The OptIPuter, Quartzite, and Starlight projects: a campus to global-scale testbed for optical technologies enabling LambdaGrid computing

Abstract

Dedicated optical connections have significant advantages over shared internet connections. The OptIPuter project (www-optiputer-net) uses medical and earth sciences imaging as application dnvers. Quartzite (UCSD) and Starlight (Chicago) create unique combinations of OEO routers and 000 and wavelength-selective optical switches. 8 2005 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (060.2330) Fiber optic communications, (170.01 10) Imaging systemsOver campus and state fiber networks, the National Lambda Rail, and internationally, scientists are beginning to use private, 1 or 10 Gbit/s (Gbps) light pipes (termed "lambdas") to create deterministic network connections coming right into their laboratories. These dedicated connections have a number of significant advantages over shared internet connections, including high bandwidth, controlled performance (no jitter), lower cost per unit bandwidth, and security. By connecting scalable Linux clusters with these lambdas, one creates "metacomputers" on the scale of a nation or even the planet Earth. One of the largest research projects on LambdaGrids is the NSF-fhded OptIPuter (www.optiputer.net), which uses large medical and earth sciences imaging as application drivers. The OptIPuter has two regional cores, one in Southern California and one in Chicago, which has now been extended to Amsterdam. One aim of the OptIPuter project is to make interactive visualization of remote gigabyte data objects as easy as the Web makes manipulating megabyte-size data objects today. This requires parallel scaling up PCs to 100-1 OOOx in display, storage, and compute power, whik maintaining personal interactivity.The NSF has recently funded an extension of the OptIPuter project, called Quartzite, so that we can efficiently investigate and compare campus-scale terabit-class lambda network architectures that span from optical-circuits-only to packet-switched-only networks and a range of hybrid combinations in between. Quartzite connects over 300 individual cluster nodes on the UCSD campus with a novel switching core. The Quartzite core is comprised of a leading edge commercial packet switch tightly coupled to a commercial MEMS passive optical switch and then to an experimental wavelength-switchable device. Laboratory clusters supporting specialized instruments, computation, visualization, and storage serve as ideal parallel endpoints. Because Quartzite enables soft reconfiguration (from optical circuit to optical packet) of an endpoint, we will be able to better understand the where, how, and why of the packet vs. circuit architectural tradeoff, what protocols (both optical signaling and higher-level messaging) are effective, and how dynamic virtual collections at the campus scale can be knitted together with high-speed parallel networks to form an effective analysis platform for the next-generation of scientific research.

An All-Optical PCI-Express Network Interface for Optical Packet Switched Networks

“…3a, the three possible cases are investigated by changing the timing delay of channel PCIe [3] with respect to its adjacent channel at a shorter wavelength (PCIe [2]). The three possible cases examined are (1) large timing skew in PCI [2] data, (2) no significant skew, and (3) large timing skew in PCIe [3] data with respect to PCI [2]. The analyzer output data of the PCIe packet is shown for all three cases.…”

“…Many applications already require terabytes of data exchange bandwidths including video on-demand, gaming, e-science via grid computing and 100G Ethernet deployments [2]. Optical packet switched (OPS) networks offer a potential high-capacity platform as an integrated part of the backbone network for interconnection of high-performance computing nodes within the distributed network.…”

Collaborative data visualization for Earth Sciences with the OptIPuter

“…In the demonstration, we used the OptIPuter's international Lambda-Grid testbed [23] and the network infrastructure provided by iGrid 2005. As shown in Fig.…”

Interactive Real-Time Visualization for Large-Scale Spatial Datasets Based on OptIputer

“…To resolve this problem, work is underway to enable multidimensional visualization of these objects, enhancing the understanding of the complex geological systems. Exploiting this trend, an increasing number of lambda network testbeds have been deployed, including OptIputer, Dragon, CHEETAH, Global Lambda Interchange Facility (GLIF) and Netherlight (Smarr 2005(Smarr , 2009). …”