red over multiple dedicated lambdas. Use of parallel lambdas will permit SO much extra bandwidth that the connection is likely to be uncongested. "Recent cost breakthroughs in networking technol- ogy are making it possible to send multiple lambdas down a single piece of customer-owned optical fiber," says co-PI Papadopoulos. "This will increase potential capacity to the point where bandwidth ceases to be the bottleneck in the development of metropolitan-scale grids." According to Cal-(IT)2's Smarr, grid-intensive applications "will require a large-scale distributed information infrastructure based on petascale comput- ing, exabyte storage, and terabit networks." A petaflop is 1,000-times faster than today's speediest parallel computers, which process one trillion floating- point operations per second (teraflops). An exabyte is a billion gigabytes of storage, and terabit networks will transmit data at one trillion bits per second some 20 million times faster than a dialup 56K Internet connection. The southern California- and Chicago-based research teams already col- laborate on large-scale cluster networking projects and plan to prototype the OptIPuter initially on campus, metropolitan, and state-wide optical fiber networks [including the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California's experimental developmental network CalREN-XD in California and the Illinois Wired/Wireless Infrastructure for Research and Education (I-WIRE) in Illinois]. Private companies will also collaborate with university researchers on the project. IBM is providing systems architecture and performance help, and Telcordia Technologies will work closely with the network research teams to contribute its optical networking expertise. "The OptIPuter project has the potential for extraordinary innovations in both computing and networking, and we are pleased to be a part of this team of highly qualified and experi- INFOSTRUCTURE enced researchers," says Richard S. Wolff, Vice President of Applied Research at Telcordia. Furthermore, th