The OptIPuter Gets Real
by Michael Feldman
Editor, HPCwire

Last week, the UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that they would collaborate to decipher the genetic code of the world’s marine microbiological communities. This project, the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA), will use the OptIPuter model developed at Calit2 as the architecture for its computational resources. According to Larry Smarr, Calit2 director and principal investigator for the CAMERA project, this work will represent “the first persistent application of the OptIPuter.”

Named for its use of Optical networking, Internet Protocol, computer storage, processing, and visualization technologies, the OptIPuter is an infrastructure that links computational resources over optical networks using the IP communication mechanism. The OptIPuter’s central architectural element is optical networks, not computers. The goal of this architecture is to enable researchers who are generating large volumes of data to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate their data from distributed sites.