Teleimmersion and Visualization with the OptIPuter
Thomas A. DeFanti, Jason Leigh, Maxine D. Brown, Daniel J. Sandin, Oliver Yu, Chong Zhang, Rajvikram Singh, Naveen K. Krishnaprasad, Robert L. Grossman, Marco Mazzucco, Larry L. Smarr, Phil Papadopoulos, John M. Orcutt · 2002
The OptIPuter is a radical distributed visualization, teleimmersion, data mining and computing architecture. Observing that the exponential growth rates in bandwidth and storage are now much higher than Moore's Law, this major new project of several US universities in Southern California and Illinois goes to the end of the rainbow to exploit a new world in which the central architectural element is optical networking, not computers. This transition is caused by the use of parallelism, as in supercomputing a decade ago. However, this time the parallelism is in multiple wavelengths of light, or lambdas, on single optical fibers, creating supernetworks. The OptIPuter project aims to re- optimize the entire Grid stack of software abstractions, to learn how, as George Gilder suggests, to waste bandwidth and storage in order to conserve increasingly scarce high-end computing and people time in this new world of inverted values.