The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology – Cal-(IT)² – is bringing together the best brains in wireless and supercomputing in Southern California. A four-story $44 million state-of-the-art facility opened Friday, Nov. 19 in Irvine. The San Diego building is scheduled for completion in spring 2005.
Larry Smarr, the director of Cal-(IT)², is a pioneer in the high-performance computing. Using Grid networking, The National LambdaRail fiber pipe (video), optical switches and an OptIPuter, a rack of graphic computers (video) is used to visualize 1K x 1K x 1K (one gigabyte) and larger data structures. Users can do an extreme zoom into micro-details – from anywhere on earth. Not unlike Keyhole’s 3-D digital globe (except it’s 1000 times faster and volumetric). Databases are shared globally faster than a local hard drive.
UCSD’s Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD) is one of the programs that could find itself being replicated nation-wide. Their wireless projects include a wireless “backpack” that provides mobile 802.11 connectivity, and the CyberShuttle that enables riders to connect to the Internet en route between the Sorrento Valley train station and campus.
The latter project was commercialized by Entr e Wireless (right). The National Science Foundation awarded $9 million to UC Irvine and $3.5 million to UCSD, to develop information sharing tools for first responders.
The High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) team is creating, demonstrating, and evaluating a non-commercial, prototype, high-performance, wide-area, wireless network in San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial counties.
Ramesh Rao, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCSD, runs Cal-(IT) there. He believes the ability to overlay technology on top of incompatible wireless systems is going to be a big challenge. “The GSM guys will talk about the evolution of GPRS while the CDMA folks discuss their roadmap. But somebody has to think about what will happen when all these systems show up in the spectrum at the same time,” he says.
The new big thing is the National LambdaRail (video) and OptIPuter (video). Caltech researchers won the Supercomputing Bandwidth Challenge with a sustained data transfer of 101 gigabits per second (Gbps) between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles at the recent Supercomputer 2004 conference.
Check out this riveting one hour lecture by Larry Smarr. He and Tom Defanti at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Lab have developed a portal to the future.
Wow!
Larry Smarr discussed the importance of dedicated optical networks in the newsletter, HPCwire. Smarr is the new director of the overall California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology program:
HPCwire: Nice to see you again, Larry… What do you make of some conference-goers [Supercomputer 2004] assertions that supercomputing is becoming more mainstream?
LS: I don’t know if mainstream is what I would call it. If you look at the development of the field, the Top500 ten years ago was probably 50% vector systems like Cray Research — which, by anybody’s standards, were botique — tiny installed base, a few hundred in the world. Whereas now, the Top500 I believe is close to half IBM Linux clusters. If you go back ten years ago, if you were writing software for a Cray vector processor, you had to amortize the development cost over the installed base, which, as I said, measured in the hundreds. That’s a giant dollar figure per installed base. If your processor is an I-32 or an I-64 or an Opteron, you have an installed base which is many orders of magnitude larger than that. So you’re amortizing it over a vastly broader installed base, so it’s much more affordable. In that sense, the architecture has become more mainstream.
HPCwire: I’ve had a lot of people asking me to define the OptIPuter project. Could you clear that up for everyone? What are you hoping to accomplish with this project?
LS: The OptIPuter project was organized around an emerging new component of the digital infrastructure — and that is dedicated optical fibers, or dedicated optical wavelengths (lambdas) on those fibers. That’s in contrast to the best effort shared Internet. According to Steve Corbato, chief technology officer of Internet2, over two dozen states or regional owned and operated optical fiber networks exist.
Dark fiber by itself is just what it says — it’s dark, it’s useless. The OptIPuter project assumes the use of Internet Protocol over lambdas, or individual wavelengths. So you may have routers or you may have passively optical switched boxes like Glimmerglass and Calient, which you see here on the floor and actually a part of SCinet, perhaps for the first time this year.
Then you have to say, well if you’re going to have the Grid to use as middleware for your distributed computing environment, how does the Grid stack — the traditional layers of middleware software — how does that alter. That is what the OptIPuter project is researching. It reserves it, then sets it up for you as a user as a live circuit with the appropriate switching or routing along the way.
In a sentence, the OptIPuter project is about completing the Grid. It takes us from a situation in which you have shared, unpredictable best effort internet at the base of the Grid stack, and replaces it with jitter-free fixed latency and predictable network optical circuits. That’s what we call going from the Grid to the Lambda Grid.
Instead of the traditional 50 Mbps of throughput that you get for file transfer over today’s shared Internet, you can get more like 95% of 1 Gb or 10 Gb, which means roughly speaking, a hundred fold increase in the capacity of the network.
HPCwire: Do you have plans for the new Cal-IT^2 headquarters?
LS: My new institute, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, is going to be opening two buildings in the next six months. One at the University of California at Irvine will be dedicated November 19. The other one at UCSD, we’ll probably move into it in April 2005.
These buildings are both very interesting, they have a mix of facilities that may not be replicated anywhere else on Earth. They have MEMS and nano clean rooms, circuit labs — including system on chip integration labs — they have radio design labs, nanoplatonics labs, and some of the most advanced virtual reality and digital cinema spaces in the world.
The building itself is entirely allocated to projects. Projects that are supported by federal grants, industrial partnerships, partnerships for education, and community outreach, for example. So all of these are things that come and go over time, but each one of which requires space at the facilities to support virtual teams.
The UCSD building at Cal-IT^2 will have 140 fiber strands coming into it. When you consider that in 5 years, you could easily support one hundred 10 Gb lambdas or a terabit per fiber, that means something like a 150 terabits per second, which is comparable to the bandwidth into all hundred million homes in the U.S., each one with a cable modem or DSL at a megabit per second.
You can sort of think of it as AccessGrid on steroids! The development is global. The sharing is global. Our community came from a world thirty years ago in which only America built supercomputers, typically classified with rigid export controls. Today, if you look around the floor, it’s clearly become a global community.
HPCwire: Can you update us on the NSF funded LOOKING (Laboratory for Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid )project, for which you were the co- principal investigator?
LS: We were very fortunate that we received the largest ITR award this year. John Delaney, an eminent oceanographer at the University of Washington, is the principle investigator (PI). Then you have co-principle investigators like Ed Lazowska, the head of computer science for many years at the University of Washington, Ron Johnson, the CIO at the University of Washington and a pioneer in establishing the Pacific wave of National LambdaRail, myself from UCSD, and John Orcutt, who is giving a masterworks here on the applications of the OptIPuter. He’s also the president of the American Geophysical union and deputy director of Scripps Institution at UCSD.
LOOKING is prototyping the cyberinfrastructure that will enable a new generation of ocean observatories. The National Science Foundation has a major research equipment project called “ORION” which will be about $250 million of fantastic equipment that will be used to read-out the state of the ocean at an unprecedented level of fidelity.
One of the most amazing aspects of that is the project “Neptune” that Canada and the U.S. are working on off the northwest coast and in Victoria, Canada. They will take an entire continental plate seaward of that area and take telecommunication cables and reposition them to go out to the scientific instruments that will be as much as several miles in depth in the ocean floor.
LOOKING is really about taking this modern development of the union of Grid and Web services and placing that on top of the middleware and physical infrastructure of the OptIPuter, then creating a cyberinfrastructure that allows for remote operation, automatic data access, and management for this very cross- cutting set of scientific instruments.
Smarr was not at liberty to discuss the dozens of multi-billion dollar projects that have reportedly burned up more than $100 billion in taxpayer money. That would make an interesting story, wouldn’t it.
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