calit2

Smarr and Papadopoulos Guest Edit 2nd Issue of 'Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch'

6.6.2005 – Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (www.ctwatch.org) is a new quarterly electronic publication that seeks to introduce key trends related to cyberinfrastructure by authoritative authors and thereby generate discussion within the community. It’s funded through the NSF Cyberinfrastructure Core program for the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and its editor in chief is Jack Dongarra.

CTWatch

The 2nd issue, just published, is guest edited by Larry Smarr, Calit2 director and founding director of NCSA, and Philip Papadopoulos, director of the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Lab at SDSC and Calit2 technology advisor. This issue focuses on the state of 1- and 10-Gbps long-haul optical circuits supporting the research community.

The authors in this issue have all played critical roles in this new age of long-haul research networks. Most are also playing key roles planning and architecting the network for the upcoming biennial iGrid meeting to be held as the first major event in the UCSD Calit2 building September 26-30, 2005.

Linda Winkler from Argonne National Laboratory has been a leader in the development of the TeraGrid and SciNet (the Supercomputing conference’s “monster” network that exists for five days every November). In her article, “Does 10G Measure Up?," she describes the challenges of high-end research deployments and heroic efforts in the Bandwidth Challenge where the current state of the art clocks in at more than 100 Gbps for an application using multiple 10-G networks at SC2004.

“The National LambdaRail,” by Dave Farber and Tom West, describes how regional research networks have taken advantage of the abundance of dark fiber to enable multiple, research-focused 10-Gigabit networks.

In “Translight, A Major US Component of GLIF,” Tom DeFanti, Maxine Brown, Joe Mambretti, John Silvester, and Ron Johnson describe the optical interconnections available between U.S. and international researchers.

Smarr and Papadopoulos also briefly describe the UCSD “OptIPuter” campus network interconnecting five laboratories and clusters of three functional types: compute, storage, and scalable, tiled display walls. A related project, “Quartzite,” is augmenting this structure by adding DWDM signaling on the established fiber plant, a transparent optical switch from Glimmerglass, and, in 2006, a wavelength selective switch from Lucent. In the authors’ opinion, OptIPuter and Quartzite preview what universities need to evolve to: immense bandwidth, optical circuits on demand, and reconfigurable endpoint systems.