TWAREN, or TaiWan Advanced Research & Education Network, is a project under development to construct the next generation broadband network for research and educational purposes. Due to its technical sophistication and geographic location, Taiwan can serve as an information bridge between north and south Pacific Asia, thereby facilitating international collaborative research.
GRID will use the TWAREN network infrastructure. There are several practical applications for GRID, including long distance patient monitoring, eco-system monitoring, disaster prevention, and emergency response systems. We plan to have commercial applications within three years. At the same time we will use the GRID to cooperate with other nations in projects such as nanotechnology, system on chips, and biotechnology.
Taiwan's National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) is the nation's leading source for high-performance computing (HPC) hardware, software, and networking resources. We are committed to developing innovative and life-enhancing applications that best utilize these resources. The focus of our new slogan, “Better HPC Better Living,” is on improving the lives of people and the environment we live in. Our goal is to establish a unique dialogue between science, technology, and the world we live in, while, at the same time, enabling science discovery and technology innovation.
The NCHC is a national laboratory founded in 1991. Effective January 2003, the NCHC transformed from a governmental entity into a non-profit organization under the National Applied Research Laboratory (NARL). Since that time, the NCHC has taken on additional responsibility for the nation's HPC, networking, and platform integration requirements. In 2005, the NCHC became ISO 9001-2000 certified. By meeting this international standard of quality, the NCHC is able to offer an unparalleled level of service.
Internet2 is a consortium being led by 207 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 is recreating the partnership among academia, industry and government that fostered today´s Internet in its infancy. The primary goals of Internet2 are to:
Create a leading edge network capability for the national research community
Enable revolutionary Internet applications
Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community.
APAN (Asia-Pacific Advanced Network ) is a non-profit international consortium established on 3 June 1997. APAN is designed to be a high-performance network for research and development on advanced next generation applications and services. APAN provides an advanced networking environment for the research and education community in the Asia-Pacific region, and promotes global collaboration.
Abilene is a proving ground for high-bandwidth technologies. The cross-country backbone is 10 gigabits per second, with the goal of offering 100 megabits per second of connectivity between every Abilene connected desktop.
Lambda-based networking is ultimately about using different "colors" or wavelengths of (laser) light in fibers for separate connections. Each wavelength is called a "lambda." Current coding schemes allow for typically 10 Gbps to be encoded by a laser on a high-speed network interface. In lambda networking, the goal is to achieve ultimate Quality of Service by giving applications and user communities their own sets of lambdas on a shared (dark) fiber infrastructure; thus, isolating the different communities from each other. The implementation requires Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) to accommodate many wavelengths on a fiber, optical switches (e.g., based on MEMS), and other optical networking equipment. A LambdaGrid requires the interconnectivity of optical links, each carrying one or more lambdas, or wavelengths, of data, to form on-demand, end-to-end "light paths," in order to meet the needs of very demanding e-science applications.
The User-controlled Lightpath (UCLP) software allows end-users - either people or sophisticated applications - to treat network resources as software objects and provision and reconfigure lightpaths within a single domain or across multiple, independently managed, domains. Users can also join or divide lightpaths and hand off control and management of these larger or smaller private sub-networks to other users.
The UCLP software is designed to enable end-users to create their own discipline or application-specific IP network, particularly in support for high-end e-science and grid applications. For example, a community of high energy physicists could create their own independent IP network (as a subset of a larger optical network) - the topology and architecture would be optimized for their particular grid application needs and requirements. More importantly these networks can be reconfigured by the end-user and do not require the permission of the optical network manager-operator.
What is TWAREN?