using the IXP for video over IP. He told us the extraordinary story that CNN after 9/11 had to relinquish its cable and satellite links from Washington DC to the government for seven days and that the only way they could transmit from Washington DC was via an IXP1200 box that streamed their video feed over IP. In essence we all watched IXP1200-streamed video for seven days on CNN in Washington after 9/11/01.

IXP 425 architecture - Ger Hartnett (Intel)
Ger was great in explaining and describing the features of the IXP425 and possible avenues for research. It was clear from the questions and reactions from the conference participants that there is interest here. More information on the IXP425 available at: http://developer.intel.com/design/network/products/npfamily/ixp425.htm

Presentation - UT Austin (Dr. Harrick Vin)
Presentation - U. Massachusetts (Dr. Jie Wang)
Great presentations from both of these professors. Harrick went into a lot of detail on the project that he's working on with Intel to simplify and optimize coding for the IXP family of processors. Dr. Harrick Vin's presentation is available here. Dr. Jie Wang’s presentation is available here. Please note that this is a preliminary report of a paper that will be published in the near future.

Presentation - University of Utah (Abhijeet Joglekar)
We also had an update on the Emulab project running at the University of Utah. Abhijeet Joglekar, student of Dr. Jay Lepreau gave an excellent presentation and also communicated the good news that there are now several IXP nodes available on Emulab. Abhijeet’s presentation is available here.