Special section: iGrid 2005: The Global Lambda Integrated Facility

iGrid 2005 was the fourth community-driven biennial International Grid event, held on 26–30 September 2005 at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) building on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. iGrid events are coordinated efforts to accelerate the use of multi-gigabit international and national networks, to advance scientific research, and to educate decision makers, academicians and industry researchers on the resulting benefits. Attracting 450 participants, iGrid 2005 featured 49 realtime application demonstrations developed by multidisciplinary teams from 20 countries, as well as a symposium of 25 lectures, panels and master classes on the applications, middleware, and underlying cyberinfrastructure that was used. At its core, this cyberinfrastructure uses supernetworks rather than supercomputers as its central architectural element, which is constructed from multiple wavelengths of light (lambdas) on single optical fibers. Newmiddleware technologies are enabling applications to dynamically manage these lambda resources just as they do any grid resource, creating a LambdaGrid of interconnected, distributed, high-performance computers, data storage devices, visualization displays and instrumentation. A world-scale LambdaGrid laboratory, driven by the demands of application scientists, engineered by leading network engineers, and enabled by grid middleware developers, is being created by the international virtual organization GLIF, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility. GLIF provided the persistent high-performance infrastructure that iGrid participants used, shown in Fig. 1, and iGrid provided the forum for global teams to demonstrate advancements in scientific collaboration and discovery that this infrastructure is enabling. GLIF held its annual meeting on the last day of iGrid 2005. Previous iGrids in 1998, 2000 and 2002, and GLIF’s organization that began with a Lambda Workshop held in