NSF Funds Quanta Research at EVL in Support of Optical Networking
November 6, 2001
CHICAGO, IL -- The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $540,000 grant to
Jason Leigh and Oliver Yu of the University of Illinois at Chicago's
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) to develop Quanta--a software
system for supporting adaptive Quality-of-Service (QoS) over extremely
high-speed optical networks.
Compared to the congested "two-lane highway" commodity network the world
relies on today, an emerging optical network, currently in the formative
stages of being designed and built on both a national and international
scale, will have a proportionate bandwidth capacity of dozens of lanes.
The challenge then is to give applications the horsepower and control to
race through the lanes.
Getting applications to work optimally on a high-speed optical network will
not be as simple as connecting ones computer to the Internet. Today's
protocol stacks and scientific applications will be unable to use the
extreme level of bandwidth. The researchers at EVL intend to address this
problem with Quanta, by providing scientific applications a high-level way
to specify their data delivery requirements (such as bandwidth, latency,
jitter, reliability), and then transparently translate them into the
appropriate transmission protocol and network QoS services.
Quanta will consist of novel networking protocols designed to handle a wide
variety of extremely high bandwidth application traffic flows. Its QoS
architecture will allow flexible control of these protocols, and support
wire and optical QoS mechanisms such as Generalized Multi Protocol
Label/Lambda Switching (GMPLS). This means that distributed scientists will
communicate more fluidly, and distributed applications will communicate
more quickly and efficiently. Ultimately, both advantages will translate to
scientists being able to make discoveries more rapidly.
Scientists will be the first users of the burgeoning optical network by
virtue of their high bandwidth applications and distributed computing and
storage needs. Allowing scientists to take better advantage of emerging
national and international optical networks will lay the groundwork for
future optical commodity networks.
The National Science Foundation-funded StarLightSM project is one such
advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services
optimized for high-performance applications. StarLight is now being used by
EVL researchers to conduct Chicago-to-Amsterdam optical testing. It is
being built in parallel with STAR TAPSM,
the Chicago-based international,
interconnection point that has facilitated the long-term interconnection
and interoperability of advanced international networking since 1997.
StarLight is being developed by the EVL, 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.
STAR TAP is a registered trademark of the University of Illinois Board of
Trustees.
StarLight is a registered trademark of the University of Illinois Board of
Trustees and Northwestern University Board of Trustees.
Contact:
Laura Wolf
Electronic Visualization Laboratory
University of Illinois at Chicago
laura@evl.uic.edu