HPCwire: Optical Network Is Key to Next-Generation Research Cyberinfrastructure

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June 11, 2008

Optical Network Is Key to Next-Generation Research Cyberinfrastructure

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At TeraGrid '08 Conference, UC San Diego's Smarr urges university campuses to remove network bottlenecks to supercomputer users

The director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a partnership of UC San Diego and the UC Irvine, said today that all the pieces are in place for a revolution in the usability of remote high performance computers to advance science across many disciplines. He urged early adopter application scientists to drive the creation of end-to-end dedicated lightpaths connecting remote supercomputers to their labs, greatly enhancing their local capability to analyze visually massive datasets generated by TeraGrid's terascale to petascale computers.

In a featured keynote today at the TeraGrid '08 Conference being held in Las Vegas this week, Calit2 Director Larry Smarr said "the last ten years have established the state, regional, national, and global optical networks needed for this revolution, but the bottleneck is on the user's campus." However, as a result of research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), there now is a clear path forward to removing this last bottleneck.

This opens the possibility for end users of the NSF's TeraGrid to begin to adopt these optical network technologies. The TeraGrid integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities from the eleven partner sites around the country.

"The NSF-funded OptIPuter project [www.optiputer.net] has been exploring for six years how user-controlled, wide-area, high-bandwidth lightpaths -- termed lambdas -- on fiber optics can provide direct uncongested access to global data repositories, scientific instruments and high performance computational resources from the researchers' Linux clusters in their campus laboratories," said Smarr. "This research is now being rapidly adopted because universities are beginning to acquire lambda access through state or regional optical networks interconnected with the National LambdaRail, the Internet2 Dynamic Circuit Network, and the Global Lambda Integrated Facility."

The OptIPuter project, led by Smarr, is not designed to scale to millions of sites like the normal shared Internet, but to create private networks with much higher levels of data volume, accuracy, and timeliness for a few data-intensive research and education sites. Led by Calit2, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and the University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), OptIPuter ties together the efforts of researchers from over a dozen campuses.

The OptIPuter uses dedicated lightpaths to form end-to-end uncongested 1- or 10-Gbps Internet protocol (IP) networks. The OptIPuter's dedicated network infrastructure -- and supporting software -- has a number of significant advantages over shared Internet connections, including high bandwidth, controlled performance (no jitter), lower cost per unit bandwidth, and security. "The OptIPuter essentially completes the Grid program," said Smarr. "In addition to allowing the end user to discover, reserve, and integrate remote computers, storage, and instruments, the OptIPuter enables the user to do the same for dedicated lambdas, creating a high-performance LambdaGrid."

In his talk, Smarr described how the user-configurable OptIPuter global platform is already being used for research in collaborative work environments, digital cinema, biomedical instrumentation, and marine microbial metagenomics. He issued a challenge to the TeraGrid users to begin to adopt this technology to support remote use of the TeraGrid resources.

"OptIPuter technologies can enhance the ability of scientists to use remote high-performance computing resources from their local labs, particularly applications with persistent large data flows, real-time visualization and collaboration, and remote steering," Smarr said.

A key OptIPuter technology, the OptIPortal, was prototyped by EVL and developed by Calit2 under the NSF-funded OptIPuter partnership. The OptIPortal is a networked and scalable, high-resolution LCD tiled display system, driven by a PC graphics cluster. Designed for the user's laboratory, each OptIPortal can be constructed with commodity commercial displays and processors. While most of the PC clusters run Linux, there are some that run on Mac (Calit2@UC Irvine and UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography) or on Windows (UCSD's National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research) clusters.

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