VISUALIZATION

San Diego -- Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) will use hardware and software provided by Ixia to analyze the performance of a next-generation optical network. The Calabasas, CA-based company--a leading provider of high-speed, multiport network performance analysis and optimization systems--will donate approximately $400,000 worth of traffic generation and performance testing equipment as part of its partnership with the campus-based California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2]. The donation will come from Ixia's University Partners Program (IxUPP), set up to further advancements in Internet research and development. For more, go to http://www.ixiacom.com/company/alliances/IxUPP.php. Ixia's donation to Cal-(IT)2 of equipment and software will support research and classroom laboratory environments within the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering's Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department and UCSD Extension's Information Technologies Program. The technology will also support development and rollout of the "OptIPuter," a powerful distributed cyberinfrastructure designed to support data-intensive scientific research and collaboration. The OptIPuter is named for optical networking, Internet Protocol, and computer storage and processing. The six-campus project is led by Cal-(IT)2, a joint venture of UCSD and UC Irvine, with $13.5 million in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). "We are very excited about Ixia joining the OptIPuter research program," said Larry Smarr, Cal-(IT)2's director, UCSD computer science and engineering professor, and principal investigator on the OptIPuter project. "One of our goals is to instrument our LambdaGrid in such a way that it becomes a research testbed in itself." The LambdaGrid is a Cal-(IT)2 "living laboratory," or grid, of distributed computer resources linked via lambdas, parallel wavelengths of light traveling over optical fibers. [Deployment of OptIPuter testbeds by UCSD's largest partner in the OptIPuter project, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), will involve different suppliers of test and other networking equipment.] Ixia's initial donation includes multiple Ixia 1600 chassis, LM1000T-1 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) copper and fiber interface modules, and various software applications. "A fundamental component of any research initiative is being able to adequately test and validate new approaches," said Errol Ginsberg, Ixia's CEO and President. "Ixia is proud to lend our support to Cal-(IT)2 as it explores new Grid technologies through the OptIPuter project." In making this donation, Ixia re-affirmed its status as an official industry partner of Cal-(IT)2. The partnership was inherited from Caimis, Inc., when Ixia acquired the firm in November 2001. Caimis was a founding industry partner of Cal-(IT)2. "Early on we realized the pioneering work that could be done through Cal-(IT)2," said Tracie Monk, co-founder of Caimis and now Ixia's Director of Strategic Marketing. "And since the merger, Ixia can offer even more expertise and cutting-edge technology for the OptIPuter and other Cal-(IT)2 projects." "Ixia's state-of-the-art hardware and software will enhance our research, accelerating the test and deployment of leading edge optical networking and switching capabilities being installed at UCSD," said Andrew Chien, a CSE professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering who is leading the OptIPuter middleware and systems software research effort. Our researchers will use it to evaluate higher-level novel protocols for very high speed optical networks. We will use the Ixia system to generate background traffic, measure network performance, and evaluate protocols." Chien is an expert in high performance and grid computing, as well as high speed network communication. He says the objective of these novel protocols is to make it easy for "anyone--not just big research projects--to use very high bandwidth."