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$13.5 million virtual computer aims to link researchers

Illinois researchers are at the heart of a $13.5 million federally funded project to build an ultrahigh-speed virtual computer.

JOHN VAN Chicago Tribune

The end result will be like having the parts of a really powerful computer strewn around the country and linked by fiber, said Thomas DeFanti of the University of Illinois at Chicago, which will manage the project, called OptIPuter.

"Think of OptIPuter as a giant graphics card, connected to a giant disk system via a system bus that happens to be an extremely high-speed optical network," said DeFanti.

"One of our major design goals is to provide scientists with advanced interactive querying and visualization tools to enable them to explore massive amounts of previously uncorrelated data in near-real time," he said.

Working as chief investigator for OptIPuter will be Larry Smarr, the man who founded a supercomputer research center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and whose students played a major role in making the Web accessible to ordinary people.

Smarr now is affiliated with the University of California at San Diego.

Besides the academic researchers in Illinois and California, the project will be assisted by IBM Corp., which will supply systems architecture and performance help, and Telcordia Technologies Inc., which will contribute optical networking expertise.

OptIPuter is expected to move data at speeds that are about 200,000 times faster than is possible with a typical dial-up modem used to access the Internet.

By attaining such speed, it should be possible for scientists to access and analyze information available in databases but essentially inaccessible to today’s computers and the networks that link them.

If it works as hoped, the virtual computer should yield new insights in a wide range of fields, similar to when scientists first got access to supercomputers about two decades ago.

Here I am: For years public safety officials have asked for mobile phones equipped with a way to locate the phones to aid dispatchers who get emergency calls from people unsure of their location.

Progress has been slow, but there are signs that the goal is within reach.

In a recent trial in Texas, Cingular Wireless installed a device on 22 of its cell sites and found it was able to locate callers to meet requirements set by the Federal Communications Commission.

"Our technology works with all legacy and future handsets," said Kent Sander, president of TruePosition Inc., which made the location-finding technology.

And just last week Motorola Inc. announced that it has collaborated with IBM Corp. to produce a self-contained single chip that determines its location by receiving signals from global positioning satellites. The new chip that combines Motorola’s design with IBM’s silicon germanium technology is able to detect GPS signals so weak that they are comparable to someone in Chicago being able to spot a light bulb burning in Korea, said IBM’s Walt Lange.

Rain forest medicine: A firm based in Woodridge that is partnering with the state government of Sarawak in Malaysia has won a patent on a group of antiviral substances discovered in the rain forest.

The antivirals, called calanolides, have promise for use as drugs, said Michael Flavin, chief executive of Advanced Life Sciences.

"This broad patent coverage expands our intellectual property portfolio in calanolides as potential antiviral drugs," he said.

In lab tests, one calanolide has demonstrated the potential to fight HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, as well as tuberculosis, Flavin said.

Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune

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