Berkeley Lab scientists are developing China Clipper in collaboration with their counterparts at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Argonne National Laboratory. The project allowed cardio-angiography data to be collected directly from a scanner in a San Francisco hospital. The system was connected to a high-speed Bay Area network, allowing data to be collected, processed, and stored at Berkeley Lab and accessed by cardiologists at the Kaiser Oakland hospital. Currently such images are processed and kept at a central office, and it can take weeks for doctors to see one or two images. This work is guided by the vision that faster access to data will allow scientists to conduct their work more efficiently and gain new insights.
Research often starts out with a scientific model.
Scientists then conduct an experiment and compare the actual results with what was expected. Understanding the resulting differences is where the real science happens, Johnston says. China Clipper is expected to lead to better utilization of instrumentation for experiments and fast comparisons of actual experiments and computational models. Evolution of an idea China Clipper is the culmination of a decade of research and development of high-speed, wide area, data intensive computing. The first demonstration of the project's potential, Johnston said, came during 1989 hearings held by then-Senator Al Gore on his High Performance Computing and Communications legislation.