from CAnet-3-NEWS

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Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 16:10:03 -0500 (EST)
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CANARIE to deploy world's first wavelength disk drive

For more information on this item please visit the CANARIE CA*net 3 Optical
Internet program web site at http://www.canet3.net/news/news.html
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CANARIE TO BUILD WORLD'S LARGEST DISK DRIVE

OTTAWA, February 7, 2001 —  CANARIE, Canada's advanced Internet development
organization, today announced a plan to construct the world's largest “disk
drive” called a Wavelength Disk Drive which will be constructed around
wavelengths of light on CANARIE's national optical research network, CA*net
3. The wavelength disk drive will be more than 8000 km in diameter.

"For several years, researchers have recognized that harnessing the
computing power of thousands of personal computers connected to the Internet
would provide more computing power than even the largest super computers,”
said Andrew Bjerring, President and CEO of CANARIE.  “This innovative
project is intended to address one of the challenges inherent in realizing
this dream: the difficulty of sharing large amounts of data efficiently
among thousands of computers, each trying to communicate with the others."

Instead of having the computers send and receive data from each other— which
slows the collaborative effort down to the slowest computer or slowest
network link — the computers will simply read and write the data to the
optical network as
if it were one large, shared disk drive.  Because the intrinsic carrying
capacity of a multi-wavelength optical network like CANARIE’s CA*net 3 is so
large, it acts as a gigantic, nation-wide optical storage device. Since all
the participating computers will have ready access to all the data
circulating on the network, their collective ability to solve problems
quickly will be greatly enhanced.

This revolutionary use of optical networks has immediate applications in
such collaborative research fields as environmental modelling, genomic and
pharmaceutical simulations and astrophysics, to name a few.

"This is an exciting concept," says Andy Woodsworth, Director General,
Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council of Canada.
“We operate Canada's largest distributed network of servers as part of The
Canadian Bioinformatics Resource, a national service dedicated to providing
researchers with convenient, effective access to high-quality genomics and
bioinformatics tools and databases, interconnected to our new 6912 processor
Paracel GeneMatcher in Halifax. This technology will allow more efficient
distribution of data between these servers."

The implications of this concept to telecommunications carriers could be
equally significant.  Purchasing a super computer in the future might simply
involve buying optical wavelengths from a favourite carrier just as silicon
chip based machines are purchased from computer manufacturers today.  This
revolutionary use of optical network technology could also become an
important use for unused bandwidth.  No longer would networks be simply a
means of computers exchanging data directly with each another; the network
will be the computer.

CANARIE will be deploying a proof-of-concept wavelength optical disk drive
on its CA*net 3 network over the next few months.  The capacity of this
trial disk drive is expected to be several gigabytes.

About CANARIE Inc.
World-renowned CANARIE Inc. is Canada's advanced Internet development
organization.  CANARIE is a non-profit corporation dedicated to accelerating
the development of Canada’s Internet and the creation of innovative
applications that exploit the power of that infrastructure to benefit
Canadians.  CANARIE plays the critical role of facilitator, bringing
together experts from private industry, government, and the research and
education community to form project partnerships.

For further technical information on the Wavelength Disk Drive please see
http://www.canet3.net/library/papers.html

For further information on CANARIE Inc., please visit www.canarie.ca and the
CANARIE IWAY Awards at www.canarie.ca/iway.
-30-
For more information, or to arrange an interview, please contact:
Andrée Mongeon
Märkant Communications
An affiliate of Opsis Communications and Marketing Inc.
Tel: (613) 276.2044
E-mail: [log in to unmask]


Wavelength Disk Drive

Abstract

Wavelength disk drives (WDD) is a novel new concept to address the
inter-processor communication issues of distributed computing networks often
referred to as grids or peer to peer computing. The inter-processor
communications of such computing architectures in many cases is severely
limited by the throughput performance of TCP, as well as by classic “head of
line” blocking problems and “N squared” interconnection issues when many
processors try to communicate with each other at the same time. The WDD is
based on concepts of optical delay storage devices developed in the 1950s,
but in this instance applied to large scale dense wave division multiplexed
(DWDM) networks.  Large nation wide DWDM networks of 100 or more wavelengths
have an intrinsic storage capacity of several 10s to 100s of Gigabytes of
data, but most significantly, as opposed to traditional optical delay line
technologies, they allow hundreds, if not thousands of processors to access
the storage device at the same time.  With WDD a large scale
multi-wavelength network in essence can be considered like a large disk
drive, with each wavelength being a separate track and specialized routers
with the WDD software acting as independent read/write heads. The
specialized routers with the WDD software inject a data record into the DWDM
network as a UDP flow.  When a WDD node receives an incoming packet, the UDP
packet TTL is reset and then forwarded to the next WDD node on the network.
In this way the originating packets are continuously circulating around the
DWDM network.  With each UDP packet flow, optional read/write, file name and
other possible applications attributes can be mapped into the header of the
first packet which will allow other WDD nodes to read, write or modify the
data as required by the application. The originating WDD node of an given
data record is responsible for maintaining data flow integrity and packet
sequence every time the flow circulates around the network.  A number of
middleware applications are possible to interface the WDD node with a client
computer including a simple TCP emulator, a data workflow control algorithm
and ultimately a sophisticated virtual file system.  However, a number of
distributed computing applications such as SETI@Home, bio-diversity grids,
computation fluid dynamic calculations may require only a very simple TCP
emulator or workflow architecture since all the records are transient and
short lived.  Future research activities include using Optical BGP (OBGP) to
configure the wavelengths into optical ring configurations for different WDD
computing applications and the interconnection of a WDD system into
community optical networks which would allow researchers to access the
thousands of computing resources available in schools and homes and possibly
encourage the greater participation of the general public into basic
research.


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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.



Bill St. Arnaud
Senior Director Network Projects
CANARIE
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Bill St. Arnaud
Senior Director Network Projects
CANARIE
[log in to unmask]
+1 613 785-0426