Internet2 Participation at SC|05

12-18 November 2005
Seattle, Washington

Internet2 and Internet2 members are participating in the annual Supercomputing conference, SC|05, 12-18 November 2005 in Seattle, Washington. The conference theme, "Gateway to Discovery," will showcase how high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in research, education and commerce. The Internet2 booth, #2435, in the SC|05 exhibit area will feature several demonstrations on topics such as network performance tools, security, digital video, and more.

SC|05 News

Internet2 Demonstrates Optical Networking Firsts at SC|05 Supercomputing Conference: Consortium's Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure Testbed Links Radio Telescopes Across the Globe For Real Time Data Analysis; Demonstration marks a critical milestone in dynamic or "on demand" optical networking that can support even the most extreme applications used by the global research and education community today.

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SC|05 Exhibit Schedule

Exhibition Opening Gala:
Monday, November 14
7:00pm - 9:00pm

Exhibits Open:
Tuesday, November 15
Upper Level 9:30am - 6:00pm
Lower Level 10:00am - 6:00pm

Wednesday, November 16
Upper Level 9:30am - 6:00pm
Lower Level 10:00am - 6:00pm

Thursday, November 17
Upper Level 9:30am - 4:00pm
Lower Level 10:00am 4:00pm

Internet2 Members in the SC|05 Exhibit Area

More than 50 Internet2 members are exhibiting throughout the show floor at SC|05. Click one of the following links for a floor plan listing all Internet2 member participating in the technical exhibits:

Demonstrations & Presentations

HOPI— HOPI is the Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure Project (HOPI) and it is being used to support six SC|05 demonstrations. The goal of HOPI is to examine future network architectures that combine capabilities, from both the packet switched and circuit switched worlds, and create a hybrid of these two types of infrastructures.  To enable the testing of various hybrid approaches, the HOPI testbed will utilize resources from Abilene, from the RONs (regional optical networks), from National Lambda Rail (NLR, of which Internet2 is a key participant), and from other internationally connected facilities such as MAN LAN (Manhattan Landing) in New York City.  HOPI nodes are deployed at locations that allow easy connection between Abilene and the Internet2 NLR Wave. The nodes include optical and Ethernet switches to use circuit like paths to model optical waves.  Four HOPI nodes are located in in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and Washington, DC. In December 2005, New York City will be the location of the fifth HOPI node.

E-VLBI (Electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry) — The E-VLBI e-science application is able to link radio telescope facilities residing in Japan, Sweden, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States together to stream simultaneous real-time observation data to correlators at the MIT Haystack Observatory outside Boston. This science process – very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) – has traditionally been done by physically shipping tapes or disc packs between the telescopes and the correlator for processing. This SC05 demonstration is leveraging high performance low latency light paths to bring telescopes online to Haystack in real time, delivering data streams up to 512 Mbs from each available site to the correlator. This real time process — “Electronic” VLBI, or E-VLBI for short — enables the radio astronomy community to more actively steer observations and to react quickly to transient celestial and terrestrial events.

This radio astronomy demonstration will be held at the Internet2 booth at the following times:

Wednesday, November 16, 2005 - 11 a.m. -2 p.m.
Thursday, November 17, 2005 - 11 a.m. - 2 p.m.

DRAGON Control Plane — This session will include a presentation and demonstration on an architecture and implementation for policy-based resource management and service provisioning in GMPLS networks. The presentation will include a discussion of how GMPLS protocols can be utilized and extended to enable "hybrid" network architectures which can provide traditional best effort routed service as well as deterministic "lightpath" services. Status of the implementation and deployment on DRAGON and HOPI infrastructures will be discussed. A demonstration of interdomain lightpath provisioning across HOPI and DRAGON will be presented using UltraGrid as the example application.

UltraGrid — This session will include a presentation and demonstration on the UltraGrid system. The UltraGrid video conferencing system enables high-definition (HD) interactive video conferencing with minimal latency. UltraGrid, supports full rate uncompressed HD video at over 1.2 Gbps. In combination with AccessGrid, UltraGrid provides a complete HD video conferencing experience, utilizing AccessGrid's venue server infrastructure and audio services. The UltraGrid system can also be utilized as a general purpose HD data distribution system. UltraGrid nodes convert SMTPE 292M high-definition video signals into RTP/UDP/IP packets which can then be distributed across a variety of network infrastructures. UltraGrid's architecture seeks to minimize system induced latency. This enables UltraGrid to be utilized for a variety of real-time applications which are latency sensitive such as video conferencing and real-time interactive 3D visualization. For uncompressed HD, UltraGrid operates in two different modes: one at just under 1 Gbps (for environments limited to 1 Gbps transport) and another at full rate HD mode of over 1.2 Gbps. UltraGrid also supports video compression schemes, including standard definition Digital Video (DV) and Motion JPEG. UltraGrid systems are built using commodity personal computer hardware and open source software available at http://ultragrid.east.isi.edu.

