California Scientists Demonstrate How to Use Advanced Fiber-Optic Backbone for Research
San Diego, Oct. 9, 2008 -- How can super-fast networking among research institutions in California help scientists make new discoveries? Researchers, campus administrators and networking infrastructure officials converged on the University of California, San Diego in September to find out.
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Taking advantage of the statewide, fiber-based California Research & Education Network (CalREN) and campus fiber-optic connections in and out of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) building on the UC San Diego campus, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) held a two-day workshop showcasing end-to-end advanced scientific applications enabled by CalREN's high-performance "experimental-developmental" (CalREN-XD) and "high performance & research" (CalREN-HPR) infrastructure.
"We brought together the community in order to educate researchers in a variety of disciplines about new cyberinfrastructure technologies to enable new ways of doing science," said Jim Dolgonas, president of the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC). "We expect to continue doing these types of workshops, because they give domain scientists very concrete examples of how their colleagues are benefiting from access to California's considerable investment in a world-class networking infrastructure."
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Nearly 100 people attended the invitation-only workshop Sept. 15-16 at Calit2 in San Diego, and institutions from throughout the state staged 13 demonstrations, eight of which required multi-Gigabit bandwidth. Attendees were wowed by demonstrations in research areas as diverse as space science, high-quality cinema, cloud and grid computing, geospatial data, telepresence, and data visualization. [For the full list of demos, see box at right.]
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Silvestri added that his immediate challenge is to improve the actual speed of transferring data. "We tested the network between Irvine and San Diego and confirmed 1Gbps capacity over the entire distance, but in practice, I am still getting a transfer rate of roughly 40Mbps using various different protocols," noted the physicist. "Now we are looking at a dedicated network between my lab and the SDSC cluster, which could improve performance by a factor of ten."
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One of the demonstrations involved real-time applications running on dual 1Gbps lightpaths between Calit2's divisions at UC San Diego and UC Irvine. Falko Kuester, a former professor at Irvine who is now Calit2's Professor of Visualization and Virtual Reality at UC San Diego, demonstrated the prototype for a system he calls the "HIPerVerse". The technology allows two of the world's highest-resolution, distributed visualization systems - the HIPerSpace display in San Diego and the HIPerWall in Irvine - to be interconnected into ultra-resolution environments at the pixel level.
"The common practice is to 'join' walls via a couple of video streams, sharing pre-rendered scientific data, animation or live video feeds in support of telepresence, but none of these approaches has ever surpassed the equivalent of 16 million pixels worth of shared data," said Kuester, who is also a professor of structural engineering in UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. "Those in the audience familiar with scalable, high-resolution display environments were blown away by our HIPerVerse approach, which can scale to global proportions. Assuming the right network topology in place, we now can reach out and connect to all OptIPortals and derivatives running our CGLX software system within the OptIPlanet Collaboratory."
"This opens up fascinating possibilities," Kuester added.
Alternate Endings
A high-definition, interactive mystery film, "Alternate Endings," caught the imagination of workshop attendees. The film -- by University of Southern California graduate student Greg Townsend - was presented by Richard Weinberg, professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Encompassing 16 storylines and 5 different endings, the film presented several opportunities for workshop attendees to choose the action at critical junctures in the plot. The presentation marked the first time that an interactive film had been streamed to a remote location from the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts in Los Angeles (in this case, to Calit2 over CalREN).
CineGrid Testbed for Advanced Networked Digital Audio Post Production
Calit2's Director of Sonic Arts R&D, Peter Otto, staged a demonstration of multichannel streaming for cinematic sound post-production, and he used a technique that had never been used before. "Previous experiments involved transport control of a distant audio workstation, which means we were able to start, stop, rewind and locate arbitrary points of a sound track and play them back at will," said Otto, who is also a professor of music at UC San Diego. "But that approach is bandwidth intensive. So our next step was to use the network to send device-control streams to the distant workstation and receive status updates at the lowest latency possible to achieve seemingly instantaneous control of any audio parameter at the source. Synchronization information passed between sites allowed us to synch video in our audition space."
"The net result," he added, pun intended, "was a much higher degree of immediacy and control of a distant audio workstation, with integrated and recallable mixing data." According to Otto, sound-editing experts in attendance felt that the system was "fast, accurate and detailed enough to be used for high-level, final editing decisions in professional film production."
Researchers involved in the real-time demos appreciated the opportunity to push the envelope. "The workshop provided the inspiration to experiment with radically different approaches," concluded Calit2's Falko Kuester. "The bar was set very high with all of the exciting research projects that leveraged CalREN capabilities."
Related Links
CalREN-XD/HPR Workshop
CENIC
Workshop Demonstrations
Media Contacts
Doug Ramsey/Calit2, 858-822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu or Janis Cortese/CENIC, 714-220-3454, jcortese@cenic.org