The OptIPuter is a powerful distributed cyberinfrastructure to support data-intensive scientific research and collaboration. It has two application drivers--the National Institutes of Health's Biomedical Informatics Research Network and the National Science Foundation's EarthScope--where scientists are generating multi-gigabytes of 3D volumetric data objects that reside on distributed archives that they want to correlate, analyze and visualize.

The OptIPuter is being designed as a "virtual" parallel computer in which the individual "processors" are widely distributed clusters; the "memory" is in the form of large distributed data repositories; "peripherals" are very-large scientific instruments, visualization displays and/or sensor arrays; and the "motherboard" uses standard IP delivered over multiple dedicated lambdas.

Collaborators
University of California San Diego, University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, San Diego State University, Information Sciences Institute/University of Southern California, University of California-Irvine, Texas A&M University, United States Geological Survey, USA;University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Contact
Larry Smarr
University of California San Diego
lsmarr@ucsd.edu

Tom DeFanti
University of Illinois at Chicago
tom@evl.uic.edu

http://www.calit2.net/news/2002/9-25-optiputer.html