UltraLight is a recently funded four-year NSF ITR program to explore a new class of integrated information systems that will support the decades-long research program at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and other next generation sciences. Physicists at the LHC face unprecedented challenges: (1) massive, globally distributed datasets growing to the 100 petabyte level by 2010; (2) petaflops of distributed computing; (3) collaborative data analysis by global communities of thousands of scientists. In response to these challenges, the Grid-based infrastructures developed by the LHC collaborations provide massive computing and storage resources, but are limited by their treatment of the network as an external, passive, and largely unmanaged resource.

UltraLight will overcome these limitations by monitoring, managing and optimizing the use of the network in real-time, using a distributed set of intelligent global services. These services will leverage Grid middleware, network-aware applications, and heuristic optimization algorithms, to form an integrated system that will meet the experiments' needs, while empowering data-intensive science over the next 10 years.

Our collaborators include Caltech, Fermilab, Florida International University, Internet2, MIT, SLAC and the University of Florida.

Michigan is currently the only ATLAS site collaborating on UltraLight and will leverage the MiLR (Michigan Light-Rail) fiber between Ann Arbor and the StarLight PoP in Chicago to enable our UltraLight participation. The Physics department will be working closely with MGRID, ITCS (Information and Technology Central Services) and MERIT Networks to conduct the UltraLight research.

Related Links

	UltraLight: An Ultrascale Information System for Data Intensive Research