graphics card, connected to a giant disk system, via a system bus that happens to be an extremely high-speed optical network," says DeFanti, a distinguished professor of computer science at UIC and codirector of the university's Elec- tronic Visualization Laboratory. "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." The OptIPuter project manager will be UIC's Maxine Brown. SDSC will provide facilities and services, including access to the NSF-funded TeraGrid and its 13.6 teraflops of cluster computing power distributed across four sites. THE INTERNET RULES-IP TECHNOLOGIES The project's broad multidisciplinary team will also conduct large-scale, application-driven system experiments. These will be carried out in close con- junction with two data-intensive e-science efforts already underway: NSF's EarthScope and the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They will provide the appli- cation drivers to ensure a useful and usable OptIPuter design. Under co-PI Ellisman, UCSD's National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) is driving the BIRN neuroscience application, with an emphasis on neuroimaging. Under the leadership of UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography's deputy director and acting dean John Orcutt, Scripps' Insti- tute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics is leading the EarthScope geoscience effort, including acquisition, processing, and scientific interpretation of satellite-derived remote sensing, near-real-time environmental, and active source data. The OptIPuter is a "virtual" parallel computer in which the individual "processors" are widely distributed clusters; the "memory" is in the form of large distributed data repositories; "peripherals" are very large scientific instruments, visualization displays, and/or sensor arrays; and the "mother- board" uses standard IP delive