News for and about the Internet2 community

[Greg Wood <>]

Press Release
Contact:
Shirley Connelly, Associate Director, NCDM
312 413 2176, 


Robert Grossman Director, NCDM
312 413 2176, 


Joe Mambretti, Director, iCAIR
847 467 3911, 


NEW RECORD FOR MOVING DATA TRANSATLANTICALLY

Amsterdam, 24 September 2002 - At the iGRID2002 conference, a new record
was set for moving information across the Atlantic over high performance
networks.  The record was set by using a novel technique - Photonic Data
Services (PDS), which were recently developed jointly by the Laboratory
for Advanced Computing/The National Center for Data Mining (LAC/NCDM)
at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the International Center
for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University. The
biennial iGrid (International Grid) event is dedicated to showcasing
leading-edge applications enabled by global high-performance networks.
iGrid presents the latest developments in these areas.

Using PDS, data was transported over 2.8 Gbps (Gigabits per second -
1000 times one million bits per second) as part of a data mining
application. The goal of data mining is to find patterns in extremely
large volumes of data.  This demonstration was the first for PDS and
shows the potential for data mining applications to drive the use of
available telecommunications bandwidth.

Despite the wide availability of optical fiber --- by some estimates
only 3% of the current fiber optics is currently used --- moving data
effectively over long distances is still a major problem, for example,
across the United States or the Atlantic. PDS was used to send data over
500x faster than conventional methods using TCP (the standard protocol
used to send internet data).  PDS consists of innovative integration of
four separate protocols: 1) the DataSpace Transfer Protocol (DSTP), the
basis for data webs, which is layered over 2) SABUL, a high bandwidth
network protocol, which is layered over 3) IP, the standard Internet
protocol, which is layered over 4) Photonic Path Services.  With the
SABUL protocol, data can be reliably sent at maximum speed - fully
utilizing the network. DSTP and SABUL were developed by the Laboratory
for Advanced Computing at UIC, while the Photonic Path Services were
developed by iCAIR at Northwestern.

"By combining SABUL with the DSTP protocol for remote data analysis and
distributed data mining and layering them over Photonic Path Services,
it is now possible to analyze Gigabyte size data sets anywhere in the
world," said Robert Grossman, Director of the Laboratory for Advanced
Computing and National Center for Data Mining at the University of
Illinois at Chicago.

"Photonic Path Services allow an application to create specialized, high
performance network connections on demand. For the first time these
types of connections will be available to large scale global
applications," said Joe Mambretti, Director of iCAIR at Northwestern
University.

This type of data communication service can be used by multiple types of
industries including bioinformatics, financial services, geosciences,
computational research and industrial design. This experiment
demonstrated high performance, end-to-end, data streaming between the
StarLight facility in Chicago to SARA Reken- en Netwerkdiensten, in
Amsterdam, a Dutch national expertise centre in the field of
High-Performance Computing and High-Performance Networking.

National Center for Data Mining, University of Illinois, at Chicago
The National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at the University of Illinois
at Chicago (UIC) was established in 1998 to serve as a national resource
for high performance and distributed data mining. The Center sponsors
research projects,
standards, testbeds, and outreach.  The Center is coordinating the
development of the Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), the standard
for data mining models, and sponsoring the Terra Wide Data Mining
Testbed, a worldwide testbed for high performance and distributed data
mining. For more information about NCDM, see www.ncdm.uic.edu

The International Center for Advanced Internet Research, Northwestern
University
Northwestern University's International Center for Advanced Internet
Research (iCAIR, www.icair.org) accelerates leading-edge innovation and
enhanced global communications through advanced Internet technologies,
in partnership with the international community, and national partners,
including EVL at the University of Illinois (www.evl.uic.edu), the Math
and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Lab (www.mcs.anl.gov),
CANARIE (www.canarie.ca), SURFnet (Netherlands, www.surfnet.nl), APAN
(Asia Pacific, www.apan.net), and CERN (Europe, www.cern.ch.) For more
information about Northwestern, see www.northwestern.edu.

iGRID2002
iGrid 2002, the 3rd biennial International Grid applications-driven
testbed event, is organized by the GigaPort Project (Netherlands),
Amsterdam Science & Technology Centre, SARA Computing and Networking
Services (Netherlands), Universiteit van Amsterdam's Science Faculty,
Argonne National Laboratory/ Mathematics and Computer Science Division
(USA), Indiana University/ Office of the Vice President for Information
Technology (USA), Northwestern University/ International Center for
Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) (USA), and the University of Illinois
at Chicago/ Electronic Visualization Laboratory (USA), with funding from
The Netherlands' National Computer Facilities (NWO/NCF) and the USA's
National Science Foundation. http://www.igrid2002.org

StarLight
StarLight, the optical STAR TAP, is an advanced optical infrastructure
and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance
applications. StarLight, funded by the National Science Foundation, is
being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, 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 Holland's SURFnet.
http://www.startap.net/starlight

SURFnet
SURFnet operates and innovates the national research network, to which
two hundred institutions in higher education and research in the
Netherlands are connected. To remain in the lead SURFnet puts in a
sustained effort to improve the infrastructure and to develop new
applications to give users faster and better access to new Internet
services. For more information please visit www.surfnet.nl. For SARA,
see www.sara.nl



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