PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Harvey Newman California Institute of Technology (Caltech) 626.395.6656 Harvey.Newman@cern.ch
Susan Estrada CENIC Development Associate 760.929.0580 sestrada@aldea.com
M. Stuart Lynn CENIC President 510. 987.0405 mslynn@ucop.edu
Global Initiatives Challenge Traditional Data Management Tools
San Francisco, California, September 25, 1998: New modes of sharing information, as well as methodologies to cooperatively access and analyze data, are key to the success of future international scientific joint ventures. For commercial enterprises geographically distributed across the state, the nation and the world, large-scale data management will be a critical function of "doing business" in the global marketplace. For science, engineering and industry, advanced data management tools will transform the process of search and discovery which governs society's technological advances.
"In the future, research physicists worldwide will need a massive, quickly accessible database system for major experiments in exploring such complex phenomena as the missing fundamental constituents of matter," said Julian Bunn, CERN. "The Globally Interconnected Object Databases (GIOD) model center will be used to simulate the performance and scalability of object-based database management systems (ODBMS) and to compare networking approaches so that we can better understand the needs of central and remote computing centers."
GIOD addresses some of the key issues of Petabyte-scale data access and analysis using an ensemble of networked computers, that will challenge scientists searching for the origin of mass and other new physics phenomena in the next generation of high energy physics experiments. The GIOD Project is a partnership among the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), Caltech, and Hewlett Packard.
Researchers from Caltech will demonstrate the GIOD project at the Internet2 Project Meeting on September 28 and 29 at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero, San Francisco. Internet2 is the new education and research network that builds upon the success of the last 10 years in generalizing and adapting research Internet technology to academic needs. Caltech is a member of the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), which is collaborating with Internet2 to deploy the nation's new high speed advanced services education and research network. CENIC is providing the network connection to the Internet2 Project Meeting over which the GIOD project is to be demonstrated. CENIC, which runs the State's new high performance network, gives researchers unprecedented bandwidth -- up to 1.2 gigabits per second.
Although corporations have not yet begun to grapple with the problem of Petabyte-scale data management and access over networks, business analysts project that many medium and large corporations will have to manage data volumes in this range by 2005. Handling this volume and density of information, and coordinating the data analysis efforts of hundreds of scientists in a worldwide collaboration, are unprecedented in the history of scientific research. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will be the world's most powerful particle accelerator; thus, broad access to its experimental results is of major importance to the Project's international partners.
"The GIOD project will benefit potentially thousands of research physicists worldwide who will need to access and analyze critical data, regardless of where it is collected," said Harvey Newman, professor of physics, Caltech. "We are investigating the computing, networking and data-storage resources required to handle pre-filtered data rates in the experiments' data acquisition systems of petabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of data per second, and the storage of several tens of petabytes of data per year."
A sophisticated data management process is critical to LHC participants at remote sites. Access to advanced networks like CENIC's network that can provide researchers with unprecedented bandwidth -- up to 1.2 gigabits per second - will be essential to the overall success of this international collaboration.
"Technology transfer from the university environment to the global Internet is a main goal of Internet2 and CENIC. GIOD models the data transfer problems that are expected in multinational corporations as soon as 2005. CENIC allows innovators at Caltech to work with their remotely located colleagues at CERN in Switzerland and other institutes to tackle these issues -- solving tomorrow's problems today," said M. Stuart Lynn, CENIC president and University of California associate vice-president for information resources and communications.
CENIC is a not-for-profit corporation formed by the California Institute of Technology, the California State University, Stanford University, the University of California, and the University of Southern California to advance the use of communications technology in teaching, learning, and research at California's institutions of higher education. CENIC operates the high performance network for qualified institutions for research and learning purposes. CENIC's network is partially funded by the National Science Foundation.
More detailed information is available at the following web sites: * http://www.cenic.org * http://pcbunn.cacr.caltech.edu
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