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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 8, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 36
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Special Features:
NSF FUNDS EXPERIMENTAL GRID
INFRASTRUCTURE ON UCSD CAMPUS
The Computer Science and Engineering building now under construction on the
campus of the University of California-San Diego will be equipped with one of
the most advanced computer and telecommunications networks anywhere. Effective
Sept. 1, the National Science Foundation is awarding a $1.8 million Research
Infrastructure grant over five years to UC-SD to outfit the building with a
Fast Wired and Wireless Grid (FWGrid).
"Experimental computer science requires extensive equipment infrastructure
to
perform large-scale and leading-edge studies," said Andrew Chien, FWGrid
principal investigator and professor of computer science and engineering in
the Jacobs School of Engineering. "With the FWGrid, our new building will
represent a microcosm of what Grid computing will look like five years into
the future."
FWGrid's high-speed wireless, wired, computing, and data capabilities will
be
distributed throughout the building. The research infrastructure will be
comprised of teraflops of computing power, terabytes of memory, and petabytes
of storage. Researchers will also access and exchange data at astonishingly
high speeds. "Untethered" wireless communication will happen at speeds as high
as 1 Gigabit per second, and wired communication will top 100 Gb/s. "Those
speeds and computing resources will enable innovative next-generation systems
and applications," said Chien, who noted that the California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information Technology is also involved in the project.
"The faster communication will enable radical new ways to distribute
applications, and give us the opportunity to manipulate and process terabytes
of data as easily as we handle megabytes today."
Three other members of the Jacobs School's computer-science faculty will
participate in the FWGrid project. David Kriegman leads the graphics and image
processing efforts, while Joseph Pasquale and Stefan Savage are responsible,
respectively, for the efforts in distributed middleware and network
measurement.
Key aspects of this infrastructure include: mobile image/video capture and
display devices; high-bandwidth wireless to link the mobile devices to the
rest of the network; "rich" wired networks of 10-100 Gb/s to move and
aggregate data and computation without limit; and distributed clusters with
large processing (teraflops) and data (tens of terabytes) capabilities (to
power the infrastructure). "We see FWGrid as three concentric circles,"
explained Chien. "At the center will be super-high-bandwidth networks, large
compute servers, and data storage centers. The middle circle includes wired
high bandwidth, desktop compute platforms, and fixed cameras. And at the
mobile periphery will be wireless high bandwidth, mobile devices with large
computing and data capabilities, and arrays of small devices such as PDAs,
cell phones, and sensors."
Because FWGrid will be a "living laboratory," the researchers will gain
access
to real users and actual workloads.
"This new infrastructure will have a deep impact on undergraduate and
graduate
education," said CSE chair Ramamohan Paturi. "It will support experimental
research, especially cross-disciplinary research. It will also provide an
opportunity for our undergraduates to develop experimental applications."
Research areas to be supported by FWGrid include low-level network measurement
and analysis; grid middleware and modeling; application-oriented middleware;
new distributed application architectures; and higher-level applications using
rich image and video, e.g., enabling mobile users to capture and display rich,
3-D information in a fashion that interleaves digital information with
reality.
High-resolution photo of principal investigator Andrew Chien can be
download
from the "Faculty & Students" section of the Image Gallery at
www.jacobs
school.ucsd.edu/news_events/gallery/.
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