UCSD Division CIO Hidley Describes OptIPuter Progress at CENIC Conference

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3.17.04 – Greg Hidley, chief infrastructure officer for the UCSD Division of Calit², yesterday participated in a three-member panel titled “The New Frontier Track” with a presentation titled “OptIPuter Regional Connectivity via CENIC and National Lambda Rail Services.” CENIC stands for the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, and their meeting held in Marina del Rey, CA, this week is the eighth annual held.

"The OptIPuter,” says Hidley, “is an NSF-funded optical networking research project driven by applications in the life and earth sciences.” It’s also about motivating the development of specialized visualization technologies, including increasingly scalable tiled displays and new software tools for viewing data.

Currently, “multiple OptIPuters” exist -- in Chicago (linking the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University), San Diego, Calit² partner UCI, USC/ISI, and the University of Amsterdam. The goal of course is to link these testbeds via CENIC in California, via National Lambda Rail nationally, and via Starlight across the Atlantic. Discussions over further participation are heating up with potential academic and government partners in other parts of the country supported by other agencies.

These testbeds consist of “nodes,” defined as scalable PC clusters and more specialized nodes such as a high-voltage electron microscope managed by Mark Ellisman’s lab at UCSD. (Ellisman gave a CENIC keynote today at 9:15 AM.)

Each testbed is linked by a dedicated network. “They are not part of the general Internet,” says Hidley. They’re connected by dark fiber with dedicated lambdas available, and middleware is being developed to accommodate on-demand optical path allocation. UIC focuses on dynamic lambda allocation, middleware development, and high-end visualization research. Glimmerglass and Calient support the optical network in Chicago, which is using an OC-192 connection across the Atlantic to Amsterdam. UCSD focuses on middleware, applications drivers, storage, security, and network infrastructure.

Aaron Chin, new OptIPuter project manager, and Greg Hidley, Chief Infrastructure Officer at Calit²

In Year 1 of the project a small number of clusters have been established at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the School of Medicine. Additionally, 32- and 64-bit control clusters were established at the Jacobs School of Engineering. The infrastructure also includes an optically connected geowall at the UCSD Preuss School, a charter middle/high school on the edge of the UCSD campus that expects to graduate its first class this spring. The center of this infrastructure is a Chiaro Enstara router, which can support sustained bandwidth up to 6.3 Tbps. The network consists of dedicated fiber pairs at UCSD connecting end points around the campus up to a mile apart.

Significant expansions planned for Year 2, which started in October last year, will increase OptIPuter resources to 16 clusters at UCSD and four visualization environments, including an IBM 48-node storage cluster, a 128-node Sun Microsystems cluster, additional Sun clusters, and a 64-bit cluster to drive a 4x5 40-megapixel display.

Year 2 plans also call for building out the network at UCSD across southern California to UCI and USC/ISI, working with CENIC to be an early adopter of CENIC’s XD (experimental development) network. (Chicago nodes are already connected via OC-192 through Netherlight to the University of Amsterdam).

The Pacific Northwest Gigapop, led by Ron Johnson, may provide an early path via Pacific Light Rail and by Bill St. Arnaud via CANARIE to Starlight to connect the San Diego OptIPuter to Chicago and Amsterdam. Such a connection will enable end-to-end experiments. Later this year the National Lambda Rail will be coming online, which will provide another route of connectivity to Starlight in Chicago and additional points east that are interested in linking into the project.

Proposals to continue extending this infrastructure in scope and capability have been submitted recently to NSF.

For more information, see the OptIPuter Web site at www.optiputer.net and the November 2003 issue of the Communications of the ACM that focuses on the project, edited by Maxine D. Brown, OptIPuter project manager.