iCAIR Press Releases
Media Contacts: Doug Ramsey, (858) 822=5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu,
or Laura Wolf, (312) 996-3002, laura@evl.uic.edu
San Diego, CA, and Chicago, IL, May 4, 2005 -- The University of California,
San Diego, and the California Institute for Telecommunications and
Information Technology (Calit2) will host iGrid 2005 in September. The goal
of iGrid 2005 is to push research and development of optical networking with
data-intensive applications. This fourth biennial international workshop
will showcase the power of high-bandwidth 'extreme' networking to support
the world's most demanding applications - from science to art - and
international collaborations among partner institutions from Europe, North
America, South America, and the Pacific Rim.
This workshop should appeal to those with a futuristic mindset who are
curious about how today's state-of-the-art, globally distributed,
collaborative applications might become the mainstream of tomorrow.
The event will take place Sept. 26-29 in the new Calit2 building at UCSD,
one of the most 'wired' buildings on any U.S. campus.
"Calit2 is supporting iGrid," said Calit2 director Larry Smarr, a professor
of Computer Science and Engineering in UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering,
"because of our focus on experimentation and prototyping of
applications-driven infrastructure across scales from local to global. iGrid
will allow us to make a year's worth of progress in less than a week."
"The unique capabilities of the Calit2 building at UCSD, including
networking, computing, and visualization, will be put to their first
important test by iGrid," said Calit2 UCSD division director Ramesh Rao, a
professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "It is certainly an
unconventional and exciting way of bringing the building online."
The iGrid workshop will be followed by the Global Lambda Integrated Facility
meeting on Sept. 30. GLIF is an international virtual organization that
supports persistent data-intensive scientific research and middleware
development on 'lambdagrids,' natural extensions of the grid to include user
control of lambdas (wavelengths of light on which gigabits of data are
sent). The iGrid event earlier in the week will showcase international
scientific projects enabled by the infrastructure that GLIF participants
design and deploy year round.
Last held in 2002, iGrid is a coordinated effort to accelerate the use of
many existing 10-gigabit-per-second international and national networks to
advance scientific research and educate decision makers, academicians, and
industry researchers on the benefits of these advanced networks. The 2005
event provides an international testbed for participants to collaborate on a
global scale to advance the state of the art in high-performance computing
and communications.
"CENIC and the National LambdaRail are bringing an additional 50 gigabits of
bandwidth into UCSD in support of iGrid and GLIF activities," said Jim
Dolgonas, president and chief operating officer of the Corporation for
Education Network Initiatives in California.
The iGrid event consists of two tracks: real-time demonstrations and
presentations about today's emerging global cyberinfrastructure.
The demos are driven by applications scientists, engineered by a worldwide
collaboration among leaders in advanced networking, and enabled by grid
middleware developers. Applications include art, astro- and particle
physics, chemistry, earth and ocean sciences, neuroscience, and
radio-astronomy, among others. To date, some 45 demonstration project
proposals have been received from participants in 20 countries.
Attendees will learn about the underlying technologies, including
high-performance optical networking, user control of lightpaths, remote
control of instrumentation and supercomputer simulations, remote data
gathering, interactive and high-definition TV to support distributed virtual
lecture halls, visualization on large-format displays, virtual reality,
global data sharing, ultra-high-performance file transfer, and other
technologies.
"What's particularly exciting - and unusual - about this workshop is that it
enables people at the edge of the technology curve to work with colleagues
worldwide," said Maxine Brown, associate director of the Electronic
Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago and
co-chair of iGrid 2005. "Academicians, government researchers, and industry
representatives work together to incorporate new grid networking
technologies and hardware into their problem-solving environments,
facilitating their research and creating new markets of opportunity."
"This international group of like-minded people work together briefly but
intensely, and the results can be dramatic," said Tom DeFanti, co-chair of
iGrid, director of EVL, and research scientist at Calit2. "We think of it as
real-time guerrilla networking."
Much of the infrastructure put in place for iGrid will persist afterward and
be available for long-term experimentation.
The results of the meeting will be published in a special issue of the
Elsevier journal The International Journal of Grid Computing: Theory,
Methods and Applications to be issued within a few months of the event. This
issue will be edited by Cees de Laat, University of Amsterdam, Smarr,
DeFanti, and Brown.
The iGrid event traditionally serves as a showcase for leading vendors and
their latest capabilities, including pre-commercial technologies.
About iGrid
The iGrid workshop is a biennial event organized by the high-performance
computing research community to showcase international grid computing using
advanced networks. It's an opportunity for the best and brightest
technologists worldwide in applications, middleware, and networking to work
together to advance the state of the art. The event has facilitated major
change: prior to iGrid 2002 in Amsterdam, there was 2.5 Gb of transatlantic
bandwidth. By the time the event took place, there was 22.5 Gb of bandwidth,
and it has been growing ever since. San Diego is the fourth iGrid host site.
In 2002 the meeting took place at the Science Park, Amsterdam, the
Netherlands; two years earlier at INET 2000 in Yokohama, Japan; and in 1998
the inaugural iGrid meeting at Supercomputing98 in Orlando, Florida. For
more information, see www.igrid2005.org.
About GLIF
GLIF is a collaboration of institutions, organizations, consortia, and
country National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) that voluntarily
share optical networking resources and expertise to advance scientific
collaboration and discovery. GLIF's mission is to create and sustain a
Global Facility that supports leading-edge capabilities based on new and
emerging technologies and paradigms related to advanced optical networking.
See www.glif.is.
About Calit2
Calit2's mission is to extend the reach of the Internet throughout the
physical world. The institute teams UCSD and UC Irvine faculty, students,
and research professionals with leading California telecommunications,
computer, software, and applications companies to conduct research on the
scientific and technological components needed to bring this new Internet
into being. Institute applications researchers conduct studies in "living
laboratories" to investigate how this future Internet will accelerate
advances in environmental science, civil infrastructure, intelligent
transportation and telematics, genomic medicine, new media arts, and
educational practices. See www.calit2.net.
About CENIC
The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California is charged
with designing, provisioning, and operating robust, high-capacity,
next-generation Internet communications services through a cohesive
infrastructure for its associates and affiliates. CENIC represents the
common interests of its associates, who are drawn from California's higher
education academic and research communities, and is highly accountable to
the institutions it serves to fulfill the trust that has been placed with
it. CENIC also provides services to California K-12 schools and, to
facilitate the education and research mission of its associates, to
non-California higher education institutions and industry research
organizations with which CENIC associate researchers and educators are
engaged.