*Appears in Telecommunication, Teleimmersion and Telexistence, (Susumu Tachi, editor), Ohmsha / IOS Press, 2003, pp. 25-71.

The OptIPuter is a radical distributed visualization, teleimmersion, data mining and computing architecture. Observing that the exponential growth rates in bandwidth and storage are now much higher than Moore’s Law, this major new project of several US universities in Southern California and Illinois “goes to the end of the rainbow” to exploit a new world in which the central architectural element is optical networking, not computers. This transition is caused by the use of parallelism, as in supercomputing, a decade ago.

However, this time the parallelism is in multiple wavelengths of light, or lambdas, on single optical fibers, creating supernetworks. The OptIPuter project aims to reoptimize the entire Grid stack of software abstractions, to learn how, as George Gilder suggests, to “waste” bandwidth and storage in order to conserve increasingly “scarce” high-end computing and people time in this new world of inverted values.

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DeFanti, T., Leigh, J., Brown, M., Sandin, D., Yu, O., Zhang, C., Singh, R., He, E., Alimohideen, J., Krishnaprasad, N., Grossman, R., Mazzucco, M., Smarr, L., Ellisman, M., Papadopoulos, A., Chien, A., Orcutt, J., Teleimmersion and Visualization with the OptIPuter, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence (ICAT 2002), The University of Tokyo, Japan, December 3rd, 2002.