iGrid 2005, is the 4th community-driven biennial International Grid event, to coordinate efforts to accelerate the use of multi-10Gb international and national networks. This year, iGrid showcases more than four-dozen real-time application demonstrations from 20 countries, along with keynotes, panels and presentations.
A single optical fiber can carry multiple wavelengths of light, or lambdas, enabling multiple networks to run in parallel. New middleware allows researchers to switch those fiber strands like twisted pair telephone lines on dial up – with 10 GigE speeds.
On the last day of iGrid 2005, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) has its annual meeting. GLIF is the international virtual organization creating a world-scale LambdaGrid laboratory, driven by the demands of application scientists, engineered by leading network engineers, and enabled by grid middleware developers.
iGrid showcases the latest advances in scientific collaboration and discovery enabled by GLIF partners, by providing a forum for these far-flung teams to test interoperability on a global scale.
Grid computing, says Steve Wallage in The Feature, is an IT buzzword that may be applied by the telcos. Wallage mentions three telecom projects that involve grids and wireless:
- Intel Research at Berkeley has been looking at how to link wireless devices to create a wireless grid. Distributed robotics will be enabled by small, low-cost flexible wireless devices with a flexible, open operating system and environment to combine sensing, communication and computations.
- TeleCom City, an economic and technology development project located north of Boston that s funded by the National Science Foundation. It’s led by Syracuse University and supported by other universities including MIT, Tufts and Boston University. The two-year project is looking at how to use idle computing power in a wireless grid environment.
- DARC* (Distributed Audio Recording Collective) is out of Syracuse University. The system lets wireless devices with no prior knowledge of each other collectively record and mix an audio signal such as a concert, speech, lecture or emergency event. The project demonstrates the potential of wireless grids and distributed ad hoc resource sharing to harness the combined ability of mobile devices in social contexts outside the expected environments for computing.
One of the newest grid developments is from the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) — home to Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux — and dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of open source software.
OSDL and ActiveGrid, a new commercial open source software company, has joined OSDL and will participate in the lab’s Data Center Linux (DCL) working group.
ActiveGrid is focused on enabling transactional applications to be scaled across a grid of low-cost commodity computers. The company is building its products around the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and the PHP, Python and Perl scripting languages) stack of open source software.
“We are bringing transaction grid computing to mainstream business applications, leveraging the innovation of the open-source LAMP stack,” said Jeff Veis, vice president of marketing and business development at ActiveGrid. “Community-driven innovation is at the very core of what differentiates Linux from traditional technology models. We see OSDL as the preeminent organization in which to foster the industry collaboration needed to drive the broad adoption of open-source based transaction grid computing.”
The lab has launched a project aimed at helping Linux clustering and reducing redundancy in the kernel. OSDL established its Clusters Special Interest Group to boost the use of Linux clusters.
The city of Beaverton, Ore., along with OSDL and others, is putting more than $1 million into economic development around open-source software, and an open-source software center designed to attract and retain students from the University of Oregon and Oregon State is also on the cards.
The Open Technology Business Center, brings together the best minds to analyze business implications of the Open Technology movement, according to LaVonne Reimer, Director for the new Open Technolgy business center.
The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is a National Institutes of Health initiative involves a consortium of 15 universities and 22 research groups that participate in distributed collaborations in biomedical science centered around brain imaging of human neurological disorders and associated animal models. The development of the National LambdaRail (video), Lambda Light Switch and the Opticomputer make it a reality.
Here’s a riveting one hour lecture on the Lambda Light Switch by Larry Smarr.
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