Broadband Communities

OCT 2012

BROADBAND COMMUNITIES is the leading source of information on digital and broadband technologies for buildings and communities. Our editorial aims to accelerate the deployment of Fiber-To-The-Home and Fiber-To-The-Premises.

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Helping Researchers Grapple With Big Data A startup software company won a $100,000 prize for a tool that lets researchers collaborate effectively. The software depends on ultra-high- speed, reliable networks. By Joan Engebretson ■ Contributing Editor, Broadband Communities " What can you do with a gig?" asked EPB Fiber Optics, the municipal fiber operator in Chattanooga, Tenn., and the first U.S. provider to offer 1 Gbps Internet service to all customers. One answer came from startup software developer Banyan, which aims to help scientific and academic researchers work more effectively. Te company offers software to control multiple versions of documents and datasets on which mul- tiple people are working. Collaborative research created an estimated 1.5 mil- lion reports last year in the U.S. alone. In August, Banyan won first prize, including a $100,000 cash infusion, in the GigTank competition organized by the Company Lab, a Chattanooga-based development association. GigTank was part of an entrepreneur accelerator pro- gram aimed at encouraging the creation of applications that can benefit from EPB's high-speed fiber network. "Scientific research is a collabora- tive effort that involves a large num- ber of people working on huge data sets," said Banyan co-founder Toni Gemayel in the GigTank Demo Day presentation that helped the company win watch?v=lnFu6cWkXMQ). "Even though these scientists are working on the cutting edge of research, the tools they have to share and publish their data are surprisingly primitive. Version control, tracking author con- tributions, merging contributors' work and rolling back errors as they occur are critical tasks that are often managed by email." Even when this process goes smoothly, Gemayel said, it's slow and in- efficient. "When it fails, as it often does, it's frustrating, time-consuming and very costly," he said. Stanford University lost $50 million when it was unable to prove whether a professor who conducted research that led to a valuable patent had done the re- search at Stanford or at a private labora- tory. "Banyan could have won this case for Stanford," said Gemayel, because it assigns identification numbers to indi- vidual users that do not change regard- less of where the individual is working. Other product capabilities include a management interface that lets lab man- agers know who is working on a dataset at any particular time as well as inter- faces to popular collaboration tools such as Dropbox and Microsoft Office. COORDINATING RESEARCH TEAMS the award (www.youtube.com/ Banyan estimates that 10 people work on a typical collaborative report, and often they are in different locations. Broad- band connectivity speeds the exchange of materials – and really high-speed broad- band, such as the gigabit connectivity available in Chattanooga, is particularly important for the large datasets that characterize much of today's research. Gemayel cited a test Banyan con- About the Author Joan Engebretson is a Chicago-based freelancer who has been writing about the telecom industry since 1993. She can be reached at joanengebretson@cs.com. 18 | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com | OCTOBER 2012 ducted in cooperation with the National Science Foundation's Global Environ- ment for Network Innovations (GENI), EPB and US Ignite. Te organizers sent a 1 terabyte genome file from Chat- tanooga to the University of Southern California in 2.5 hours – a savings of 20 hours compared with using a 100 Mbps connection. Within four years, Banyan expects 200 U.S. universities to be con- nected by Gigabit Ethernet, facilitating their ability to work collaboratively. Banyan software has already been tested by scientific and academic insti- tutions that include Stanford Univer- sity, the University of Chicago and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Te com- pany initially plans to target the United States, but eventually aims to launch the product internationally. Te Banyan software is available as a premises-based solution or as a cloud- based service. Te company expects the cloud-based offering to appeal to large research institutions, hospitals, labora- tories and pharmaceutical companies. Other GigTank winners include Ba- bel Sushi, whose crowd-sourcing lan- guage app translates conversations in near real time, and Iron Gaming, whose social gaming model leverages live com- petitive events and interactive streaming content. Y

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