Advanced Networking Applications

Connecting People and IT Resources for U.S. Scientific Leadership

Logo of the Grid Physics Network, which will develop grid technologies enabling researchers to access and use large-scale data from the world's most advanced physics experiments

Selected agency activities
NSF

Because of their mission-oriented focus on advanced computing and networking for scientific research, the NITRD agencies are the world's leaders in forging a technical path toward the convergence of high-end computing and high-speed networks. The fundamental paradigm shift in scientific research methods now under way is highlighted by the increasing number of Federally supported networking applications that call for a grid infrastructure of connectivity to supercomputing platforms, advanced instrumentation, and terascale data storage systems. In addition to their scientific purposes, these initiatives are prototyping more cost-effective, efficient models for future societal uses of highend computing and networking resources. The following examples of current Federal networking applications point to what lies ahead.

The NEES program will use IT to serve a critical national need - finding new ways to reduce the hazard that earthquakes present to life and property. The NEESgrid, an Internet-based computational and collaboratory infrastructure for the earthquake engineering community, will link earthquake engineering research sites across the country, provide data storage facilities and repositories, and offer remote access to the latest research tools. The systems integration and development component of the NEES program was established in 2001 by a consortium of institutions led by NCSA. Grid components will be deployed by 2004.

In the NVO project, launched in FY 2002, astronomers at 17 universities led by Johns Hopkins and Caltech will use grid techniques to enable researchers for the first time to access and computationally analyze data from multiple sources among the leading archives of astronomical information. In the absence of supercomputing resources, astronomers traditionally have constructed theoretical models for simulations of astrophysical phenomena. Networked high-end computing capabilities will allow astronomers to explore massive amounts of observational data and build their models and simulations inductively.

GriPhyN is an ambitious effort to make data from the world's leading physics research - such as the results of supercollider experiments - available to and usable by the wider physics community. Expected to reach many petabytes per year within a decade, the raw data generated by particle detectors are simply too massive for most single computing systems to store or analyze. Bringing together seven IT researchgroups and scientists in four major NSF physics projects, this effort aims to establish a common "virtual data" framework and protocols that will enable physicists to use distributed high-end storage and computational resources over a grid.

The NBTS system can be deployed to aid force protection in tactical settings as well as to enhance security both indoors and outdoors around critical locations such as military bases, embassies, and airports. The system processes and integrates feeds from tens to hundreds of video cameras onto 3-D site models, and it provides a remotely observable single integrated picture of actions and movements within complex, 3-D settings. Using enhanced image-processing, moving-target indication signals can also be overlaid on the background. The NBTS prototype, developed for DARPA by Sarnoff Laboratory, has been tested by the U.S. Air Force.

NASA computer scientists and aviation experts are using the agency’s Information Power Grid (IPG), which won a NASA award for excellence in 2001, to conduct simulations in NASA's aviation safety program, a collaborative initiative with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). One simulation employed IPG resources to model commercial air traffic flow across the U.S. using real-time data from radar tracks of departing and arriving flights at Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport. The simulation is part of a planned FAA National Airspace Simulation System.

The DOE national collaboratories program integrates national and international facilities, distributed terascale computing resources, and several thousand investigators into a virtual laboratory infrastructure. This infrastructure enables easy access to computing resources, science facilities, and research collaborators by providing advanced collaboratory technologies, middleware, advanced network services, and scalable cybersecurity services.

The current lack of software interoperability sharply limits the ease and speed of manufacturing processes and business-to-business interactions. In collaboration with business partners, NIST is developing a Shared Manufacturing B2B (business-to-business) Interoperability Testbed to help
companies boost the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of the mission-critical software products they increasingly rely on for managing production, sales, supply chains, customer relations, transaction records, and the like. Software components are run through the testbed's Web-based, distributed evaluation process, which checks the software’s conformance to emerging B2B interoperability standards. NIST and its private-sector partners hope to expand the capabilities of the testbed and turn it into an independent testing facility that can be used by both government and business.

Several NITRD - supported grid applications will be showcased at the international iGrid show in autumn 2002 in Amsterdam, including: the Telescience Portal (National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research/UCSD ), enabling remote manipulation of electron microscopy specimens; and Collaborative Visualization over the Access Grid (ANL/University of Chicago) , a demonstration of high-bandwidth QoS and capabilities.