Special Section: Optiplanet - The Optiputer Global Collaboratory

摘要

The OptIPuter research project, so named for its use of OPTical networking,Internet Protocol, and compUTER technologies, was funded by the USA National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2002 for a period of six years [17,4]. The goal was to understand how to system engineer an 'optical overlay' to the standard shared Internet, so that individual researchers could tightly couple computational resources over dedicated jitter-free 10 Gbps optical lightpaths, or 'lambdas'. Such 'data superhighways' are needed because the shared Internet and World Wide Web are engineered to interactively handle megabyte-sized objects, whereas today's scientific instruments generate gigabyte- to terabyte-sized datasets. The OptIPuter project aims to make interactive access of remote gigabyte visualization data objects as easy as the Web makes access to remote lower-resolution images today.