UWO receives funding for ANISE synchrotron project

An innovative new project based at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) that seeks to make Canada's and the United States' synchrotrons more accessible for scientists was awarded major funding from CANARIE.

CANARIE, Canada's advanced research and innovation network, recently announced the second round of winners in its flagship cyberinfrastructure research funding program, the Network-Enabled Platform (NEP) program. The UWO project is among several projects announced.

UWO was awarded $1.2 million for the ANISE project (Active Network for Information from Synchrotron Experiments) which will give users of Canada's synchrotron (the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon, SK), as well as users of other synchrotrons in the U.S., near real-time analysis of data from synchrotron experiments, enabling users to assess the utility of experiments as they run.

ANISE will be a distributed network with main processing and storage nodes located at UWO using SHARCNET and the Canadian Light Source using WESTGRID. A CANARIE lightpath will be used to connect these and the U.S. synchrotron in Chicago to users worldwide. ANISE will employ System S, a controlling software for stream computing that is currently being tested by IBM Watson Laboratories for processing data arriving at high rates.

ORION's infrastructure will support connections and lightpaths in Ontario and help enable the ANISE project, as it did for the Science Studio project, of which ANISE is a continuation.

All projects are expected to be completed by the fall of 2011.

To date, CANARIE has invested $25.5 million in ground-breaking research funding through two rounds of its NEP program. CANARIE's NEP program was the first in Canada to fund the development of platforms required to analyze massive amounts of data.

To read about the other projects, visit www.canarie.ca/templates/news/releases/NEP2.pdf.