TransLight/StarLight, GLIF
and OptIPuter
Maxine D. Brown
Electronic Visualization Laboratory
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO
maxine@uic.edu
CANS 2006
December 8, 2006
US National Science Foundation (NSF)
Funds 5 IRNC International Networking Projects
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Support science and engineering research and education
applications
Enable state-of-the-art international network services
Share tools and best practices
Work on major events and activities (SC, Grid, GLIF)
IRNC is the international extension of US R&E Networks (national
and regional)
www.irnclinks.net
TransLight/StarLight
Mission Statement
• TransLight/StarLight works with US and European R&E
networks:
– to implement strategies to best serve production
science
– to identify and best serve pre-production data-intensive
e-science applications, for they are the drivers for new
networking tools and services to advance the state-ofthe-art of production science; e.g., persistent large data
flows, real-time visualization and collaboration, and/or
remote instrumentation scheduling
www.startap.net/translight
TransLight/StarLight
A Hybrid Network Consisting of Two Trans-Atlantic Links
GÉANT2 PoP @ AMS-IE
NetherLight
StarLight
MAN LAN
• OC-192 routed connection between MAN LAN in New York City and the
Amsterdam Internet Exchange that connects the USA Abilene and
ESnet networks to the pan-European GÉANT2 network
• OC-192 switched connection between NLR and RONs at StarLight and
optical connections at NetherLight; part of the GLIF LambdaGrid fabric
www.startap.net/translight
TransLight/Pacific Wave
10GE Wave Facilitates US West Coast Connectivity
Developing a distributed exchange facility on the US West Coast
(currently Seattle, Sunnyvale and Los Angeles) to interconnect
international and US research and education networks
www.pacificwave.net/participants/irnc/
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TransLight is a 10Gbps lightpath donated by Cisco and deployed by NLR that
facilitates US, European and Pacific Rim network connections
Enables participating networks to easily configure direct connections
whenever needed
Adds resiliency and stability to the North American segment of GLIF
www.pnw-gigapop.net/news/translight_conn.html
GLORIAD
Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development
www.gloriad.org
Greg Cole, Natasha Bulashova,
NSF Co-PIs
Global Lambda Integrated Facility
Available Advanced Network Resources − September 2005
GLIF is a consortium of institutions, organizations, consortia and country
National Research & Education Networks who voluntarily share optical
networking resources and expertise to develop the Global LambdaGrid
for the advancement of scientific collaboration and discovery
Visualization courtesy of Bob Patterson, NCSA; data compilation by Maxine Brown, UIC.
www.glif.is
GLIF Working Groups
• Governance: To create an open, neutral community for anyone
who wants to contribute resources and/or services (bandwidth,
software, application drivers), to build the Global LambdaGrid
• Engineering: To define the types of links and the
minimum/maximum configurations of Optical Exchange
facilities in order to assure the interoperability and
interconnectivity of participating networks
• Applications: To enable the super-users providing the
application drivers; to find new e-science drivers; and, to move
scientific experiments into production usage as they mature,
and to document these advancements
• Control Plane and Grid Integration Middleware: To agree on
the interfaces and protocols for lambda provisioning and
management
www.glif.is
Annual GLIF Meetings
GLIF 2006, Tokyo, Japan, hosted by NiCT and WIDE
www.glif.is
iGrid 2005
September 26-30, 2005, San Diego, California
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4th community-driven biennial International Grid event attracting 450 participants
– An international testbed for participants to collaborate on a global scale
– To accelerate the use of multi-10Gb international and national networks
– To advance scientific research
– To educate decision makers, academicians and industry about hybrid networks
49 demonstrations showcasing global experiments in e-Science and next-generation
shared open-source LambdaGrid services
20 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, CERN, China, Czech Republic, Germany,
Hungary, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden,
Taiwan, UK, USA
25 lectures, panels and master classes as part of a symposium
100Gb into the Calit2 building on the UCSD campus
All IRNC links used!
www.igrid2005.org
iGrid 2005 Proceedings Available!
Special issue on iGrid 2005: The
Global Lambda Integrated Facility
27 referred papers!
