June 27, 2002

Registration is open for the global iGrid 2002 event this September 23-26 in Amsterdam. A showcase of 29 very-high-bandwidth technical innovations and application advancements from 15 countries will be on display. On September 25-26, two full-day Topical Meetings (Symposia) will run concurrently with the demonstrations, featuring invited keynote speakers on e-Science and Virtual Laboratory/Grid developments.

IGrid 2002 will be held at the Amsterdam Science and Technology Centre (WTCW), a world-class scientific research campus and supercomputing hub where SURFnet's 2.5 Gigabit NetherLight circuit to the StarLight in Chicago originates.

Grid computing is the emerging enabling technology for facilitating multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary collaborations worldwide, and underlies the iGrid 2002 high-speed networking demonstrations of remote instrumentation control, tele-immersion, real-time client server systems, multimedia, tele-teaching, digital video, distributed computing and high-throughput, high-priority data transfers.

The event itself will provide an international testbed for applications scientists, computer scientists, artists, networking engineers and commercial vendors to collaborate on a global scale, and advance the state-of-the-art in high-performance computing and communications.

The iGrid 2002 event, funded in part by the US National Science Foundation and the Netherlands' GigaPort project, is a challenge to scientists and technologists to optimally utilize experimental networks.

Early registration ends August 1, 2002. See www.igrid2002.org for details.

About SURFnet and NetherLight
SURFnet--the advanced national research network of the Netherlands--recently established Netherlight, an optical testbed connecting Amsterdam to Chicago at 2.5Gbps. This transoceanic link is the first to enable very-high-speed interconnectivity of evolving experimental networks in the US and Europe, and encourages other countries and continents to also interconnect, creating a global experimental network for advanced scientific research.

About StarLight
StarLight, the optical STAR TAP, is an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications. StarLight, funded by the National Science Foundation, is being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, in partnership with Canada's CANARIE and Holland's SURFnet.

Contact:
Laura Wolf
Electronic Visualization Laboratory
laura@evl.uic.edu