Jason Leigh, Senior Research Scientist at EVL presented research efforts in the development of tele-immersive collaborative applications / environments distributed over Lambda Grids at this year’s VizGRID Symposium. The presentation focused upon EVL’s current research in Amplified Collaboration Environments for the Lambda Grid.

Research is moving from locally-connected, processor-centric environments to distributed-computing environments that rely on optical connections, where the networks are faster than the resources they connect. Recent, major technological and cost breakthroughs in networking technology have made it possible to send scores of lambdas (Lambda refers to a fully dedicated wavelength of light, each capable of bandwidth speeds from 1-10 gigabits/second.) on a pair of customer-owned or leased optical fiber, making the terabit network of the future conceivable. Researchers are moving from grid-intensive computing to LambdaGrid-intensive computing, in which computational resources are connected by multiple lambdas.

LambdaGrid-intensive computing will become the main enabling technology for facilitating multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary advanced collaborations, enabling researchers to share unique resources and to have uniform and ubiquitous access to these facilities.

In turn, this will enable the development of Virtual Laboratories, or science portals, for distributed analysis in applied scientific research. Groups worldwide are collaborating on major research projects, creating experimental platforms upon which future e-Science and large-scale distributed computing experiments can take place.