GOVERNMENT

A delegation of senior government officials and business leaders from Alberta, Canada, today visited the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Jacobs School of Engineering and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)²] to talk about campus-led technological innovation and potential cooperative research ventures. The delegation was led by the Hon. Victor P. Doerksen, Alberta’s Minister of Innovation and Science, and included the Vice Presidents of Research from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and the University of Lethbridge, as well as delegates from the Alberta Science Research Authority and several other organizations. Dan Gatti, President and CEO of Edmonton-based BigBangwidth, arranged for the Alberta delegation to visit BigBangwidth’s first U.S. installation at UCSD. “This visit underscores the importance the province of Alberta as well as its universities and companies place on cutting-edge research and technology transfer,” said Gatti. “The delegation observed how Alberta-based technology is used at UCSD, which opened dialogue on potential future projects that could be funded jointly by the U.S. and Canada.” BigBangwidth originated with research at the University of Alberta. Last November, the company won approval to deploy its next-generation lightpath technology as part of a new Grid computing and networking environment -- called the OptIPuter -- on the UCSD campus. BigBangwidth’s Lightpath Accelerator™ automatically lifts large data streams off of packet-switched networks to provide direct lightpaths to high-performance network and storage devices. The OptIPuter project is led by Cal-(IT)² director Larry Smarr, and its chief software architect is Andrew Chien, director of UCSD’s Center for Networked Systems. Smarr and Chien are both professors of Computer Science and Engineering in the university’s Jacobs School of Engineering, and they both met with the Canadian contingent. “California has a rich history of successful innovation and commercialization of technologies -- an experience that we share with our Canadian colleagues,” said Chien. “We are excited about a number of areas where we could collaborate with leading researchers, companies, and institutions in Alberta, and this meeting was a great step forward in tapping the synergies.”