NSF Buys Glimmerglass Switch for LambdaRail

SAN DIEGO & HAYWARD, Calif., Sept. 23 -- Glimmerglass, a provider of automated fiber management solutions, announced today that the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded OptIPuter project has purchased its intelligent optical switch to cross-connect all single-mode fiber connections in the OptIPuter 10 Gb/s optical network backbone connected to the National LambdaRail.
The Glimmerglass switch, which is already in place in OptIPuter's University of Illinois facility, has been mirrored in the project's University of California, San Diego (UCSD) facility. The OptIPuter project, named for its use of optical networking, Internet protocol, and computer storage, processing and visualization, was created to explore and implement "supernetworks" in which the central architectural element is optical networks, not computers.

The Glimmerglass switch at UCSD supports 128 x 128 (input x output) fibers and will serve in demonstrations at iGrid 2005, an international grid conference to be held next week in San Diego. Demonstrations will include real-time, multiscale brain data assembly, acquisition and analysis between collaborative but geographically dispersed centers; parallel interactive 3-D visualization of earth science interest; and use of global lambdas for particle physics analysis.

"The Glimmerglass optical switches allow us to automatically control extremely large, extremely complex networks and to preconfigure different network architectures that can be called and loaded on demand," said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a partnership of UCSD and UC Irvine, and principal investigator on the OptIPuter project.

"We can dynamically re-allocate a light path in seconds. This is a huge time-saver for us and critical for conducting important network tests."
National LambdaRail (NLR) is an initiative of US research universities and private sector technology companies to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications.

The OptIPuter is a five-year, $13.5 million project that will enable scientists who are generating massive amounts of data to interactively visualize, analyze and correlate their data from multiple storage sites connected to optical networks. UCSD and UIC lead the research team, in partnership with researchers at Northwestern University, San Diego State University, the Information Sciences Institute at the UCSD and UC Irvine and industry partners.

For more information, visit: www.optiputer.net