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November 6, 2001

NSF Funds Quanta Research at EVL in Support of Optical Networking

CHICAGO, IL - The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $540,000 grant to Jason Leigh and Oliver Yu of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) to develop Quanta - a software system for supporting adaptive Quality-of-Service (QoS) over extremely high-speed optical networks.

Compared to the congested “two-lane highway” commodity network the world relies on today, an emerging optical network, currently in the formative stages of being designed and built on both a national and international scale, will have a proportionate bandwidth capacity of dozens of lanes. The challenge then is to give applications the horsepower and control to race through the lanes.

Getting applications to work optimally on a high-speed optical network will not be as simple as connecting ones computer to the Internet. Today’s protocol stacks and scientific applications will be unable to use the extreme level of bandwidth. The researchers at EVL intend to address this problem with Quanta, by providing scientific applications a high-level way to specify their data delivery requirements (such as bandwidth, latency, jitter, reliability), and then transparently translate them into the appropriate transmission protocol and network QoS services.

Quanta will consist of novel networking protocols designed to handle a wide variety of extremely high bandwidth application traffic flows. Its QoS architecture will allow flexible control of these protocols, and support wire and optical QoS mechanisms such as Generalized Multi Protocol Label / Lambda Switching (GMPLS). This means that distributed scientists will communicate more fluidly, and distributed applications will communicate more quickly and efficiently. Ultimately, both advantages will translate to scientists being able to make discoveries more rapidly.

Scientists will be the first users of the burgeoning optical network by virtue of their high bandwidth applications and distributed computing and storage needs. Allowing scientists to take better advantage of emerging national and international optical networks will lay the groundwork for future optical commodity networks.

The National Science Foundation-funded StarLight℠ project is one such advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications. StarLight is now being used by EVL researchers to conduct Chicago-to-Amsterdam optical testing. It is being built in parallel with STAR TAP℠, the Chicago-based international, interconnection point that has facilitated the long-term interconnection and interoperability of advanced international networking since 1997.

StarLight is being developed by the EVL, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, in partnership with Canada’s CANARIE and Holland’s SURFnet.

STAR TAP is a registered trademark of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.
StarLight is a registered trademark of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees and Northwestern University Board of Trustees.


Contact:
Laura Wolf
Electronic Visualization Laboratory
University of Illinois at Chicago
laura@evl.uic.edu