[CAnet - news] Impact of Optical Networks on Research

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 [Some excerpts from HPwire article - BSA]

www.hpcwire.com


Optical Race
  
... researchers collaborating over large 
  distances are more interested than ever in the possibility of 
  real-time decision making, which would allow geographically remote 
  groups to view and work simultaneously with the same large datasets or 
  large-scale, high-resolution visualizations. Research communities such 
  as environmental engineers and oceanographers -- the latter heavily 
  involved in Navy-supported research -- have specific needs for 
  technology that will make responding to environmental hazards and 
  monitoring water supplies and other natural resources more efficient.
  
  The OptIPuter is a computing paradigm in which dynamically 
  controllable optical networks become the system bus that connects 
  cluster computers as if they were giant peripherals in a 
  planetary-scale computer. (The IP in OptIPuter refers to the fact that 
  it uses Internet Protocol as the standard for data transmission.) 
  Supported by National Science Foundation's Information Technology 
  Research (ITR) program, the OptIPuter aims to deliver the middleware 
  and end-user software that will allow geoscientists and bioscientists 
  to work with enormous data-sets in real-time over thousands of miles 
  of fiber-optic cable that are part of an emerging Lambda Grid that 
  connects sites like TRECC, NCSA, UCSD, and EVL at UIC.
  
  EVL is now partnering with TRECC to deploy new visualization and other 
  user interface technologies at the TRECC facility in West Chicago. 
  It's a collaboration that's been going on for three years now and that 
  began with the installation of the Continuum at TRECC in 2001. "The 
  Continuum is really the prototype for OptIPuter collaboration 
  environments," says Jason Leigh of EVL, who currently leads the 
  project to make TRECC an OptIPuter node. "In other words, they should 
  be extremely display-rich environments, with the ability to wallpaper 
  a high-definition video stream and high-resolution visualization 
  content, and to be able to work collaboratively with this data over 
  distance."
  
   
  The result of this experiment was the Scalable Adaptive Graphics 
  Environment (SAGE) -- the software that will drive the "next 
  generation" of the Continuum. Imagine an entire room covered in thin 
  displays (which Leigh predicts will someday be cheap enough to be used 
  as wallpaper) and driven by an extremely high-speed network. "You're 
  going to stop treating information on the wall like you would on your 
  regular desktop computer," says Leigh. "The traditional notion of 
  using a keyboard and a mouse doesn't quite work very well, because the 
  cursor is so small that it will disappear into the wall." Instead, 
  Leigh suggests, people will walk up to the wall and interact with it 
  as if it were simply an office wall -- but one as useful and important 
  as a computer desktop. "Think about how you organize your office-some 
  people will put up posters, some people will tape up bits of paper 
  with notes on them, people will have little corkboards where they 
  stick bits of notes and posters and images, potentially. This is 
  exactly the same thing, except that we're going to make it digital and 
  hence provide greater access to dynamic information. People already 
  take advantage of wall space for putting up information. We're just 
  making it digital so that it's even more flexible." Leigh further 
  envisions that as users move from one room to another, all the 
  information in that room will be able to move with them, seamlessly.
  
  


======================================================================
The OptIPuter Gets Real
 
  Last week, the UCSD division of the California Institute for 
  Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the J. 
  Craig Venter Institute announced that they would collaborate to 
  decipher the genetic code of the world's marine microbiological 
  communities. This project, the Community Cyberinfrastructure for 
  Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA), will 
  use the OptIPuter model developed at Calit2 as the architecture for 
  its computational resources. 
  
  Named for its use of Optical networking, Internet Protocol, computer 
  storage, processing and visualization technologies, the OptIPuter is 
  an infrastructure that links computational resources over optical 
  networks using the IP communication mechanism. The OptIPuter's central 
  architectural element is optical networks, not computers. The goal of 
  this architecture is to enable researchers who are generating large 
  volumes of data to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate 
  their data from distributed sites.
  