NRL Data Conferencing — A Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), YottaYotta, Obsidian, SGI and Juniper team will be demonstrating several Data Conferencing applications at SC|05 utilizing SCinet’s OpenIB network and an IPv6 network path provided by Internet2 and HOPI. NRL HD video storage and Large Data Visualization applications hosted in the SGI booth and at NRL will access a high performance, secure, distributed data environment built using CXFS and YottaYotta systems to create Cache Coherent Federated Storage Access to Engenio InfiniBand (IB) storage systems located at both NRL and Seattle. The data path for this demonstration will bridge the SCinet OpenIB network across Internet2 to NRL’s Global Information Grid Evaluation Facility (GIG EF) in Washington, DC using Obsidian Research’s IB encapsulation over IPv6. This technology, which was initially developed by NRL, expands the reach of InfiniBand to Wide Area Network distances allowing IB applications and storage to be distributed across multiple remote sites.

Global Lambda for Particle Physics Analysis — Caltech, CERN, SLAC and FNAL's demonstration will use national and international networks to demonstrate the next generation of globally distributed physics analysis tools for Particle Physics and eScience research. The technologies being developed most notably in the UltraLight, FAST, PPDG, GriphyN, iVDGL and ESLEA projects will be used to show components of the so-called "Grid Analysis Environment," a grid infrastructure for physics analysis. These components will be part of the toolbox a physicist working on the next generation of experiments will have at his/her disposal to manage and control the worldwide Grid resources available for analyzing events that are produced at the world's premiere High Energy Physics Laboratories. In particular, we hope to demonstrate on-demand network and resource provisioning in response to event analysis requests issued from a physicist's desktop computer. The complex workflows implied by the requests will be translated using provisioning algorithms into network flow allocations and scheduled resource booking on remote computers/clusters. Throughout the demonstration we will make use of a sophisticated monitoring framework (MonALISA, developed at Caltech) to illustrate the progress of the analysis tasks, data flows in the network, and the effects on the global system.

Immersive Segmentation — This application allows users to collaboratively visualize and segment volumetric data sets, such as CT, MRI and the Visible Human data sets. The environment is both
visually and computationally immersive. Visual immersion is achieved through stereoscopic project of the image data on the client workstation. This presents the user with the illusion that the anatomical data set occupies physical space and allows direct interaction using a 3D position tracked probe. Computational immersion occurs by placing the user at the center of a fine-grained computational loop where user choices continuously affect the course of the segmentation algorithms. This environment supports the user’s natural cognitive cycle of investigation, where the user iteratively refines their understanding of the data set through a series of interpretive choices. The application is being used as part of a National Library of Medicine funded project involving the SUMMIT group at Stanford University of the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse. It is also one of the motivating applications being
considered by an Internet2 working group considering the development of new transport algorithms.

SCinet — Measurement data for SCinet, the collection of high-performance networks built each year to support the SC Conference, will be on display at the Internet2 booth throughout the conference. Performance measurement points running One-Way Ping, NDT, and Bandwidth Test Controller have been setup at the NOC; regularly scheduled tests are run from these nodes to ESnet and Abilene. A display in the Internet2 booth will show external link traffic data, using software provided by Indiana University.

NDT — The NDT (Network Diagnostic Tool) provides network configuration and performance testing to a users desktop or laptop computer.  This allows testing of the critical "first mile" portion of the end-2-end network path.  A Web100-enhanced server to performs both the testing and diagnostic functions.  Multi-level results allow novice and expert users to view and understand the test results. 

OWAMP — This session will provide a complete description of OWAMP (One-Way Ping), a tool that can be used to measure one-way latencies between hosts. This tool is intended to be a sample implementation of OWAMP is currently a draft in the IETF IPPM (IP Performance Metrics) working group.

BWCTL — BWCTL (Bandwidth Test Controller), a tool that was designed to add scheduling and policy controls around Iperf (a common bandwidth tester). The basic architecture and a complete feature description of BWCTL will be presented.

Thrulay— Thrulay is a tool to allow testers to collect data on both delay and throughput at the same time.

Info for the Media

If you are a member of the media and will be attending SC|05, please stop by the Internet2 booth in the exhibit hall or contact Lauren Rotman, Internet2 Media Relations Manager, for more information about Internet2 or about Internet2 activities at SC2005. Lauren can be reached via phone (202) 331-5345 or email <lkallens@internet2.edu>.