SCIENCE

Awards Recognize Innovative and Influential Advanced Network Applications: At its annual Spring Member Meeting, Internet2 announced the 2007 winners of its Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) Awards program which seeks to recognize leading innovators who have created and deployed advanced network applications that have enabled transformational progress in research, teaching and learning. The 2007 winners are the Globus MEDICUS and UltraLight projects. These projects are being recognized for their potential to significantly increase the impact of next-generation networks around the world. Chosen from many distinguished nominations, the winning submissions were judged on the depth of their positive impact on their primary users, their technical merit, and the likelihood the application would be more broadly adopted. The Globus MEDICUS project holds the promise of enabling more advanced healthcare by creating the technological platform for securely exchanging bandwidth-intensive medical resources and images, while UltraLight provides the foundation and services for linking thousands of physicists and scientists around the world who together are investigating the origins of the universe. "Within the research and education community, there are many outstanding accomplishments. The Internet2 IDEA awards give us an opportunity to recognize those members of our community who have stepped up as leaders in their field and changed the way we work and learn," said David Lassner, Chair of the Internet2 Applications Strategy Council. "In doing so, these applications and their lead collaborators serve as role models by creating new opportunities through technology that just a few years ago could not have even been imagined." Awards were presented at Internet2's 2007 Spring Member Meeting held in Arlington, VA on April 24, 2007. Additional information about the IDEA Awards and the 2007 winning applications can be found at: its Web site. To view the netcast of the awards presentation, see: its Web site. WINNING APPLICATION DETAILS: The Globus MEDICUS project Collaborators: - Stephan Erberich, Director Functional Imaging and Biomedical Informatics, University of Southern California - Carl Kesselman, Director Center for Grid Technology, Information Sciences Institute - Ann Chervenak Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Information Sciences Institute - Robert Schuler, Research Scientist, Information Sciences Institute The Globus MEDICUS project, created through collaboration between The University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and USC's Viterbi School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute, seeks to enable and promote the seamless exchange of important bandwidth-intensive medical information and images that will help to revolutionize healthcare around the world. Leveraging Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) data and computing Grids, the project seeks to combine large-scale 3D/4D medical image communication over Internet2's high bandwidth networks and to leverage Shibboleth identity management technology to facilitate strong patient data privacy-preservation. The outcome of the project has been the seamless Grid integration of the Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) standard protocol that is today used in healthcare and medical research enterprises. The recent evolution of advanced networking technologies like Internet2's network has catalyzed the possibilities of data sharing and exchange in medicine, enabling doctors, researchers, and the healthcare profession at large to engage in interdisciplinary and multi-center networked operations. At the same time significant increase in the scale of medical images, e.g. dynamic 4D imaging and increased number of detector arrays, has resulted in a data deluge. Given these facts, DICOM legacy imaging devices are not suited to face the new global order of highly networked and large scale data demands. By leveraging Grid technology, the developers of the Globus MEDICUS project, can fill this technology gap by providing reliable industry standards for the most challenging problems associated within network collaborative environments: (i) enterprise level security (data, authentication, authorization), (ii) high-speed reliable data transport utilizing high-bandwidth networks, (iii) large scale data management. The Globus MEDICUS project was originally created and funded by the National Institute of Health (award UO1-BA97452) out of the need to connect 40 international medical centers (in the USA and Canada) for the Children's Oncology Group (COG, Web site) and the Children's Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation (CNCF, Web site) to participate in multi-center clinical trials and to link them via the Internet2 network to the Image Data Center at the University of Southern California (USC). The immediate impact of this project is that these centers can now seamlessly communicate images instantly over public networks (Internet or Internet2) without disrupting the workflow. In fact the Grid workflow is completely hidden from the participating physicians who seamless procure data and images from both local resources or advanced networks - in essence, The Globus MEDICUS project has created transparent public network integration. In the mid- to long-term, the Globus MEDICUS project will enable healthcare providers at various levels, e.g. large hospitals, community care centers, and private practices see the opportunity to seamless and securely share images and post-processing resources. As people become more and more mobile, so does healthcare. The developers foresee many use-cases where Globus MEDICUS can enable new practices of medicine. For instance a small community practice can consult with an expert university center by sharing images to perform tele-radiology for remote consultation, utilizing the grid over advanced networks. A radiologist reading at multiple hospitals can operate from a single point-of-care and stays at the same time connected to colleagues over advanced networks. Using Globus MEDICUS, grid technology enables new unprecedented opportunities to utilize these high bandwidth networks for the healthcare enterprise. "Today we routinely expect information to be available on the Internet, but this is still