OptIPuter

PIs: Larry Smarr

Co-PIs: Tom DeFanti, Mark Ellisman, Philip Papadopoulos

Related People: Jason Leigh, Sheldon Brown, Andrew Chien, Aaron Chin, Mark Ellisman, Hiroyuki Hakozaki, Greg Hidley, Tom Hutton, Praveen Jagadishprasad, Sid Karin, Graham Kent, Debi Kilb, David Lee, Atul Nayak, John Orcutt, Phil Papadopoulos, Steve Peltier, Gabriele Wienhausen, Maxine Brown, Robert Grossman, Tom Moher, Luc Renambot, Alan Verlo, Oliver Yu, Joe Mambretti, Eric Frost, Valerie Taylor, Michael Goodrich, Steve Jenks, Kane Kim, Falko Kuester, Padhraic Smyth, Frank Wessel, Joseph Bannister, Carl Kesselman, Marcus Thiébaux, Joe Touch, Donna Cox, Stuart Levy, Bob Patterson, Michael Welge, Pat Gary, George Uhl, Brian Davis, Bill St. Arnaud, Paul Wielinga, Bram Stolk, Cees de Laat, Gee-Bum Koo, Jysoo Lee

Other Institutions: University of California, San Diego, University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, San Diego State University, Texas A&M University, University of California, Irvine, University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NASA, US Geological Survey Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center (EDC), CANARIE, Canada, SARA Computing and Networking Services, The Netherlands, University of Amsterdam (UvA), The Netherlands, KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information), Korea

Funding: National Science Foundation

Sponsors: Big Bandwidth, Calient Networks, Inc., Chiaro Networks, Inc., Glimmerglass Networks, Inc., IBM, Lucent Technologies, Sun Microsystems, Telcordia Technologies

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The OptIPuter’s mission is to enable scientists to explore very large, remote, data objects in a novel interactive and collaborative fashion, which is impossible on today’s shared internet. We are doing this by developing a radical LambdaGrid architecture, which shows great promise for enabling a number of this decade’s e-science shared information technology facilities. The research agenda involves the design, development and implementation of the OptIPuter -- a tightly-integrated cluster of computational, storage and visualization resources, linked over parallel dedicated optical networks across campus, metro, national, and international scales. The OptIPuter runs over 1-10Gbps lambdas, with advanced middleware and network management tools and techniques to optimize transmissions so distance-dependent delays are the only major variable.