CENIC Honors Calit2's GreenLight Project with Innovations in Networking Award
Long Beach, Calif., March 10, 2009 -- Calit2's GreenLight project is one of four groundbreaking initiatives honored today by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) with 2009 Innovations in Networking Awards.
|
Four awards are presented annually in the categories of Education, Gigabit/Broadband, High-Performance Research, and Experimental-Developmental Applications.
This year's winners are:
- Education Applications: Alternate Endings (USC);
- Gigabit/Broadband Applications: Redwood Coast Connect (Redwood Coast Rural Action);
- High-Performance Research Applications: iWarp-Based Remote Interactive Scientific Visualization (UCLA); and
- Experimental/Developmental Applications: Project GreenLight (Calit2 at UC San Diego).
This is the second year in a row that Calit2 has been a recipient of the CENIC award in the Experimental-Developmental category. In 2008, the award went to the CineGrid project, incubated in the UC San Diego division of Calit2.
On hand to pick up the award in Long Beach: GreenLight's principal investigator, Tom DeFanti, who is Calit2's director of visualization; Calit2 director Larry Smarr; and Greg Hidley, Calit2 Technical Director and GreenLight team member.
According to a CENIC news release, "Calit2's Project GreenLight examines ways to create and make available carbon-thrifty computing and data storage over advanced networks," calling it a "unique call to action."
"They have initiated Project GreenLight to discover creative ways to ensure that the next generation of datacenters supports a sustainable lifestyle and that the research sectors that use them are aware of the issues surrounding carbon-thrifty computing. Not only will the hardware and software itself be studied to determine how best they can be optimized, but the equally crucial factors of cooling and structural engineering will be studied in depth along with applications from a myriad of data-intensive disciplines. Project GreenLight will also analyze how best to share the insights that will result to enable as many other researchers to benefit from them as possible."
CENIC goes on to note that "the ways in which such technology depends on and leverages advanced networks like CalREN are numerous. Researchers in fields like metagenomics, ocean observing, microscopy, bioinformatics, astronomy, digital media, and others that depend on massive data storage and processing require the unfettered global access to such resources that networks like CalREN provide. Without the ease of access made possible by these networks, the positive impact of carbon-thrifty or carbon-neutral computing can only reach as far as a campus VLAN. And the insights gained from Project GreenLight can reach around the world and have an enormous impact on the health of our shared environment, provided that the world's researchers can access them and put them to use themselves by creating more thrifty datacenters and computing technologies."
Alternate Endings
Calit2 was also briefly mentioned in a description of the project that won this year's CENIC Education Applications Award: "Alternate Endings," a project at the University of Southern California, where professor of cinematic arts Richard Weinberg and Master's student Greg Townsend created the "interactive mystery movie" that uses optical networks to unite performers and audiences with remote HD digital media. In September 2008, Calit2 hosted a CENIC workshop, where researchers showcased high-bandwidth demonstrations using CalREN's experimental and high-performance networking tiers.
According to CENIC, "an audience in the highly networked Atkinson Hall on the UC San Diego campus was treated to the remote premiere of Alternate Endings, a high-definition comedy-mystery movie that allows its audience to choose the direction of the plot through one of 16 separate paths. The movie itself, streamed from the Trojan Vision television studios in the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts on the USC campus, was digitally merged at the various decision points with remote hosts located elsewhere on campus at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, and sent via CENIC's CalREN to the audience waiting 120 miles away in Atkinson Hall. Audience feedback was solicited by means of applause, sent back along the CalREN fiber-optic backbone to the USC campus, and used to guide the characters' decisions. Characters' guilt, innocence, and even survival were determined by audience feedback."
The "Alternate Endings" international premiere, where both movie and audience feedback will cross the Pacific Ocean at the speed of light over some of the highest-bandwidth optical fiber in the world, is slated to take place in March 2009 for an audience in Tokyo.
Other Winners
This year's Gigabit/Broadband award went to the authors of "Redwood Coast Connect," a study by a regional network of community leaders in partnership with the California Emerging Technology Fund. The study provided hard data on people, places and technology needed to propose and implement effective solutions to the broadband networking problems facing California's rugged Redwood coast.
The High-Performance Research Applications award in 2009 went to Scott Friedman of UCLA's Office of Information Technology, for recent advances in real-time manipulation and transport of HD video. The iWarp-based Remote Interactive Scientific Visualization project first won an honorable mention at the 2007 Supercomputing conference, and since then, CENIC lauded Friedman for tackling a huge new capability: temporally evolving data, which "increase the processing demands along with the requirement for reliability and zero latency in the advanced network linking the data, the processing, and those interacting with both."
CENIC also presented the 2009 Outstanding Individual Contribution Award to Russ Hobby, CI Program Architect at UC Davis. Hobby served as the first chair of CENIC's Technical Advisory Council, and he led CENIC's Optical Network Initiative (ONI) architecture team to develop the first CalREN optical network, which is now the underlying framework for CalREN's DC, HPR, and XD network tiers.
CENIC owns, operates, and manages the California Research & Education Network (CalREN), a state-spanning high-performance optical network consisting of 2,700 miles of optical fiber to which K-20 schools, colleges, universities and other educational and research sites in all 58 of California's counties connect. The most advanced such network in the nation, CalREN serves up to 9.5 million Californians every day and links hundreds of educational and research sites to one another and to colleagues nationally and internationally.
Related Links
CENIC Annual Conference
GreenLight
CENIC
CalREN-XD/HPR Workshop
2008 CENIC Award to CineGrid
Media Contacts
Janis Cortese, CENIC, 714-220-3454, jcortese@cenic.org or Doug Ramsey, Calit2, 858-822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu