Welcome to iGrid 2005!

- Maxine Brown and Tom DeFanti, iGrid 2005 co-chairs

iGrid 2005, the 4th community-driven biennial International Grid event, is a coordinated effort to accelerate the use of multi-10Gb international and national networks, to advance scientific research, and to educate decision makers, academicians and industry researchers on the benefits of these hybrid networks. This year, iGrid showcases more than four-dozen real-time application demonstrations from 20 countries, as well as a symposium with 25 lectures, panels and master classes on the applications, middleware, and underlying cyberinfrastructure.

At its core, this cyberinfrastructure has new architectural approaches to next-generation internet design and development using optical networking. A single optical fiber can carry multiple wavelengths of light, or lambdas, enabling multiple networks to run in parallel. New middleware technologies enable applications to dynamically manage these lambda resources just as they do any grid resource, creating LambdaGrids of interconnected, distributed, high-performance computers, data storage devices, and instrumentation.

On the last day of iGrid 2005, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) has its annual meeting. GLIF is the international virtual organization creating a world-scale LambdaGrid laboratory, driven by the demands of application scientists, engineered by leading network engineers, and enabled by grid middleware developers. iGrid showcases the latest advances in scientific collaboration and discovery enabled by GLIF partners, by providing a forum for these far-flung teams to test interoperability on a global scale.

© 2005 The International Grid (iGrid) biennial / triennial collaborative event showcases ongoing global collaborations in middleware development and applications research that require high-performance multi-gigabit networks. iGrids are organized by institutions, organizations, consortia and National Research & Education Networks who also participate in GLIF. Overall planning responsibilities for iGrid 2005 are being handled by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Calit2 at the University of California, San Diego, in cooperation with the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, SURFnet, University of Amsterdam, and CANARIE.