Advanced Applications

With its research partners, iCAIR is designing and developing large-scale information technologies that are significantly more flexible, programmable, expandable, and extensible than those implemented today. Many iCAIR projects are creating new digital communication services and technologies to support innovative Advanced Application Topics that cannot be implemented on traditional communications infrastructure. These new methods empower applications with multiple new capabilities. Consequently, new applications do not have to be designed in the context of the restrictions of current information technology infrastructure. They can be designed to take advantage of this new infrastructure, and, therefore, they can benefit from significantly more power and functionality than those deployed today. They will also be much more distributed and flexible. They will be the basis for ubiquitous services - available "anywhere, anytime, on any device." In addition, they will be easy-to-access and easy-to-use. Achieving these goals requires fundamentally new architectural designs for information technology infrastructure.

New Technology Architecture for Advanced Applications

Emerging next generation applications require technology infrastructure that is substantially more flexible, programmable, and customizable than that which is currently deployed. These principals are fundamental to the technology design concepts at iCAIR. Another key design principal at iCAIR is to design advanced technologies such that they are transparent, while allowing their power and capabilities to be readily accessible, ubiquitous and easily useable. Also, currently, almost all information technology systems are developed as separate, fairly distinct components. New architectural trends are creating designs that provide for interoperation and integration of multiple components into seamless digital fabrics. Much current new infrastructure development is being driven by the needs of data-intensive, compute intensive and bandwidth intensive applications. Therefore, a crucially important design goal is to provide support for extremely resource intensive applications, especially those requiring large-scale data management and transport. However, while supporting such large-scale resource requirements, this new infrastructure must also allow applications to be highly distributed, enabling them to be used from any location, regionally, nationally, and globally. In addition, many applications also require more than high performance, such as new forms of fine-grained, sophisticated control processes.

Another design premise is that new types of communication services and network infrastructure will be the foundation for next generation information technology. These emerging capabilities will be based on fundamentally new architecture, services, technology, and foundation infrastructure. (Ref: Grid Networks: Enabling Grids with Advanced Communication Technology, Eds. F. Travostino, J. Mambretti, G. Karmous-Edwards, Wiley, 2006).

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