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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
GLIMMERGLASS, UIC JOIN FORCES TO
DEVELOP NEW LambdaGrid APPS
Glimmerglass, a supplier of Transparent Connectivity solutions, and the
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of
Illinois-Chicago (UIC) announced a partnership to support the development of a
new class of compute-intensive applications running on high-performance
computers configured into Grids that are interconnected with fiber-optic
links. Glimmerglass is providing a System 300E Layer 1 Fiber Switch configured
with Photonic Multicasting to EVL, and the partners are collaborating on
Grid-related application research, proofs of concept, technical publications
and presentations. Additionally, the partners will demonstrate applications of
transparent connectivity and Glimmerglass' Photonic Multicasting technology at
the SC 2003 conference, in the National Center for Data Mining at UIC booth ,
to be held Nov. 15-21 in Phoenix.
The partnership recognizes the potential associated with the convergence of
two new technologies, Grid middleware and affordable lambda networks, which is
leading to the creation of LambdaGrids. Lambdas are wavelengths of laser light
used to send parallel streams of data over a single optical fiber. These links
are the superhighways, over which information between Grid computing nodes
flows.
The Glimmerglass System 300E enables "streaming computing," the streaming
of
information, whether high-resolution imagery or massive databases, among the
elements of the LambdaGrid with little or no latency. Grid developers, such as
EVL, will experiment with the Glimmerglass system to dynamically offload large
data-communications flows over optical networking test-beds. Because the
Glimmerglass system switches lambdas transparently without detection and
signal regeneration, it is "future-proof," able to support any transmission
speed or protocol, such as Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and beyond,
including standards not yet available today.
Lambda Multicasting A Key Innovation
Using streaming computing, Glimmerglass and EVL will investigate the
potential
benefits of the System 300's Photonic Multicasting, in which the Glimmerglass
system replicates and transmits a lambda-stream carrying data to multiple
computing resources on the LambdaGrid network. Separate, correlated operations
can thus be simultaneously performed on each lambda-stream copy, such as a
stereo rendering of image data. The Glimmerglass system can efficiently
generate and transmit exact, synchronized copies of any lambda-stream without
relying on higher layer protocols, such as TCP/IP or SONET.
"We are excited to partner with Glimmerglass on developing new Transparent
Connectivity applications," said Tom DeFanti, director of EVL. "The use of the
System 300E with Photonic Multicasting will enable new levels of scalability
and flexibility, and keep the control of the network applications-centric. In
addition to costing one to two orders of magnitude more than a Glimmerglass
system, traditional network elements such as routers are not appropriate to
our application, as they introduce latency and are inherently nondeterministic
in data transmission."
Immersive Collaboration Applications And Database Intrusion Detection
EVL expects a paradigm shift in high-performance networks as applications
move
to new Grid-based system architectures, such as the OptIPuter, where the
optical network acts like an enormous systems bus, connecting various data,
computing and visualization components that are distributed globally.
"The functional richness of elements like the Glimmerglass system is
increasing all the time," said Jason Leigh, associate professor of computer
science at EVL. "Features such as Glimmerglass' Photonic Multicasting
technology should make it easier to advance my research on Amplified
Collaborative Environments (ACEs), which are 'war rooms' for distributed teams
that share high-resolution immersive data visualizations."
"Streaming computing's lambda multicasting capability being developed by
the
EVL/Glimmerglass partnership have strong implications for my work on petabyte
databases," said Robert Grossman, an EVL collaborator and director of the
National Center for Data Mining at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "With
this technology, we can create virtual data warehouses on the fly from
distributed databases by using lambda-streaming to do 'streaming joins.' As a
first application, we will use streaming joins to improve distributed
intrusion detection systems. This could be very important since distributed
intrusion detection systems today produce so much data that a centralized data
warehouse is no longer practical for real-time intrusion detection."
Interoperability And Application Control
EVL and Glimmerglass will collaborate to integrate their proof-of-concept
investigations into applications-centric network middleware, enabling
application developers to access advanced transparent connectivity
capabilities of future LambdaGrids, thereby facilitating the adoption of these
advanced micro-photonics products.
"Our Glimmerglass System 300 was designed to be an easy-to-deploy solution
for
information-intensive applications such as those running on the LambdaGrid,"
said Mark Housley, president and CEO of Glimmerglass. "We are committed to
accelerating the Grid's growth, and believe our virtues of simplicity,
transparency, reliability and openness are important for its success."
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