not the case with medical information. We believe that making it available, in a secure fashion, is crucial: it has the potential to deliver better, more informed care at reduced cost," said Stephan Erberich, director of Functional Imaging and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Southern California. "We believe that our Globus MEDICUS project takes important first steps toward this goal. Our system lets doctors and patients utilize the power of high-speed Internet to easily and securely share information. Much remains to be done, but we are gratified by the benefits that are already apparent." Ultralight Collaborators: - Harvey Newman, Professor of Physics; Julian Bunn. Member of the Professional Staff; Iosif Legrand, Senior Software and Systems Engineer; Dan Nae, Senior Network Engineer; Yang Xia, Network Engineer; Frank Van Lingen, Software Engineer; Michael Thomas, Software Engineer; Conrad Steenberg, Software Engineer - Caltech - Arshad Ali, Director General, NUST Institute for Information Technologies - Fiasal Khan, Software Engineer, National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan and Caltech - Shawn McKee, Associate Research Scientist, Physics - University of Michigan - Paul Avery, Professor of Physics; Richard Cavanaugh, Research Scientist; Dimitri Bourilkov: Assistant Scientist, Physics - University of Florida - Paul Sheldon, Professor of Physics, Vanderbilt University - Julio Ibarra, Executive Director, Center for Internet Augmented Research & Assessment (CIARA); Heidi Alvarez, Director CIARA; Laird Kramer, Associate Professor of Physics - Florida International University - Don Petravick, Senior Scientist, Fermilab - R. Les Cottrell, Assistant Director - Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) Scientific Computing and Computing Services - W. Scott Bradley, Network Group Leader - Brookhaven National Laboratory - Rick Summerhill, Director of Network Research, Architecture and Technologies - Internet2 - David Foster, Head of Communications Group - CERN - Alberto Santoro, Professor of Physics - State University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) - Sergio Novaes, Professor of Physics - State University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) - Dongchul Son, Professor of Physics - Kyungpook National University (Korea) UltraLight is a project funded by the National Science Foundation that is developing the next generation of network-aware grids, where the network is treated as a managed resource in real-time along with computing and storage. Through the use of its four-continent network testbed in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America, and the development of state-of-the-art protocol stacks, optimized end-system configurations, real-time data transport and network-monitoring services, UltraLight is delivering the advances that will help drive the next round of physics discoveries at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at the frontiers of high energies and short distances, while also enhancing the capabilities of projects in many fields of data-intensive science, from astrophysics to biology to climatology to fusion energy. The two largest physics collaborations at the LHC, CMS, and ATLAS, each encompass more than 2,000 physicists and engineers from 170 universities and laboratories from around the world. In order to fully exploit the potential for scientific discoveries, the many petabytes of data produced by the experiments will be processed, distributed, and analyzed using a global Grid involving more than 100 "Tier1" and "Tier2" computing facilities, along with several hundred computing clusters serving individual physics groups located throughout the world. The key to discovery is the analysis phase, where individual physicists and small groups repeatedly access, and sometimes extract and transport, terabyte-scale data samples on demand, in order to optimally select the rare "signals" of new physics from potentially overwhelming "backgrounds" from already-understood particle interactions. This data will amount to many tens of petabytes in the early years of LHC operation, rising to the Exabyte range within the coming decade. By working in cooperation with Internet2, ESnet, US LHCNet, National LambdaRail, UltraScience Net, GEANT2, RNP (Brazil), Gloriad and many other national and state networks serving research and education, Ultralight will enable physicists throughout the world to successfully process, share and collaboratively analyze petabyte-scale globally distributed data. This is a key to the success of the world's largest particle physics experiments CMS and ATLAS, that will search for the Higgs particles thought to be responsible for mass in the universe, search for exotic new phenomena such as the production of gravitons associated with the existence of extra spatial dimensions, and explore new states of matter through the collision of heavy ions at unprecedented energies. Ultralight's services and applications for high speed data transport, end-to-end network monitoring, dynamic configuration, control and management, are expected to be of great benefit to many fields of science. In the longer term this could have a profound impact on the operation and modes of use of the world's major networks, and thus on research and education. Harvey Newman, a professor of Physics at Caltech who chairs the US CMS Collaboration and leads the UltraLight project said: "our development and deployment of the next generation of network-aware will be a key enabler of physics discoveries at the LHC. The ability to move Terabyte-scale datasets rapidly among the grid sites, and to monitor and optimize grid operations by co-scheduling the use of networks, computing and storage, will greatly increase the working efficiency of physicists throughout the world in their search for new physics. UltraLight's use of advanced network protocols, a new class of circuit-oriented network services to support the largest data flows, and new applications such as Caltech's Fast Data Transport, is making this possible. The vast increase in the worldwide research community's ability to use long range networks effectively will immediately benefit many other fields of data intensive science, and in the longer run, will have a major positive impact on research and education in general."