News for and about the Internet2 community

["Lauren Rotman" <>]

2007 Winners of the Annual Internet2 IDEA Awards Announced

Awards Recognize Innovative and Influential Advanced Network Applications 

ARLINGTON, VA - April 24, 2007 - Today at its annual Spring Member Meeting,
Internet2 announced the 2007 winners of its Internet2 Driving Exemplary
Applications (IDEA) Awards program which seeks to recognize leading
innovators who have created and deployed advanced network applications that
have enabled transformational progress in research, teaching and learning. 

The 2007 winners are the Globus MEDICUS and UltraLight projects. These
projects are being recognized for their potential to significantly increase
the impact of next-generation networks around the world. Chosen from many
distinguished nominations, the winning submissions were judged on the depth
of their positive impact on their primary users, their technical merit, and
the likelihood the application would be more broadly adopted.

The Globus MEDICUS project holds the promise of enabling more advanced
healthcare by creating the technological platform for securely exchanging
bandwidth-intensive medical resources and images, while UltraLight provides
the foundation and services for linking thousands of physicists and
scientists around the world who together are investigating the origins of
the universe. 

"Within the research and education community, there are many outstanding
accomplishments. The Internet2 IDEA awards give us an opportunity to
recognize those members of our community who have stepped up as leaders in
their field and changed the way we work and learn," said David Lassner,
Chair of the Internet2 Applications Strategy Council. "In doing so, these
applications and their lead collaborators serve as role models by creating
new opportunities through technology that just a few years ago could not
have even been imagined."

Awards were presented at Internet2's 2007 Spring Member Meeting held in
Arlington, VA on April 24, 2007. Additional information about the IDEA
Awards and the 2007 winning applications can be found at:
http://idea.internet2.edu

To view the netcast of the awards presentation, see:
http://events.internet2.edu/2007/spring-mm/netcast.cfm

WINNING APPLICATION DETAILS:
The Globus MEDICUS project
Collaborators:
- Stephan Erberich, Director Functional Imaging and Biomedical Informatics,
University of Southern California
- Carl Kesselman, Director Center for Grid Technology, Information Sciences
Institute
- Ann Chervenak Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Information
Sciences Institute
- Robert Schuler, Research Scientist, Information Sciences Institute

The Globus MEDICUS project, created through collaboration between The
University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and USC's Viterbi
School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute, seeks to enable and
promote the seamless exchange of important bandwidth-intensive medical
information and images that will help to revolutionize healthcare around the
world. Leveraging Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) data and computing
Grids, the project seeks to combine large-scale 3D/4D medical image
communication over Internet2's high bandwidth networks and to leverage
Shibboleth identity management technology to facilitate strong patient data
privacy-preservation. The outcome of the project has been the seamless Grid
integration of the Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM)
standard protocol that is today used in healthcare and medical research
enterprises. 

The recent evolution of advanced networking technologies like Internet2's
network has catalyzed the possibilities of data sharing and exchange in
medicine, enabling doctors, researchers, and the healthcare profession at
large to engage in interdisciplinary and multi-center networked operations.
At the same time significant increase in the scale of medical images, e.g.
dynamic 4D imaging and increased number of detector arrays, has resulted in
a data deluge. Given these facts, DICOM legacy imaging devices are not
suited to face the new global order of highly networked and large scale data
demands. 

By leveraging Grid technology, the developers of the Globus MEDICUS project,
can fill this technology gap by providing reliable industry standards for
the most challenging problems associated within network collaborative
environments: (i) enterprise level security (data, authentication,
authorization), (ii) high-speed reliable data transport utilizing
high-bandwidth networks, (iii) large scale data management.

The Globus MEDICUS project was originally created and funded by the National
Institute of Health (award UO1-BA97452) out of the need to connect 40
international medical centers (in the USA and Canada) for the Children's
Oncology Group (COG, www.curesearch.org) and the Children's Neuroblastoma
Cancer Foundation (CNCF, www.cncf-childcancer.org) to participate in
multi-center clinical trials and to link them via the Internet2 network to
the Image Data Center at the University of Southern California (USC). The
immediate impact of this project is that these centers can now seamlessly
communicate images instantly over public networks (Internet or Internet2)
without disrupting the workflow. In fact the Grid workflow is completely
hidden from the participating physicians who seamless procure data and
images from both local resources or advanced networks - in essence, The
Globus MEDICUS project has created transparent public network integration.

In the mid- to long-term, the Globus MEDICUS project will enable healthcare
providers at various levels, e.g. large hospitals, community care centers,
and private practices see the opportunity to seamless and securely share
images and post-processing resources. As people become more and more mobile,
so does healthcare. The developers foresee many use-cases where Globus
MEDICUS can enable new practices of medicine. For instance a small community
practice can consult with an expert university center by sharing images to
perform tele-radiology for remote consultation, utilizing the grid over
advanced networks. A radiologist reading at multiple hospitals can operate
from a single point-of-care and stays at the same time connected to
colleagues over advanced networks. Using Globus MEDICUS, grid technology
enables new unprecedented opportunities to utilize these high bandwidth
networks for the healthcare enterprise.

"Today we routinely expect information to be available on the Internet, but
this is still not the case with medical information. We believe that making
it available, in a secure fashion, is crucial: it has the potential to
deliver better, more informed care at reduced cost," said Stephan Erberich,
director of Functional Imaging and Biomedical Informatics at the University
of Southern California. "We believe that our Globus MEDICUS project takes
important first steps toward this goal. Our system lets doctors and patients
utilize the power of high-speed Internet to easily and securely share
information. Much remains to be done, but we are gratified by the benefits
that are already apparent."

Ultralight
Collaborators: 
- 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, Executive Director, Center for Internet Augmented Research &
Assessment (CIARA); Heidi Alvarez, Director CIARA; Laird Kramer, Associate
Professor of Physics - Florida International University
- Don Petravick, Senior Scientist, Fermilab
- R. Les Cottrell, Assistant Director - Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(SLAC) Scientific Computing and Computing Services
- W. Scott Bradley, Network Group Leader - Brookhaven National Laboratory
- Rick Summerhill, Director of Network Research, Architecture and
Technologies - 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.  

Harvey Newman, a professor of Physics at Caltech who chairs the US CMS
Collaboration and leads the UltraLight project said: "our development and
deployment of the 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."


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Media Contact:
Lauren Rotman

202.331.5345