By Jon Bashor, jbashor@lbl.gov

July 30, 1999

Berkeley Lab will be a key player in Department of Energy programs aimed at making the Internet an even more useful tool for scientific experimentation and collaboration than it is today.

Last month, the Department of Energy's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research announced funding for 19 research proposals, of which the Lab's Computing Sciences Directorate is a partner in eight, with nearly $3 million in additional funding for FY99 alone. The research program is part of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) -- a multi-agency federal R&D program to develop, test and demonstrate advanced networking technologies and applications.

NGI's goal is to take advantage of greater bandwidth to allow researchers to quickly and easily access and exchange very large sets of data. It is currently difficult to provide uniform access to data at various sites and to allow researchers at different locations to combine and use that data. NGI is aimed at providing the tools and technologies to achieve that through the use of advanced networking technologies.

"What we're trying to do is prototype the computing and networking environment in which scientists will be working in three to five years," said Bob Lucas, head of NERSC's High Performance Computing Research Department. "Our role in nearly half of all the DOE-funded programs continues Berkeley Lab's tradition of leadership in networking, which goes back to the early 1980s."

The initiative's first major thrust involves remote visualization of large amounts of scientific data by researchers at different institutions. The nationwide scientific community has only a few research centers with supercomputers and large data-storage tape archives, and far fewer scientific visualization centers. The goal is to make these centers remotely accessible and easily usable by scientists collaborating on projects nationwide.

"For example, we'd like to make it routine for researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Wisconsin to view data generated at Berkeley Lab," Lucas said.

Berkeley Lab is a partner in three such visualization programs and the lead lab in two of them: developing a prototype environment for remote, collaborative visualization of large combustion simulation data sets; and developing visualization-sensitive network protocols.

Current models for combustion are not capable of handling the huge amounts of data expected to be generated by the next generation of supercomputers. This capability is important to help researchers understand the mechanisms of combustion and to apply this knowledge to solving engineering problems such as building cleaner, more efficient diesel engines.

Another NGI theme is developing a network infrastructure to share and access data around the world. Lucas, quoting collaborator Richard Mount of SLAC, describes this thrust as "competing with UPS to quickly and efficiently ship bulky data around the country."

Said Lucas, "We will be developing the infrastructure giving users transparent access to data, no matter where its stored. They'll also be able to move it rapidly back and forth, say between SLAC at Stanford and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois."

Lucas also added that the Lab's achievements in high-performance computing and networking contributed to the success of its proposals, but even more convincing was the coordination with colleagues at Argonne and Los Alamos national laboratories. Other collaborating organizations include Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national labs, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Princeton University, and the Universities of Illinois, Utah, Wisconsin, and Southern California.

"We coordinated our proposals in such a way that DOE received a sum greater than the whole of the parts," Lucas said. "Each component will make the others more effective and useful. We gave them both excellent technical vision and solid partnerships."

DOE Announces NGI Funding

The Department of Energy announced this week that it is awarding $15 million to researchers at 17 universities and nine DOE laboratories for research on the Next Generation Internet.

Nineteen projects will be funded over three years. In addition to Berkeley Lab, participating labs are Argonne, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, SLAC, and the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

Twelve projects are basic technology projects to develop the underlying network architecture and monitoring technologies needed to support scientific Internet traffic. Five will integrate and test the technologies on DOE-related research and two are university testbeds to link the new tools to researchers at universities.