The OptIPuter is a radical distributed visualization, teleimmersion, data mining and computing architecture. Observing that the exponential growth rates in bandwidth and storage are now much higher than Moore's Law, this major new project of several universities--currently six in the US and one in Amsterdam--exploits a new world of computing in which the central architectural element is optical networking. This transition is caused by the use of parallelism, as in supercomputing a decade ago. However, this time the parallelism is in multiple wavelengths of light, or lambdas, on single optical fibers, creating a LambdaGrid. Providing applications-centric middleware to control the LambdaGrid on a regional and global scale is a key goal of the OptIPuter and StarLight Optical Switching projects.

This paper studies the problem of light splitter placement (LSP) and wavelength converter placement (WCP) in all-optical WDM networks to enable optimal provisioning of static and dynamic traffic through efficient photonic multicast connections. To solve the LSP-WCP problem under static traffic provisioning, an Integer Linear Programming model is formulated to achieve the optimal solution in the sense that the total number of wavelength channels required by the multicast requests is minimized. To solve the LSP-WCP problem under dynamic traffic provisioning, a complementary-combined LSP-WCP heuristic is proposed to minimize the multicast traffic blocking probability, and is proved through extensive simulations.