Smarr, Larry, Maxine Brown, Tom
DeFanti and Cees de Laat (guest
editors)
Future Generation Computer Systems,
Volume 22, Issue 8, Elsevier, October
2006, pp. 849-1054
www.elsevier.com/locate/future
OptIPuter
Removing Bandwidth as an Obstacle In Data-Intensive e-Science
• OptIPuter is an NSF-funded award to develop cyberinfrastructure to
enable the real-time collaboration and visualization of very-large timevarying volumetric datasets for the geosciences and biosciences
• OptIPuter is examining a new model of computing whereby ultra-highspeed networks form the backplane of a global computer
NIH Biomedical Informatics
Research Network
http://siovizcenter.ucsd.edu
http://ncmir.ucsd.edu
www.optiputer.net
NSF EarthScope
and ORION
OptIPuter
Architecture Bandwidth Matches Clusters to the Network
• Hardware: clusters of computers that act as giant storage, compute
or visualization peripherals, in which each node of each cluster is
attached at 1 or 10GigE to a backplane of ultra-high-speed networks
• Software: Advanced middleware and application toolkits are being
developed for light path management, data management and mining,
visualization, and collaboration
Commodity GigE Switch
Fibers or Lambdas
www.optiputer.net
OptIPuter
Enabling Persistent Collaboration Spaces
OptIPortals Are 21st Century PCs with 10Gbps
Network Connections
• Tiled-display installations at partner sites
• Unified SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics
Environment) software (integrated with Rocks Viz
Roll)
Source: Jason Leigh, UIC/EVL
www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/optiputer
www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage
OptIPuter Partners
• UCSD
• University of Illinois at
Chicago
• University of CaliforniaIrvine
• San Diego State Univ
• University of Southern
California
• NCSA
• Northwestern
• Texas A&M
• University of Michigan
• Purdue University
• USGS
• NASA
• CANARIE, Canada
• CRC, Canada
• SARA, Netherlands
• Univ of Amsterdam,
Netherlands
• KISTI, Korea
• AIST, Japan
OptIPuter
10GE CAVEwave on the National LambdaRail
The OptIPuter exploits a new world in which the central architectural
element is optical networking – creating supernetworks
Connections
to Asian
partners
CA*net 4 to Canadian partners
and JGN2 to Japanese partners
Connections
to European
partners
NU
UIC
NCSA
USC
UCI SDSU
UCSD
NASA GSFC
Venter
Institute
TAMU
CAVEwave™ is the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory’s
very own 10 Gigabit wavelength on the NLR infrastructure, connected to the University of
Washington in Seattle and UCSD in San Diego, enabling OptIPuter experiments. It was recently
extended to the DC area to connect with NASA GSFC and Venter Institute
www.evl.uic.edu
OptIPuter
Demonstration of SAGE Applications
MagicCarpet
Bitplayer
Streaming Blue Marble
Streaming animation of
dataset from San Diego to
tornado simulation
EVL using UDP.
using UDP.
6.7Gbps
516 Mbps
About 9 Gbps in total.
SAGE can simultaneously support these applications
without decreasing their performance
SVC
Locally streaming
HD camera live
video using UDP.
538Mbps
Source: Xi Wang, UIC/EVL
JuxtaView
Locally streaming the aerial
photography of downtown
Chicago using TCP.
850 Mbps
What you will see this afternoon….
StarLight
On the campus of Northwestern University
• StarLight is the world’s largest 1 GE
and 10 GE optical exchange for
research and education networks (~70
1GE and ~50x10G)
• StarLight is a large research-friendly
co-location facility with space, power
and fiber that is available to university
and national/international network
collaborators as a point of presence/
GOLE in Chicago
• StarLight provides an optical
infrastructure and proving ground for
network services optimized for highperformance applications
• StarLight is a collaboration of NU, UIC,
ANL, CA*net 4, and many others, with
partial funding by NSF/OCI and DOE
www.startap.net/starLight
Northwestern University’s
Chicago downtown campus
StarLight Connected Networks
International Advanced Networks National and Regional Networks
ASNet
CANARIE
CERN/LHCNET
CERNET/NSFCNET
CESNET (Czech Repubic)
GLORIAD-China/CSTnet
GLORIAD-Russia
GLORIAD-KREONet2/KOREN
HARNET
JGN-II
SINET
SURFnet
TaiwanLight/TWAREN
TransLight/StarLight IRNC
UKLight
www.startap.net/starlight/NETWORKS
Source: Linda Winker
Abilene
BOREAS
CAVEwave
DREN
ESnet
Fermi LightPath
HOPI
I-Light
I-WIRE
LONI
MCNC/EnLIGHTened
MiLR
MREN
National LambdaRail
NISN
OMNInet
Southern Light Rail
TeraGrid
TransLight
UltraScience Net
USGS
Wisc Wave
Electronic Visualization Laboratory
University of Illinois at Chicago
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EVL established in 1973 − 33 years of
interdisciplinary collaboration in
Computer Science and Art
Tom DeFanti, Dan Sandin, Jason
Leigh, co-directors
Students in CS, ECE, Art+Design
Real-time Computer Science + Art 
Networked Scientific Visualization,
Computer Graphics and Teleimmersive Virtual Environments 
Lightpaths and LambdaGrids
Research in:
– Advanced display systems
– Visualization and virtual reality
software
– Advanced networking protocols
– Collaboration and human/computer
interaction
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Funding mainly NSF, ONR, NIH. Also
NTT, General Motors
www.evl.uic.edu
EVL is a network user !
EVL Sponsors and Collaborators
• TransLight/StarLight is made possible by NSF cooperative agreement
OCI-0441094 to University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)
• OptIPuter is OptIPuter made possible by NSF award OCI-0225642 to
University of California, San Diego
• StarLight made possible by NSF OCI-0229642 to UIC and Northwestern
• Equipment instrumentation development made possible by NSF
awards CNS-0224306 and CNS-0420477 to UIC
• Additional UIC funding provided by
– State of Illinois I-WIRE Program, and major UIC cost sharing
– Northwestern University for facility space, engineering and management
• US NSF/CISE and US DoE/Argonne National Laboratory for StarLight
and I-WIRE network engineering and design
• Kees Neggers of SURFnet and Bill St. Arnaud of CANARIE for
networking leadership
• Larry Smarr of Calit2 for I-WIRE and OptIPuter leadership
Questions?
www.startap.net/starlight
www.startap.net/translight
www.optiputer.net
www.evl.uic.edu