Photography by Philip Prittermann
The future is coming. But
Calit2 is giving us glimpses of it today.
Some two thousand people have experienced Calit2’s visionary
new facility since last fall, witnessing at first hand some of
the unique facilities that support cutting-edge research projects,
ranging from nanotechnology to the newest forms of media art. And
they came away wowed. Almost a month before the building’s dedication in October
2005, Calit2 unveiled the only super high-definition capability
in the U.S., linked over the highest-performance international
optical networks with similar capabilities 9,000 miles away. The
combined capabilities enabled real-time “conversations” between
San Diego and Tokyo without any noticeable delay, and were shown
at a resolution of 4096 x 2160 pixels—four times the resolution
of high-definition television. Viewers remarked that the effect
was so lifelike, it was as if the Japanese were physically in the
Calit2 theater.
According to Calit2 director Larry Smarr, “This is something
qualitatively different than videoteleconferencing—it’s
a new state of physical/cyber interaction that’s broadening
the horizons of what we imagine to be possible for research, education
and entertainment.”
 Dubbed the “Woodstock of Networking,” iGrid attracted
more than 500 of the world’s networking and applications
experts from 25 countries across Europe, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe,
North and South America and the Pacific Rim, and encouraged them
to push the state of the art in international optical networking
with their data, computational and visualization needs. To make
this possible, networking capacity coming into the campus doubled
during the course of the weeklong event.
When the building was formally dedicated a month after iGrid, some
150 projects across 20 disciplines, ranging from bioengineering
to wireless networks, were showcased. One especially topical project
attracted intense interest. It showed imagery of the topography
of the New Orleans area before and after the devastation of Hurricane
Katrina last August. The images were shown on a 55-panel tiled
display (11 displays wide by 5 displays tall) showing 100 million
pixels of high-resolution detail.
Although the clarity of the imagery stunned many visitors, the
scientific application is even more important than the spectacle:
The display allows communications specialists to identify high-lying
areas still above water where they could site wireless cell towers
that support emergency response.
These visualization capabilities are among the facilities provided
by a $100-million grant awarded to Calit2 when it was chosen as
one of four institutes, all partnerships of multiple UC campuses,
through the California Institutes for Science and Innovation initiative,
launched in 2000. This initiative was motivated by a growing concern
that California could no longer depend on an unchallenged edge
in innovation. According to the initiative’s final call for
proposals, it sought to create “world-class centers for scientific
discovery that fuel innovation.” And innovation is the key
to economic competitiveness. According to Calit2’s philosophy, innovation and competitiveness
are closely linked to advances in telecommunications and information
technologies. The State of California is most interested in technologies
that can address problems in the economy and quality of life, including
environmental pollution, water shortages, inadequate health care,
the loss of lives and property in natural and man-made disasters
and the crush of automobile traffic.
 Calit2, a partnership between UC San Diego and UC Irvine, believes
innovation is most likely to take place in facilities that provide
not only new technical
capabilities but that encourage new ways of working together. To that end,
the institute worked with the architect, NBBJ in San Francisco, to formulate
new design principles that promote collaboration in the physical environment.
Consequently, the UCSD building consists of unique technical capabilities
that were designed to be shared. It includes a clean room for
nanofabrication; immersive
virtual-reality facilities; a digital theater for new media arts research,
performance, and scientific visualization; test and measurement labs for circuit
design; and transmission and networking testbeds, including a rooftop “antenna
garden” to support communication experiments.
These capabilities are complemented by a mostly open floor plan,
to encourage information sharing and casual interaction among
faculty and students across
more than two dozen departments. Industrial and community partners, academic
professionals, and even high school students form part of this mix. Some 900
people, 75 percent of whom are students, took up residence last fall.
“We’ve taken the road less traveled,” says Calit2’s UCSD division
director Ramesh Rao. “The building juxtaposes people and programs in
uncommon proximity, to maximize the opportunity for experts from different
disciplines to work together.”
Taking this egalitarian philosophy one step further, the building
was designed to have no corner offices so as to minimize any
perception of traditional
organizational hierarchy.
Calit2’s building is bandwidth central, boasting 1.6 million feet (roughly
360 miles) of Ethernet cable. The relatively few closed-door offices sport
12 Ethernet ports that support any combination of computers and printers.
Innovation in design even extends to the furniture chosen: The
tables and chairs are easily reconfigured in height and in
combination with other pieces,
and
they come on wheels for maximum mobility. The building’s design and its sociological organization help support
the development of unusual partnerships and collaborations to address large-scale,
multidisciplinary problems. More fundamentally, though, they point the way
to a reinvention of collaborative research environments.
What will the researchers do with Calit2’s unusual capabilities? In the
end, Calit2 is not about achieving a premeditated product or outcome. It is
more about invigorating the process to stimulate creativity. Calit2 believes
that’s how true innovation occurs.
“We think of this as a grand experiment,” says Smarr. “If we knew
where this was going, we’d have no need to try it out. All I can say
is: Stay tuned.”
Stephanie Sides is Director of Communications at Calit2
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