MREN Advanced Applications and Access to Remote Instrumentation

MREN has integrated advanced networking into support for the primary educational and research missions of its constituent communities, and it continues to be at the forefront of providing high performance networking servics for advanced applications, including those requiring access to remote instrumentation.

To view a montage of images from some of the following projects, click here.

MREN and Advanced Applications

MREN has always supported many projects related to large-scale, high performance e-Science applications, which have always been one of the primary drivers of next generation technologies. These data, bandwidth and computationally intensive applications include those that utilizes computational Grids - high energy physics, astrophysics, bioinformatics, computational biology, computational chemistry, data mining, high resolution visualization, digital engineering, geosciences, oceanographic and atmospheric studies, advanced digital media, medical imaging, financial data management, and e-commerce. Underlying such discipline-specific applications are other, cross-cutting applications, such as digital video, remote access to scientific instruments, specialized virtual-reality such as Teleimmersion (immersive virtual reality based on CAVE technologies),, and high-performance distributed systems. (ref: advanced medical imaging, astronomy and astrophysics)

Access to Remote Instrumentation

MREN also provides access to remote instrumentation such as special facilities used for high energy physics, for example, the key facilities at Fermilab (eg, collider detectors - D0 and CDF, high energy physics computational processors, and astronomy facilities, such as those related to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project). MREN also provides access to the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at ANL, a 7 Gev synchrotron, as well as to the massively parallel (128 node) high performance computer at ANL's High Performance Computing Research Center. MREN is also working on projects to link advanced virtual reality environments among member institutions over high performance networks. These VR laboratories, a type of "holodeck," are based on CAVE technology developed by the EVL laboratory at UIC. Other projects involve linking terabyte mass storage facilities to high performance networks. The CATS project (Chicago-Argonne Terabyte System) is configured for 35 Terabyte and is scaleable to 180 TB. One early project used a satellite to establish digital communications to the UoC's NSF Center for Astrophysics Research in Antarctica (CARA) to create the first interactive digital video conference to the South Pole.

Global Advanced Applications

MREN continues to be involved in many types of international projects, for example, exploring options for enhanced connectivity to the large scale instrumentation on other continents, such as the European Center for Nuclear Physics (CERN) in Switzerland. MREN has been involved in a number of international advanced application initiatives through its cooperative efforts with the Science, Technology and Research Transit Access Point -- STAR TAP. Currently, it is involved with multiple projects based on StarLight, the “optical STAR TAP.”

iGRID Conferences

The types of applications that inform MREN's technical designs can be seen at the international iGRID conferences. The primary showcase of the world's most advanced network based applications are the iGRID conferences, events that demonstrate the power and potential of the "international Grid." Many excellent next generation applications have been demonstrated every two years as part of these iGrid international applications and technology showcases. These iGRID demonstrations are organized by the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago along with other organizational partners. The goal of iGRID is to showcase the evolution and importance of global research community networking, especially by demonstrating applications being prototyped on the Global Grid. iGrid highlights achievements in Grid architecture development and the advancements enabled in science, engineering, cultural heritage, distance education, media communications, and art and architecture.

In 1998, during the national Supercomputing conference in Orlando, a variety of demonstrations were shown that required high performance networking and computing. During the last iGRID (iGRID2000) in Yokahama, Japan, 24 demonstrations were shown, featuring technical innovations and application advancements, including those requiring Teleimmersion, large datasets, distributed computing, remote instrumentation, collaboration, human/computer interfaces, streaming media, digital video and high-definition television. During that conference, 14 countries participated: Canada, CERN, Germany, Greece, Japan, Korea, Mexico, The Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom, USA. (ref: www.startap.net/igrid2000)

In September 2002, EVL at UIC and its partners in the Netherlands led the organization of iGRID2002, which took place in Amsterdam. The applications demonstrated at the iGRID conferences are particularly bandwidth intensive and most are based on Grid computing infrastructure. (www.igrid2002.org)

© 2003 MREN

11-1-03