The 16th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop will be held on 29-30 September 2016 at the Intercontinental Hotel, Miami, USA. It is being held in conjunction with the Internet2 Technology Exchange 2016. Dr. Heidi Morgan, Dr. Julio Ibarra, Dr. Chip Cox, and Jeronimo Bezerra presented “AmLight backbone transition to SDN: Celebrating the second anniversary” at the GLIF Workshop Plenary Sessions.

GLIF, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility, is an international consortium that promotes the paradigm of lambda networking. The GLIF participants are National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), consortia and institutions working with lambdas. Participation in GLIF is open to any organisation that subscribes to the GLIF vision and can contribute to the GLIF actvities. GLIF was established at the 3rd LambdaGrid Workshop in Reykjavik, Iceland, in August 2003.

The activities of GLIF are two-fold:

  • The GLIF participants jointly make lambdas available as an integrated global facility for use by scientists and projects involved in data-intensive scientific research.
  • GLIF brings together leading networking engineers worldwide, who exchange information to learn from each other’s experiences, seek to establish best practice, work together to develop, test and implement new lambda networking technologies, middleware and applications, and generally collaborate to bring the technology forward.

The GLIF community shares a common vision of building a new grid-computing paradigm, in which the central architectural element is optical networks, not computers, to support this decade’s most demanding e-science applications. This paradigm is based on the use of parallelism, as in supercomputing a decade ago. However, with GLIF the parallelism is in multiple wavelengths of light, or lambdas, on single optical fibres.