Global Lambda Integrated Facility

EnLIGHTened Testbed

EnLIGHTened Testbed

Website

http://enlightenedcomputing.org/

Contact

Gigi Karmous-Edwards, MCNC, United States
Tomohiro Kudoh, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan

Collaborators

Japan: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST); KDDI R&D Laboratories; NTT Network Innovation Laboratories; National Institute of Information and Communications Technologies (NICT)
United States: MCNC; North Carolina State University; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill/ Renaissance Computing Institute; Louisiana State University/ Center for Computation & Technology; Southeastern Universities Research Association; Naval Research Lab; National LambdaRail/Cisco; IBM; Calient Networks; AT&T Research; Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI); UltraLight; StarLight

Description

EnLIGHTened network

Two applications invoke middleware capable of creating an end-to-end international lightpath to co-schedule computing and networking resources across two national testbeds—Japan’s G-Lambda and US’s EnLIGHTened—via a GMPLS control plane.

At the GLIF 2006 annual meeting in Tokyo on 11 September 2006, researchers in the US and Japan demonstrated 'automated' interoperability between network and computing resources in two national grid computing research testbeds – the G-lambda project in Japan and the Enlightened Computing project in the US. More specifically, a software application in a research testbed in one country was able to reserve, manage and monitor computing and network resources across both countries - a key milestone toward the development of a Global Grid of networked, interoperable resources.

EnLIGHTened in action

Once the network was set up, a real-time animation of a Black Hole simulation running on supercomputers at the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University was transmitted from the US to Japan.

Researchers demonstrated how applications can establish network connections 'on demand to computational resources, databases and instruments. The duration of these connections is based on the application’s requirement for precisely the time needed, and no more. Whether seconds or days, the network and resources are connected and managed to perform a task. Then, the connection is released in order to share resources for other purposes.