Breaking News - Networking:

NLR Wavelength, CAVEwave, To Support NSF's OptIPuter Project

Marking a new era in control over and accessibility to national-scale optical networking capabilities for the U.S. research community, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has acquired a dedicated 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) wavelength on the National LambdaRail (NLR) infrastructure from Chicago to San Diego. The 3,200-mile wavelength, known as the CAVEwave, will initially support the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded OptIPuter project shared between UIC and the University of California-San Diego (UCSD).

"CAVEwave provides researchers with a deterministic network, with guaranteed bandwidth, schedulable times and known latency characteristics, in order to understand requirements for the real-time visualization, analysis and correlation of terabytes and petabytes of data from multiple storage sites," explained EVL director Tom DeFanti. "All this bandwidth, which supplements our existing network infrastructure, for less than the cost of a 32-node cluster at each end!"

NLR is a major initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies to provide a cutting-edge national scale network infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies. The defining characteristic of the NLR infrastructure is its ability to support many distinct networks for the U.S. research community using the same core infrastructure. The OptIPuter will be among several demonstrations supported by the NLR infrastructure at the upcoming SC2004 conference being held in Pittsburgh from Nov. 6-12.

"Without the visionary establishment of NLR, the national-scale of our OptIPuter research would be impossible," said OptIPuter principal investigator Larry Smarr, who is also director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a UCSD and University of California-Irvine (UCI) partnership. "The OptIPuter team is excited to be an early adopter of NLR and CAVEwave services, and enthusiastically accepted NLR's invitation to showcase our research efforts in the NLR booth at SC2004."

"As the first national optical networking infrastructure owned and controlled by the U.S. research community, NLR enables unprecedented control and flexibility in meeting the needs of cutting-edge research projects," said Tom West, CEO of NLR. "As the CAVEwave demonstrates, NLR is a cost-effective way to meet a range of needs, from project-specific, dedicated experimental networks to shared regional and national research and education production networks."

CAVEwave extends from the EVL laboratory to the StarLight optical internet exchange in Chicago, to the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP) in Seattle, to the UCSD campus. It is connected via campus dark fiber to OptIPuter laboratories at UCSD, and to OptIPuter sites on the UCI and University of Southern California campuses via CENIC's eXperimental Development (XD) multi- gigabit network. This configuration enables future research among Chicago, San Diego, the University of Washington, and international colleagues who connect to the PNWGP via Pacific Wave on the U.S. west coast, or to StarLight in Chicago.

"CAVEwave's connectivity, and the applications it enables, represents a milestone," said PNWGP and University of Washington vice president of computing and communications Ron Johnson. "The network research community connecting to CAVEwave is orchestrating many major new developments that will have major implications in how researchers interact with one another and their data in the months and years to come."

In initial tests between Chicago and San Diego to prepare for SC2004 demonstrations, EVL researchers successfully retrieved datasets from a storage cluster at the UCSD San Diego Supercomputing Center and displayed them on a 30-megapixel display in Chicago. A seismic dataset from UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) was rendered and visualized using EVL's Vol- a-Tile, a volume rendering tool for very large, time-series scientific datasets. Rat cerebellum ultra-high-resolution microscopy data from UCSD's National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) was displayed using EVL's JuxtaView, a tool for visualizing very-high-resolution two- dimensional imagery on scalable tiled displays. Both Vol-a-Tile and JuxtaView are being developed under the OptIPuter grant