News Briefs - General:

Internet Visionary Smarr To Deliver SC Global Keynote

Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2], will give the keynote address at SC Global 2004, the Access Grid-enabled component of the SC04 high-performance computing, networking, and storage conference, Nov. 6-12, 2004. Smarr's address, Towards a Planetary Collaboratory, will be 10:30 a.m. to noon on Nov. 9 in rooms 403 and 405 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh. It will also be available over the Access Grid to SC Global Constellation, Satellite, and Observer Sites around the world. Smarr – who is also a professor of computer science at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering – will review some of the history toward realizing the vision of the "collaboratory."

The goal of a collaboratory is to eliminate distance between collaborating scientists and remote scientific instruments, distributed data repositories, and other resources. The tools used to achieve this goal are increasing amounts of bandwidth and innovations in Internet technologies and middleware. The Access Grid itself is perhaps the best-known Internet-based collaboratory today, and Smarr is leading a multi- institutional, NSF-funded effort called the OptIPuter to create environments for high-performance science (i.e., big data science) enabled by ‘intelligent light paths.’ Smarr will discuss the spirit of innovation in collaboratory development, fueled by recent phenomena in which researchers are creating optical networking "clear channels" or "lambdas" across the campus, state, nation, and globe, whose entire bandwidth can be dedicated to a single campus researcher. In the United States, the backbone is the National Lambda Rail, which is linked to the international Global Lambda Integrated Facility. The Cal-(IT)2 director will discuss examples of applications that require "personal lambdas" and how they open new possibilities toward telepresence and global collaboratories. SC Global attendees, whether at the main conference site in Pittsburgh or at remote SC Global Sites, will have the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of events during the conference, including:

• Continental Challenge: The first-ever demonstration of simultaneous Access Grid connections from all six inhabited continents
• Stereographics and Virtual Reality over the Access Grid
• Advancing Technology in Native American Communities
• LEAD: Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery
• The ARCEL Network, a Global Faculty in Art & Science

SC2004 is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (ACM SIGARCH).