The OptIPuter annual All Hands Meeting is a three-day meeting, to be held January 26-28, during which participants from all 11 NSF-funded and affiliate academic partners sites from across the U.S. and Europe will meet to discuss the OptIPuter’s third year’s progress and update work plans, timelines, and deliverables.

The OptIPuter is a powerful distributed cyberinfrastructure to support data-intensive scientific research and collaboration. It has two application drivers the NIH Biomedical Informatics Research Network and the NSF EarthScope where scientists are generating multi-gigabytes of 3D volumetric data objects that reside on distributed archives that they want to correlate, analyze, and visualize.

The OptIPuter is being designed as a “virtual” parallel computer in which the individual “processors” are widely distributed clusters; the “memory” is in the form of large distributed data repositories; “peripherals” are very-large scientific instruments, visualization displays and/or sensor arrays; and the “motherboard” uses standard IP delivered over multiple dedicated lambdas.

PEOPLE INVOLVED:

Principal Investigator: Larry Smarr, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2] at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD)

Co-Principal Investigators: Tom DeFanti and Jason Leigh, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); Mark Ellisman and Philip Papadopoulos, UCSD

Project Manager: Maxine Brown, UIC

System Software Architect: Andrew Chien, UCSD

INSTITUTIONS INVOLVED

Partner institutions:
University of California, San Diego
University of Illinois at Chicago
Northwestern University
San Diego State University
Texas A&M University
University of California, Irvine
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute

Affiliate Partner institutions:
USGS Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center (EDC)
University of Amsterdam (UvA)
NASA

Corporate Partners:
Big Bangwidth
Calient Networks
CANARIE
Chiaro Networks
Cisco
Glimmerglass Networks
HP
IBM
Level (3) Communications
Lucent Technologies
Sun Microsystems
Telcordia

The OptIPuter receives major funding from the National Science Foundation, cooperative agreement SCI-0225642 to UCSD.