October 1, 2008

Press Release

Seattle, Washington

Today at the 8th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop in Seattle, Washington, an international research consortium announced a new innovative digital media communication service, based on an advanced architecture, network middleware, and flexible optical fiber technology. Demonstrated publicly for the first time at the workshop, the service enabled multiple high resolution digital media streams to be transported between North America and Europe using dynamically provisioned optical lightpaths, which could be used as scheduled or on-demand. The service was implemented on an international experimental network testbed – the High Performance Digital Media Network (HPDMnet), using the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF), international advanced communications facility based on Open Lambda Exchanges around the world. At the demonstration, high resolution screens showcased diverse content from Barcelona, Chicago, Ottawa, and several sites in Amsterdam.

The communication service that was demonstrated represents a major departure from traditional Internet based digital media services, which have limited capabilities for supporting very high capacity streams. To address the challenges of 21st century digital media requirements, the HPDMnet research consortium established an initiative to design, develop, and implement, an advanced communication service that could support extremely high resolution digital content. The types of technologies demonstrated included those that are based on advanced architectures, such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). These services support methods for discovering resources, signalling for services, managing and controlling streams, receiving streams, transporting streams, duplicating streams using dynamically allocated lightpaths (e.g., optical multicast), and scheduling resources.  This approach allows for customers to select and integrate their own media service attributes instead of forcing them to rely on a predefined service. The current version of the demonstrated service was designed for supporting the highest possible resolution digital media at specialized venues, such as university sites, conference centers, and research centers. These advanced capabilities will not be available for consumer use for three to five years.

The demonstration in Seattle was supported by several international advanced communications facilities, including i2CAT in Barcelona, NetherLight in Amsterdam, the PacificWave GOLE in Seattle, and StarLight in Chicago. One objective of the initiative is to implement a persistent service among the major GLIF facilities world-wide.  Additional demonstrations are planned at other events scheduled for later this year, including one at the international supercomputing conference (SC08) and one at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  

The demonstration includes technologies from organizations around the world, including the Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC), CANARIE Inc., i2CAT, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF), Inocybe Technologies Inc, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, Nortel, SARA, StarLight, SURFnet/NetherLight, and the University van Amsterdam

About the Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC)
The Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC), an agency of Industry Canada, is the Canadian government's primary laboratory for research and development (R&D) in advanced telecommunications. Their R&D is used for public policy purposes and to strengthen the Canadian economy through technology and knowledge transfer. CRC specializes in taking an interdisciplinary approach to longer-term R&D in wireless systems, radio fundamentals, communication networks, photonics and interactive multimedia. (www.crc.ca)

About CANARIE Inc.
CANARIE Inc., based in Ottawa, is Canada's advanced network organization. It facilitates the development and use of its network as well as the advanced products, applications and services that run on it. The CANARIE network serves universities, colleges, schools, government labs, research institutes, hospitals and other organizations in a wide variety of fields in both the public and private sectors. By promoting and participating in strategic collaborations among key sectors, and by partnering with peer networks and organizations around the world, CANARIE Inc. stimulates and supports research, innovation and growth, bringing economic, social, and cultural benefits to Canadians. The national organization was created in 1993 by the private sector and academia under the leadership of the Government of Canada. CANARIE Inc. is supported by membership fees, with major funding of its programs and activities provided by the Government of Canada through Industry Canada. (www.canarie.ca)

About the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF)
GLIF, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility, is an international virtual organization that promotes the paradigm of lambda networking. GLIF provides lambdas internationally as an integrated facility to support data-intensive scientific research, and supports middleware development for lambda networking. It brings together some of the world's premier networking engineers who are working together to develop an international infrastructure by identifying equipment, connection requirements, and necessary engineering functions and services. (www.glif.is)

About Inocybe Technologies Inc
Inocybe Technologies creates enterprise-class open source-based network centric computing software, successfully bringing to market the first practical yet enterprise-ready open source solution for systems and network administrators. Inocybe's UCLP Enterprise Edition™ provides open source and proprietary web services to control network resources. Inocybe specializes in SOA and Web services for physical devices, virtualization, and interoperability.  (www. inocybe.ca)

About i2CAT
i2CAT is a non-profit Foundation aimed at fostering research and innovation supporting advanced Internet technology. Based on Barcelona, Spain, i2CAT, promotes deployment of services and wideband applications from private and public research companies supporting the Catalunya region. The i2CAT model aims to make Internet research and innovation accessible to the whole of society through collaboration between the public sector, businesses and research groups. (www.i2cat.cat)

About HPDMnet
The High Performance Digital Media Network (HPDMnet) and its related activities comprise an experimental network research initiative that is designing, developing and implementing the world's first international high performance service specifically created for high quality, large-scale digital media, including support for extremely high volume media streams. This initiative represents a complete departure from existing services, which are based on legacy services and technologies and which cannot meet many emerging needs for high quality, reliable services. By using advanced concepts, architecture, and technology, this initiative is providing a foundation for future digital media services, as well as for other data-intensive applications. This initiative was established as a cooperative partnership by several major network research centers.
(www.hpdmnet.org)

About the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR), Northwestern University
iCAIR accelerates leading-edge innovation and enhanced global communications through advanced Internet technologies, in partnership with the international community, and national partners. With its research partners, iCAIR conducts basic network R&D designs large scale experimental testbeds, and operates local, regional, national and international advanced prototype networks and facilities. ( www.icair.org)

About Nortel
Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities that make the promise of Business Made Simple a reality for our customers. Nortel’s next-generation technologies, for both service provider and enterprise networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications. Nortel's technologies are designed to help eliminate today's barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to the information they need, when they need it. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries around the world. (www.nortel.com)

About Pacific Wave
Pacific Wave is a state-of-the-art international peering exchange facility designed to serve research and education networks throughout the Pacific Rim and the world. Pacific Wave enhances research and education network capabilities by increasing network efficiency, reducing latency, increasing throughput, and reducing costs. Pacific Wave is a joint project between CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, and is operated in collaboration with the University of Southern California and the University of Washington. (www.pacificwave.net)

About SARA
The SARA Computing and Networking Services organization in Amsterdam is an advanced ICT service center that supplies – for over 30 years – a complete package of high performance computing & visualization, high performance networking and infrastructure services. Among SARA’s customers are the business community and scientific, educational, and government institutions. (www.sara.nl)

About StarLight
StarLight is an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications. StarLight is the GLIF Open Lightpath Exchange (GOLE) in Chicago. Operational since summer 2001, StarLight has 1GE and 10GE switch/router facilities and true optical switching for wavelengths. StarLight is being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, in partnership with Canada's CANARIE and the Netherlands' SURFnet. (www.startap.net/starlight)

About the University van Amsterdam
The System and Network Engineering (SNE) Research group at the University of Amsterdam researches cross-domain interaction between Grid resource providers, optical and hybrid networking, resource descriptions using semantic web and programmable networks for the Future Internet. In collaboration with SURFnet and SARA, UvA has capabilities to access high-speed optical test bed installations in the optical photonic backbone of SURFnet in the Netherlands and internationally in the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF). SARA and UvA collaborate in the creation, maintenance and utilization of a state of the art Lambda Grid experimentation laboratory named LightHouse, which is very well connected to NetherLight. UvA is a founding member and key contributor to CineGrid, GLIF and OGF. (http://www.science.uva.nl/research/sne)

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