     
  "What is exciting about this is that it's taking both frontier science 
  and combining it with frontier cyberinfrastructure," said Smarr. Larry
Smarr, as one of the 
  luminaries in the field, is well known for his contributions to the 
  information technology community, from his early involvement in the 
  original Mosaic web browser at NCSA to his current work as the 
  founding director of Calit2. David Kingsbury, the science program 
  officer at the Moore foundation, was well-aware of Smarr's work.
      
  Beside basic scientific discovery, there are several of potential 
  applications for metagenomic research. According to Smarr, there are a 
  number of companies that are already looking at marine microorganisms 
  for new drugs, the way they have with soil-based microorganisms. There 
  are also exciting biofuel applications that are being considered, for 
  example the production of hydrogen and ethanol as fuel sources from 
  microbial metabolism.
  
  Smarr also projects how the technology can be applied directly to 
  other microbial ecosystems. For example, the microorganisms inside of 
  the large intestines were recently shotgun sequenced by Stanford 
  researchers. Soil microorganisms, the source of many drugs, such as 
  penicillin, are another likely target for metagenomics. Even airborne 
  dust particles can be biologically active and are currently being 
  studied in relation to the mold problem caused by the aftermath of 
  Hurricane Katrina.
  
    
  The OptIPuter model is based on the ability of optical networks to 
  move data around at speeds of tens of gigabits per second over 
  dedicated lambdas. Significantly, the increases in optical network 
  bandwidth and storage capacity are outstripping the increases in CPU 
  performance. As a result, "Moore's Law" is not driving information 
  technology the way it used to (ironic when you consider that Gordon 
  Moore, the originator of "Moore's Law," is now funding this project 
  through his Foundation).
  
  The OptIPuter exploits the enormous bandwidth of fiber optic networks 
  to link distributed computer and storage resources. With the recent 
  expansion of National LambdaRail as the optical backbone for 
  cross-country connectivity, Smarr believes we're entering a critical 
  stage for technological change.
  
  "This is a one-in-twenty-year transition point," said Smarr, "going 
  back to 1985, when the NSF built the first backbone for the shared 
  Internet. Now National LambdaRail has built the first backbone for the 
  unshared Internet. At present, there are about two dozen state and 
  regional optical networks that are interconnecting to National 
  LambdaRail. The campuses are beginning to put fiber optics into their 
  actual laboratories, and connecting these to the state and regional 
  optical networks which are then connected to National LambdaRail."
  
  
  "So that was the fundamental insight that led us to work on these 
  optical networks. It wasn't that optical networks were cool and we 
  were looking for something to do with them. It was that the scientific 
  community had decided on Linux clusters as their standard and they're 
  natural need for a wide area network was clearly in the gigabits and 
  tens of gigabits per second range. So we looked around for a 
  technology that could provide this and found that the telecom industry 
  had evolved to the point where the natural data flow on their 
  individual lambdas was 10 gigabits per second."
  
  The Science Server
  
  As part of the CAMERA project, Calit2 will partner with UCSD's SDSC to 
  develop the science data server complex, which couples the Calit2 and 
  SDSC middleware, compute, and storage capabilities with the TeraGrid 
  computing facility in a Service Oriented Architecture. This will 
  enable computing resources to be applied to a range of tools to tackle 
  the computationally intense questions derived from the metagenomic 
  data collection.
  
  
  
  "This is the first science data server that has been architected to 
  direct-connect to your local cluster through the National LambdaRail. 
  What we've done with this server is make it the first TeraGrid 
  appliance. In other words, we're linking directly into the TeraGrid 
  lambdas from our science server. So as a user, when you connect to the 
  science server, it now appears to be just an extension of your local 
  cluster. Over the next few years the TeraGrid will expand to tens of 
  thousand of processors, so you'll get orders of magnitude increases in 
  power by plugging into the TeraGrid. It should all appear as if it's 
  in your laboratory. And that's the vision!"
 


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