The OptIPuter, A New Kind of Supercomputer

By Roland Piquepaille

John Markoff wrote a story named "Supercomputer to Use Optical Fibers" about this project for the New York Times. As usual, please remember that you need to register with the New York Times to access to his article. It's free and easy.

Here are some excerpts.

Highlighting a radical departure in the design of the fastest computers, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology plans to announce on Monday that it will use an optical router designed by a Texas company as the heart of a campus-wide supercomputer that will be woven together with optical fibers.

The new design will turn some traditional computing ideas upside down. In the past, computer processors have been the fastest part of a supercomputer, while memory and disk storage have been bottlenecks. In the new design, the communications lines will be the fastest part of the computer and the processors will become slower "peripherals."

The new style of supercomputing is called an "optiputer" and it will be housed at the University of California at San Diego. The optiputer will initially consist of about 500 processors [provided by IBM] linked via the optical switching system that will permit parts of the computer to share information at the speed of light. Each of the clusters is based on Intel microprocessors and runs the Linux operating system

For more details, you can check the press release issued by the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2] and Chiaro Networks, the provider of the optical router at the heart of the optiputer: "Chiaro Networks Chosen by California Technology Institute to Provide Revolutionary Routing Platform for OptIPputer."

Here are some highlights about the project.

The OptIPuter is a five-year, $13.5 million project funded by the National Science Foundation. It will enable scientists who are generating massive amounts of data to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate their data from multiple storage sites connected to optical networks. Led by Cal-(IT)2 Director Larry Smarr, the project is a joint venture of UCSD and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). They will lead the research team, in partnership with researchers at Northwestern University, San Diego State University, the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, and University of California-Irvine [a partner of UCSD in Cal-(IT)2]. Co-PIs on the project are UCSD's Mark Ellisman and SDSC's Papadopoulos, and UIC's Thomas A. DeFanti, Jason Leigh, and Project Manager Maxine Brown.

You'll find more information on the OptIPuter at the Cal-(IT)2 website.

Sources: John Markoff, The New York Times, November 18, 2002; Chiaro Networks, November 18, 2002; Cal-(IT)2, September 25, 2002