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High-speed network connection
ties top universities to ORNL
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Aug. 14, 2002 - Oak Ridge National Laboratory's new
computer link to Atlanta is 200,000 times faster than the fastest
dial-up connections typical of home computers and is expected to spur
significant advances in science and economic development in the region
and beyond.
At a ceremony today at ORNL, Ray Orbach,
director of the Department of
Energy's Office of Science,
symbolically completed the connection
linking the laboratory's supercomputer to Southern Crossroads
(http://www.sox.net/about/main.htm)
universities and other premier
schools around the country. The link will connect DOE's
ESnet computer
network with Internet2,
the network of top-tier universities, at speeds
up to 20 times faster than the previous ORNL connection. With the new
link, a data file the size of the film "Gone With the Wind" could be
transmitted in a mere six seconds.
"This new high-speed network strengthens the partnership between DOE
and the academic community, which is critical to our plans to reassert
U.S. leadership in computational sciences," said ORNL's
Thomas
Zacharia, associate lab director for the Computing and Computational
Sciences Directorate.
The network of fiber optic cables, which run from ORNL through
Chattanooga to Georgia Tech in Atlanta, also will enhance the
ORNL-Chattanooga technology corridor by positioning the region for new
research and development opportunities. And the benefits are likely to
extend far beyond, including throughout Georgia.
"Over the past several years ORNL, Oak Ridge Associated Universities
and the core universities -- Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, University of
Virginia, Duke, North Carolina State, University of Tennessee and
Florida State -- have worked together in order to foster
inter-institutional, multidisciplinary research," said
Charles L.
Liotta, vice president for research at Georgia Tech. "The new
high-speed network will allow this partnership to evolve to a new level
of research/education collaboration. I predict that an important
outcome will be enhanced economic development for this region of the
nation."
Bill Wing
of ORNL's Computer Science and Mathematics
Division noted
that the connection to Southern Crossroads universities will allow for
vastly increased flow of information between ORNL researchers and
collaborators at Internet2 institutions. Southern Crossroads members
include the University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Emory, Georgia,
Alabama, South Carolina, Kentucky, Florida State and Georgia Tech, the
site of the 10 gigabit (10 billion bits per second) connection. The
high-speed link is provided by Qwest
Communications International,
which also supplies the backbone for ESnet and Internet2.
With the link to ORNL's
Cheetah,
a 4.5 teraflop IBM machine recently
listed No. 8 in the Top500 list of
fastest computers in the world,
researchers from leading universities and national laboratories will
have access to incredible amounts of data that will help them in their
studies of astrophysics,
biology,
chemistry,
climate modeling,
materials and
fusion. Researchers
will be able to acquire data through
ORNL's Center for Computational Sciences
in a matter of seconds.
And this is just the beginning, as DOE and ORNL look forward to an
ongoing partnership with the nation's research universities. Officials
are confident they will see extraordinary progress in computers and
high-performance networks for science and engineering.
"The network forms a test bed that will serve as the basis for network
research and development that will carry DOE's computational mission
forward for the next five to 10 years," Zacharia said. "Soon, we will
need to transport petabyte-size files and this network and the research
it enables will be crucial."
ORNL officials also noted that linking Internet2 and ESnet is a natural
step for ORNL because the Center for Computational Sciences is the
designated primary site for DOE's Scientific Discovery through Advanced
Computing (SciDAC).
The initiative involves extensive partnerships between 13
DOE labs and about 50 universities and is intended to solve research
problems of national importance.
For example, John Drake,
an ORNL senior researcher, noted the immediate
impact the high-speed connection will have in ocean science studies and
a $20 million SciDAC climate study.
"This enables our collaborators at Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Los Alamos National
Laboratory to receive very large data files containing new analyses of
the ocean's influence on future climates," Drake said. "With that
information readily available, researchers will be able to perform
studies more quickly and they will be able to develop more
sophisticated models."
Recently, the new computing power of the Cheetah enabled researchers at
ORNL and the National Center for Atmospheric Research to double the
resolution of climate studies. Scientists expect that breakthrough to
result in a better understanding of local impacts on global climate
change.
While some connections, including those at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and UT, will increase from 45 or 155 million bits per second
(mbs) to 622 mbs, many will leap to 10 gigabits per second when the
Internet2 speed increases to OC192 later this year. Among those will be
ORNL connections to Georgia Tech, Stanford, the University of
Washington, Argonne National Laboratory, the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and San Diego
Supercomputer Center.
Efforts to make the connection happen began more than a year ago and
have involved dozens of people, said Zacharia, who acknowledged the
support from Chattanooga Mayor
Bob Corker and U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp
(R-3rd District). "Without their diligence and commitment to this
project, we simply would not be poised to leap into an era of new
collaborations and discoveries certain to make our lives better,"
Zacharia said.
ORNL is a Department of Energy multiprogram research facility managed
by UT-Battelle.
NOTE TO EDITORS:
You may read other press releases from Oak Ridge National Laboratory
or learn more about the lab at
http://www.ornl.gov/news.