Special section: OptIPlanet - The OptIPuter global collaboratory

The technological developments made by OptIPuter research project as an OptIPlanet Collaboratory of virtual organizations, in various scientific and technology domains, enhancing and contributing to this evolving cyberinfrastructure to solve complex global problems, are summarized. OptIPuter project has developed an optical control plane, an infrastructure and distributed intelligence, to control the establishment and maintenance of connections in a network and algorithms for engineering an optimal path among endpoints. The Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) visualization middleware developed by OptIPuter partner Electronic Visualization Laboratory, is an operating system for tiled-display environments, which allows users to launch distributed visualization applications on remote computer clusters.