Internet2 > IDEA Awards > 2007 Awards

IDEA Award Winner 2007

UltraLight

  • Harvey Newman, Professor of Physics; Julian Bunn. Member of the Professional Staff; Iosif Legrand, Senior Software and Systems Engineer; Dan Nae, Senior Network Engineer; Yang Xia, Network Engineer; Frank Van Lingen, Software Engineer; Michael Thomas, Software Engineer; Conrad Steenberg, Software Engineer; Caltech
  • Arshad Ali, Director General, NUST  Institute for Information Technologies
  • Fiasal Khan, Software Engineer, National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan and Caltech
  • Shawn McKee, Associate Research Scientist, Physics, University of Michigan
  • Paul Avery, Professor of Physics; Richard Cavanaugh, Research Scientist; Dimitri Bourilkov: Assistant Scientist, Physics, University of Florida
  • Paul Sheldon, Professor of Physics, Vanderbilt University
  • Julio Ibarra, Heidi Alvarez, Laird Kramer, Florida International University
  • Don Petravick, Senior Scientist, Fermilab
  • Les Cottrell, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
  • W. Scott Bradley, Brookhaven National Laboratory
  • Rick Summerhill, Director of Research, Architecture and Technology, Internet2
  • David Foster, Head of Communications Group, CERN
  • Alberto Santoro, Professor of Physics, State University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
  • Sergio Novaes, Professor of Physics, State University of Sao Paulo (Brazil)
  • Dongchul Son, Professor of Physics, Kyungpook National University (Korea)

UltraLight is a project funded by the National Science Foundation that is developing the next generation of network-aware grids, where the network is treated as a managed resource in real-time along with computing and storage. Through the use of its four-continent network testbed in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America, and the development of state-of-the-art protocol stacks, optimized end-system configurations, real-time data transport and network-monitoring services, UltraLight is delivering the advances that will help drive the next round of physics discoveries at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at the frontiers of high energies and short distances, while also enhancing the capabilities of projects in many fields of data-intensive science, from astrophysics to biology to climatology to fusion energy.

The two largest physics collaborations at the LHC, CMS and ATLAS, each encompass more than 2,000 physicists and engineers from 170 universities and laboratories from around the world. In order to fully exploit the potential for scientific discoveries, the many petabytes of data produced by the experiments will be processed, distributed, and analyzed using a global Grid involving more than 100 “Tier1” and “Tier2” computing facilities, along with several hundred computing clusters serving individual physics groups located throughout the world. The key to discovery is the analysis phase, where individual physicists and small groups repeatedly access, and sometimes extract and transport, terabyte-scale data samples on demand, in order to optimally select the rare "signals" of new physics from potentially overwhelming "backgrounds" from already-understood particle interactions. This data will amount to many tens of Petabytes in the early years of LHC operation, rising to the Exabyte range within the coming decade.

By working in cooperation with Internet2, ESnet, US LHCNet, National LambdaRail, UltraScience Net, GEANT2, RNP (Brazil), Gloriad and many other national and state networks serving research and education, Ultralight will enable physicists throughout the world to successfully process, share and collaboratively analyze Petabyte-scale globally distributed data. This is a key to the success of the world’s largest particle physics experiments CMS and ATLAS, that will search for the Higgs particles thought to be responsible for mass in the universe, search for exotic new phenomena such as the production of gravitons associated with the existence of extra spatial dimensions, and explore new states of matter through the collision of heavy ions at unprecedented energies.

Ultralight’s services and applications for high speed data transport, end-to-end network monitoring, dynamic configuration, control and management, are expected to be of great benefit to many fields of science. In the longer term this could have a profound impact on the operation and modes of use of the world’s major networks, and thus on research and education. 

Our development and deployment of next generation of network-aware will be a key enabler of physics discoveries at the LHC. The ability to move Terabyte-scale datasets rapidly among the grid sites, and to monitor and optimize grid operations by co-scheduling the use of networks, computing and storage, will greatly increase the working efficiency of physicists throughout the world in their search for new physics. UltraLight's use of advanced network protocols, a new class of circuit-oriented network services to support the largest data flows, and new applications such as Caltech's Fast Data Transport, is making this possible. The vast increase in the worldwide research community's ability to use long range networks effectively will immediately benefit many other fields of data intensive science, and in the longer run, will have a major positive impact on research and education in general.

Harvey Newman
Professor of Physics
Caltech

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