INDUSTRY

The future of university research and technological progress for Louisiana will take center and super stage September 2-3 when Louisiana university researchers, executives of major technology-oriented corporations, and representatives from federal funding agencies gather in Baton Rouge for “The LONI Forum.” The forum will provide an opportunity for state and international experts in high-speed networking and grid computing to explore the many possibilities of the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI). LONI, a planned statewide fiber-optics network, will link researchers and university-based supercomputers at a speed thousands of times faster than currently possible and connect Louisiana to the National LambdaRail (NLR). The Louisiana Board of Regents recently became a member of NLR, a consortium of research universities and technology companies deploying a nationwide networking infrastructure to support research in science, engineering, health care, and education. “This forum is an excellent opportunity for Louisiana’s university researchers to connect both with major corporations whose businesses depends on the kind of research and modeling LONI and the NLR will facilitate, and with decision-makers from research funding agencies like the National Science Foundation, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy,” said Commissioner of Higher Education Joseph Savoie. “This event should serve as a springboard for a variety of research projects that will benefit our universities, our state and our nation.” University researchers from Louisiana Tech, LSU A&M, LSU Health Sciences Center, Southern University A&M, Tulane University, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and the University of New Orleans – all Louisiana research institutions participating in the initial phase of LONI – will make presentations at the forum, along with internationally-known networking and Grid-Computing experts from such prestigious institutions as the University of North Carolina’s Renaissance Computing Institute, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Institute, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center in Poland. Among the corporations that will be represented are Intel, Cisco Systems and AT&T. The forum will also feature exhibits illustrative of Grid Computing and research aided by high-speed-networking. “The forum will give funding agencies, industry and academia a chance to share plans for use of this extraordinary network facility for Louisiana,” said Ed Seidel, Director of LSU’s Center for Computation & Technology. Among current Louisiana research initiatives which stand to benefit from LONI and NLR are the NSF-funded Louisiana University Consortium for Micro-Nano Technologies for Advanced Physical, Chemical and Biological Sensors, with applications ranging from medicine to national defense; the planned Center For Biological Modular Microsystems (CBM2), funded largely through a $9 million NSF grant, which will focus on solving scientific challenges in the design and development of BioMicroElectroMechanical Systems (BioMEMS); and a new multi-university research initiative to increase oil and gas discovery and productivity in the Gulf of Mexico via a powerful computing and monitoring system. The project was made possible largely by a $3.9 million U. S. Department of Energy grant. “Louisiana has been increasingly successful in attracting federal dollars for very exciting research at our universities in recent years, and LONI and the LambdaRail connection put us in a position to compete even more effectively for new funding,” said Dr. Michael Khonsari, Director of the Board of Regents’ Louisiana NSF EPSCoR (the National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research). “The LONI Forum will allow our university researchers a chance to showcase their research and to network with federal agency program directors. They will be able to demonstrate how their research will be enhanced through LONI and the National LambdaRail.” “LONI is a project that will make Louisiana a national player in Grid Computing and high-speed networking,” said Dr. Duane Blumburg, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and recently-appointed Louisiana Deputy Secretary of Economic Development. “The LONI Forum will be the public unveiling of this important project. It will help demonstrate that Louisiana is positioning itself to take a leadership role in the world of Grid Computing, and it will allow us to take advantage of the knowledge and experience of experts in the field from around the world.” The LONI Forum, which will take place at the Pennington Conference Center in Baton Rouge, is sponsored by the Office of the Governor, the Board of Regents’ NSF EPSCoR Program, and the Center for Computation and Technology at LSU. For more information, visit www.cct.lsu.edu/news/loniforum.php.