ITR: The OptIPuter

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The OptIPuter project explores a new architecture for the distributed information infrastructure (which NSF terms infostructure) required by a number of this decade's science and engineering shared facilities. The project is driven by a close collaboration with leaders of two of these community systems?NSF's EarthScope and NIH's Biomedical Imaging Research Network (BIRN)?both of which are beginning to produce an accelerating flood of data which will in stored in distributed federated data repositories. One characteristic blocking such science is that the individual data objects (a 3D brain image or a terrain dataset) are large (Gigabytes) compared to what can be interactively manipulated or visualized over today's networks. What these scientists require are ultra-high-speed predictable "clear-channel" networks linking PC clusters, storage and visualization systems, enabling collaborating scientists to explore interactively massive amounts of previously uncorrelated data. An important opportunity exists over the next few years to develop a radical new architecture for this needed scientific infostructure. Observing that the exponential growth rates in bandwidth and storage are now much higher than Moore's Law, this research "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 at the re-optimization of the entire Grid stack of software abstractions, learning how, as George Gilder suggests, to "waste" bandwidth and storage in order to conserve "scarce" computing in this new world of inverted values. Such a period of technological paradigm shifting requires large-scale application-driven system experiments and a broad multidisciplinary team to understand and develop innovative solutions for a "LambdaGrid" world. Smaller scale efforts are unlikely to produce the radical changes needed to seize the opportunity. Without tackling this research arena, more traditional approaches to developing e-Science infostructure will instead be widely adopted, but at what ultimate cost to the country in our loss of scientific leadership in the long term? Our approach is not without risk; however, with these exponentials crossing, and therefore a technologically driven reordering of infostructure architectural considerations inevitable, an exciting research opportunity is now made possible. Essentially, the OptIPuter is a "virtual" parallel computer in which the individual "processors" are widely distributed clusters; the "backplane" is provided by IP delivered over multiple dedicated lambdas (each 1-10 Gbps); and, the "mass storage systems" are large distributed scientific data repositories, fed by scientific instruments as OptIPuter peripheral devices, operated in near real-time. Furthermore, collaboration will be a defining OptIPuter characteristic; goals include implementing a next-generation Access Grid with optical multicast, enabling tiled stereo HDTV screens of reality-matching visual resolution. The OptIPuter is an embodiment of the vision of the "hollowing out of the computer" prophesized by Erich Schmidt in the mid-1990s. The old "computer-in-a-box" is being blown up and scattered across the Net. The OptIPuter's fundamental inventions include software and middleware abstractions to deliver unique capabilities in a lambda-rich world, a world in which endpoint-delivered bandwidth is greater than individual computers can saturate. This research on campus and metro-scale OptIPuters complements State (CENIC/ONI in California, I-WIRE in Illinois), national (TeraGrid), and international (StarLight) projects. The six-university OptIPuter research team spans applications, software, networking and hardware expertise to address the challenges. This team has a long history of successfully managing large multidisciplinary and multi-institutional projects, working with companies, and delivering high-impact innovations in hardware and software systems. Since industry is developing key subcomponents of the OptIPuter, several leading companies are involved as partners. The new architectural models and the software systems to make them function should contribute important capabilities to other large-scale Federally funded networked science facilities. Going beyond research, the collaborative visualization data-fusion OptIPuter centers coupled to remote instrumentation will be enabling technologies for broader societal needs, including emergency response, homeland security, health services, and science education.