The following was prepared for a project we are assisting in the state of Mississippi. 

 

A Media Center supporting a regional GRID is one of the ultimate goals of thePROJECT.

 

Constellations and galaxies are no longer terms solely applied to cosmological structures.  Due to several enabling technologies, such as high-speed data transmission technology, constellations now refers to local clusters of computers connected to other local clusters of computers, creating a distributed computer with an aggregate power far greater than the individual components. 

Imagine a group of computers at a specific site such as a neighborhood center all connected by a local area network.  Then imagine, each group of computers in different neighborhoods connected to one another through Internet 2.  Each of these neighborhood clusters then becomes a bright star in an Internet 2 created constellation.

These regional constellations may then spiral around a central nexus, the Telecom Center.The central nexus provides over all control and management of the galaxy (the sum of the constellations), insuring access to distributed resources. These distributed resources may be data archives unique to a geographic location, computer processing power for applications exceeding the resources of a single neighborhood cluster or regional constellation, and support devices such as disk farms, high-yield printers, and interactive multimedia components such as virtual reality caves. 

All of this is not fantasy, but is demonstrated daily in the scientific computing world by the Grid, a national collection of computer hardware at different University and Laboratory sites, all connected by Internet 2 and enabled with public domain software, and shared by the user community. 

A scientist or engineer at one location may virtually acquire computational resources from other remote sites and execute their application on these shared resources.  Further, the application may be developed to take specific advantage of the unique attributes of each computer resulting in an efficient and effective use of the computing resources. 

However, in order for this system to work, a central facility must exist to broker resources and to provide guidelines for use and support of the infrastructure.  In the Grid's case, this central facility is provided by Internet 2.  In the context of Mississippi, this function may be provided by the Telecom Center.

 

Dr. Christopher J. Freitas
Principal Engineer

Computational Mechanics

Southwest Research Institute