Feature - Optical network key to next-generation e-research |
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At the TeraGrid '08 conference, UC San Diego's Larry Smarr urges university campuses to remove network bottlenecks to supercomputer users. "The last ten years have established the state, regional, national and global optical networks needed for this revolution, but the bottleneck is on the user's campus," says Smarr. He urges campuses to invest in local 'data freeway' systems -switched optical fibers connecting the campus gateway to specific buildings and into the users' labs. "The OptIPuter project has been exploring for six years how user-controlled, wide-area, 1- or 10-Gbps Internet protocol (IP) lightpaths-termed lambdas-on fiber optics can provide direct, uncongested access to global data repositories, scientific instruments and high-performance computational resources," says Smarr. "The OptIPuter essentially completes the grid program. Now the user can discover, reserve and integrate dedicated lambdas, too, creating a high-performance LambdaGrid." The OptIPortal, a networked, scalable, high-resolution LCD tiled display system, driven by a PC cluster and designed for the user's laboratory, can be constructed with commodity commercial displays and processors. OptIPortal runs on Linux, Mac or Windows. |
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"OptIPortals allow end users to choose the right amount of local storage, compute, and graphics capacity needed for their application," says Smarr. "In addition, the tiled walls let users visually analyze the complexity of supercomputing runs." The highest-resolution display system in the world, located in the Calit2 building on the UCSD campus, provides a screen resolution of over 250 million pixels. OptIPortal systems are now operating in over two dozen institutions in the United States and internationally. "TeraGrid users are located in research campuses across the nation, but they all need to carry out interactive visual analysis of massive datasets generated by a remote supercomputer," he says. "I believe that we will see early adopters step forward in the next year to set up prototypes of this cyberarchitecture."
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