Calit2 to Showcase OptIPuter Project at Supercomputing 2003

11.10.03 – Leading researchers affiliated with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Calit²] will be out in force at the largest annual convention of the high-performance computing community, Supercomputing 2003. It will take place Nov. 15-21 in Phoenix, AZ.

Supercomputing 2003

The OptIPuter Grid computing and networking initiative is led by Calit² director Larry Smarr, a pioneering architect of the nation’s supercomputing facilities in the mid-1980s as founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Smarr developed the OptIPuter project and won $13.5 million in funding from the National Science Foundation in October 2002.

SC2003 attendees will get a chance to learn more about the OptIPuter, when Smarr, OptIPuter chief software architect Andrew Chien, and co-PI Jason Leigh of UIC participate in a panel on "SuperNetworking Transforming Supercomputing." It will take place Wednesday, Nov. 19 at 3:30 p.m. Both Smarr and Chien are professors of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Jacobs School of Engineering.

The following day, also at 3:30 p.m., OptIPuter project manager Maxine Brown will moderate a panel on “Strategies for Application-Empowered Networks.” That discussion will include University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) professor Tom DeFanti, who is co-PI on the OptIPuter project and is leading the research team in Chicago.

Visitors to half a dozen exhibits during Supercomputing 2003 will get a chance to learn more about the OptIPuter, which is prototyping a radical new architecture for data-intensive, distributed e-Science research. The southern California- and Chicago-based teams are building the infrastructure on campus, metropolitan, state, national and even international optical fiber networks. Apart from UCSD and UIC, OptIPuter academic partners include San Diego State University, University of Southern California (Information Sciences Institute), Northwestern University, Texas A&M, University of Amsterdam, and the U.S. Geological Survey Earth Resources Observation Systems Data Center. Industry partners to date include Chiaro Networks, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Telcordia Technologies, Inc.

Both IBM (Exhibit #2613) and Sun Microsystems (Exhibit #623) showcase their involvement with OptIPuter researchers.

Also at the Sun exhibit on Nov. 17, Calit² director Smarr will make a short presentation on the OptIPuter project, starting at 7:45 p.m. Among other research projects using Sun systems to be showcased in 15-minute presentations:
• OptIPuter (Larry Smarr, Calit2 and UCSD)
• Computational chemistry: GAMESS (Kim Baldridge, SDSC)
• Biomedical imaging: BIRN (Maryann Martone, NCMIR and SDSC, in collaboration with PRAGMA)
• Geosciences: GEON (Dogan Seber, SDSC)

OptIPuter officials are also expected to announce a partnership with BigBangwidth (Exhibit #2518), a Canadian company that makes hardware and software to provide explosive bandwidth to high-performance workstations, servers, and other network devices.