First anniversary of I-Light to be celebrated Dec. 4

By Greg Moore, Communications Specialist, UITS

I-Light strengthens Indiana's growing reputation as a major center for information technology (IT) and telecommunications, and positions the state's research universities at the forefront in the development of advanced communication applications.

During the past year, I-Light has made possible greater independence in telecommunications through decreased dependence on telecommunication providers. With multiple strands of optical fiber, I-Light increases current networking capacity by many orders of magnitude, providing more than enough capacity to meet demand over the next 10 to 20 years. This increased capacity, which is in addition to existing Internet2 connectivity, is allocated equally between the Halls of Residence at IUB, the IUB campus, and the IUPUI campus and its connections to the six regional campuses. As well, Purdue and the state of Indiana, via the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System, were able to obtain similar capacity improvements at no additional cost using I-Light.

I-Light has allowed IU and its partner universities to pool high-end computational resources in initiatives such as the Indiana Virtual Machine Room, a collaboration that resulted in the first university supercomputing grid to surpass the teraflop level of computation. The grid takes advantage of Purdue's large memory configuration and IU's raw computational power, resulting in one of the world's most powerful systems, able to provide the computational power for researchers at multiple locations to study—for example, “synthetic environments,” including economic, disaster and other simulations—in greater detail.

I-Light supports highly advanced research applications and makes possible virtual, real-time collaborative workspace for scientists and technologists on the core campuses of Indiana's major research universities. In addition, I-Light enables researchers to exchange tremendously increased volumes of scientific data.

On Wednesday, Dec. 4, technologists from IUB, IUPUI and Purdue will demonstrate some of the advances in science and IT made possible by I-Light at the first I-Light Applications Workshop, to be held at the IUPUI University Place Conference Center in Indianapolis.

The I-Light Applications Workshop will provide participants with the opportunity to explore collaboration, research and scholarship possibilities using I-Light.

Read more about I-Light and the upcoming workshop:
http://www.i-light.org/

Smarr

Stevens

I-Light Applications Workshop

IUPUI University Place Conference Center • Indianapolis
Wednesday, Dec. 4

How is the I-Light network being used for applications in advanced computing, visualization and remote collaboration?

How can the I-Light networking environment enrich research programs in a wide variety of disciplines?

Keynote speakers

Larry Smarr • Rick Stevens

Larry Smarr is a pioneer in prototyping a national information infrastructure to support academic research, governmental functions and industrial competitiveness, and is the founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the Universities of California at San Diego and Irvine.

Smarr previously served as founding director for both the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the National Computational Science Alliance. He is a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee.

Rick Stevens is director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He also directs Argonne's High Performance Computing and Communications program, as well as Argonne's Futures Laboratory, an initiative for new research and development in the areas of advanced communications, collaboration and visualization technologies to further enable wide-area, collaborative computational science.