Grid Projects Get Optical Boosts

U.S. and European researchers have given high-bandwidth grid computing several significant boosts in the past two weeks, selecting optical components for their network infrastructures.

SURFnet, an educational and research network organization in the Netherlands, and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in separate moves selected optical equipment to improve data exchange between widely dispersed research facilities.

SURFnet chose Nortel Networks to deliver optical solutions to its grid as part of the national GigaPort Next Generation Network project. SURFnet connects all universities and academic hospitals and the vast majority of the other institutes for higher education and research throughout the Netherlands.

CERN chose Chiaro Networks's Enstara router to provide long-distance connectivity between CERN and the OptIPuter Project at the University of California at San Diego. The DataTAG project, a large-scale intercontinental Grid test bed, is focused on advanced networking issues and interoperability between Grid domains across Europe and the United States.

Inclusion of the optical-networking equipment comes on the heels of two major announcements of support for optical-network grids. In December AT&T said that it would make available 8,000 miles of dark fiber network and a substantial inventory of optical networking equipment to Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) for its grid computing research.And in January, scientists at MCNC Research & Development Institute and North Carolina State University announced the successful test of a new optical network provisioning protocol to enable more efficient computing applications.

The demonstration of the Just-in-Time (JIT) protocol for provisioning and managing light path connections in the all-optical Advanced Technology Demonstration Network (ATDnet) in Washington, D.C., confirmed the viability of user-initiated, ultra-fast provisioning of all-optical network connections. It also marked the transition of the JIT protocol from the laboratory to an operational network.

Many researchers consider optical networks as the key to maximizing grid computing. That's because grids, unlike clusters and distributed computing, which need physical proximity, are often widely dispersed and can benefit from higher bandwidths.

For example, in the case of ATDnet, the optical paths linked host systems at the U.S. Department of Defense's Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences, the Naval Research Laboratory's Center for Computational Science and the Defense Intelligence Agency. By using the JIT protocol, researchers were able to establish an optical connection in milliseconds, where doing so through a carrier network could take weeks.

Also, data transmission speed is crucial given the nature of the research projects. The National Research Laboratory is interested in high-performance computing applications, such as immersive real-time visualization of satellite imagery, computational fluid dynamics, ocean and weather modeling, and space physics. SURA, meanwhile, want to use optical network-based grid computing for use with particle detectors, telescope observatories, and electron microscopes.Grid computing will allow the devices to be networked and the data to be shared, managed and accessed.