News Releases

Glimmerglass Optical Switch to Power 10Gb/s Connections on OptIPuter’s Local and National Supercomputing Network

Glimmerglass Switches To Be Featured in Upcoming iGrid 2005 Conference

San Diego / Hayward, CA - September 22, 2005 - Glimmerglass, a provider of automated fiber management solutions, announced today that the National Science Foundation-funded OptIPuter project has purchased its intelligent optical switch to cross-connect all single mode fiber connections in the OptIPuter 10Gb/s optical network backbone, connected to the National LambdaRail (NLR).

The Glimmerglass switch, already in place in OptIPuter’s University of Illinois facility, has been mirrored in the project’s University of California, San Diego facility (UCSD). The OptIPuter project, named for its use of optical networking, Internet Protocol, as well as 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 128x128 (input x output fibers) and will serve in featured demonstrations at iGrid 2005, an international grid conference, September 26 - 29 in San Diego, Calif. Demonstrations will include real-time, multi-scale brain data assembly, acquisition and analysis between collaborative but geographically dispersed centers; parallel interactive 3D 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 pre-configure 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.”

“I’m very impressed with the innovative work from Larry and his OptIPuter team,” said Robert Lundy, Glimmerglass CEO. “Grid technology and the OptIPuter project are giving us all a glimpse into what’s possible using massively parallel, dynamically reconfigurable optical networks. We’re proud to be part of it.”

About OptIPuter
The OptIPuter is a five-year, $13.5 million project funded by the National Science Foundation. It 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 University of Southern California, and UC Irvine, with multiple industry partners. For more information, go to the OptIPuter website at www.optiputer.net.

About Glimmerglass
Glimmerglass offers a new approach to managing fiber infrastructure. Its customers achieve an ROI in just a few months rather than over several years as with conventional equipment. Glimmerglass’ intelligent optical switch enables customers to automatically, remotely and instantly monitor and manage fiber optic connections in a wide range of applications. For more information about Glimmerglass, visit: www.glimmerglass.com.

About iGrid 2005
The International Grid (iGrid) collaborative event showcases ongoing global collaborations in middleware development and applications research that require high-performance multi-gigabit networks. The iGrids are organized every two or three years by institutions, organizations, consortia and National Research & Education Networks who also participate in the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF). Overall planning responsibilities for iGrid 2005 are being handled by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (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. For more information, see www.igrid2005.org.

Media Contacts:
Pam Crowley:
Crowley Communications:
408.529.9655:
pamc @ crowleypr.com:

Doug Ramsey:
UCSD / Calit2 / iGrid:
858.822.5825:
dramsey @ ucsd.edu:

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Relate links:
www.calit2.net/articles/article.php?id=693