Collaboration on End-to-End Research Cyberinfrastructure Platform
San Diego and Cypress, CA, July 22, 2009 -- National LambdaRail (NLR), the coast-to-coast, high-performance network owned by the research and education community, and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a University of California, San Diego and University of California, Irvine partnership, have agreed to form a collaboration, the goal of which is to help researchers and institutions around the country construct end-to-end research cyberinfrastructure platforms.
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"NLR's objective is to make leading-edge networking technologies and top network experts available to any interested researcher, not just those at institutions that have extensive in-house resources," said Tom West, NLR's CEO. "Calit2's deep expertise gained from its leadership of the OptIPuter and other cutting-edge networking research projects, as well as first-hand experience building one of the world's most technically advanced campus infrastructures, will be important assets in working with other university campuses interested in more fully utilizing networks for next-generation research projects."
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The UC San Diego division of Calit2, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and UCSD's Administrative Computing & Telecommunications department have joined forces over the last three years to create a prototype of such a "campus bridging" OptIPuter network infrastructure, now consisting of over sixty 10Gbps lightpaths connecting over a dozen research buildings on the San Diego campus and then connecting with the NLR. These lightpaths will be interconnected later this year with the San Diego Supercomputer Center's new Triton facility, which will provide several petabytes of rotating storage and large memory nodes optimized for data-intensive computations at UCSD.
Calit2 has also linked its two campuses with a dedicated 1Gbps lightpath and UC Irvine has built out the OptIPuter to link up a number of data-intensive sites on its campus. These two campus OptIPuter build-outs provide a "Living Laboratory" to investigate how applications can best take advantage of these breakthrough technologies. In addition, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago continues to develop new OptIPuter technologies which are then deployed on the Calit2 campuses and over CAVEwave to support new applications.
Under the terms of the collaboration agreement with NLR, Calit2 Director Smarr will chair a newly re-established NLR Science Research Council. Its mandate: to ensure that the end-to-end research platform offered by NLR and its partners is as responsive as possible to the emerging requirements of leading-edge national and international science research projects across a wide range of disciplines.
In addition, Calit2 will support NLR in training the NLR Experimental Support Services (ESS) group as a sort of "SWAT team" to advise end users on how to construct an end-to-end research platform between their on-campus labs and remote resources. A key part of this effort is to identify and advise on new NLR, regional, or on-campus network capabilities that are required to support this capability and to provide local customer support. The Calit2 focus would be on prototyping systems development and systems integration, while NLR would focus on development of production services and support teams. The agreement with Calit2 expands on the existing charter of NLR's ESS, provided under an NLR contract by the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center (PSC). Currently the ESS is focused on facilitating use of NLR services and customizing them when needed for NLR users.
The NLR-Calit2 collaboration is complementary to the agreement announced in April between NLR's industry partner, Darkstrand, and Calit2. Under that agreement, Calit2 agreed to lend its expertise on a contract basis to corporations using the NLR infrastructure.
About the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2)
Calit2 is one of four Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation created in late 2000 by the State of California to ensure that the state maintain its leadership in cutting-edge technologies and industries. More than 200 faculty members from UC San Diego and UC Irvine are collaborating on interdisciplinary projects, with funding and other support from more than 100 industry partners. For more information, visit the institute's Web site at: www.calit2.net .
About National LambdaRail (NLR)
Owned by the U.S. research and education community, NLR is the most technically advanced, flexible and cost-effective network dedicated to the needs of researchers and research organizations. For more information, please visit www.nlr.net .
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Media Contacts
Doug Ramsey, Calit2, 858-822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu, or Kristina Scott, NLR, 650-678-9034, kscott@nlr.net.