LITE

LITE houses some of the today’s most advanced visualization displays and high-performance computing capabilities available.

LITE’s visualization and high-performance computing capabilities are connected to a high-speed network. That network is comprised locally of the LUS (Lafayette Utilities System) Fiber initiative, LONI (Louisiana Optical Network Initiative), NRL (National LambdaRail) and StarLight.

LUS Fiber (http://www.lusfiber.com) is a local bond backed $125 million effort under the umbrella of the Lafayette Utilities System (LUS) connecting every home and business to a 65-mile long fiber optic loop encircling the city.

GEEK SPEAK:
Through the wizardry of 11 separate but very powerful computers working as a single entity, LITE's computer cluster is one of the largest memory footprints in the world and allows LITE to process and store huge amounts of data.
LITE is powered by:

SGI Altix 4700 with 4.1 terabytes of main memory and 160 core processors
SGI Altix 350 cluster with 352 processors
Advanced HP SVA graphics cluster

All systems interconnect through Infiniband and two 20 gig per second fiber optic networks (one for commercial use and one for research).

LONI (http://www.loni.org) is a fiber optic network connecting super computers at Louisiana’s major research universities, transforming research capabilities and, importantly to the private sector, also available for private industry development. Providing computation speeds 1,000 times faster than previously possible, LONI is a driver of Louisiana economic growth. LONI will be one of the nation’s largest grid computing environments with an anticipated 85 teraflops of computational capacity. Louisiana has pledged $40 million over ten years for the development and support of LONI.

Outside of Louisiana, LITE is connected through NRL (http://www.nlr.net), a unique nationwide network infrastructure that is owned and controlled by the U.S. research community.

Outside the country, LITE is connected to StarLight (http://www.startap.net/starlight), whose users include a global scientific community conducting advanced networking, database, visualization and computing research using IP-over-lambda networks. StarLight also supports experimental protocol and middleware research of high-performance application provisioning of lightpaths over optical networks.