Glimmerglass in iGrid Demos

SAN DIEGO and HAYWARD, Calif. -- 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.”

Glimmerglass Networks