Originally appeared in November 11, 2002 GridToday
GRIDtoday
SC2002 To Feature Most Advanced Grid Conference Network
Systems/Enterprise
SC2002, this year's edition of the SC conference series, will feature the most
advanced network in the history of the conference. SC2002, with the theme
"From Terabytes to Insights," will be held November 16-22 in Baltimore.
Over 50 volunteers representing more than 35 leading companies, universities
and research laboratories will assemble SCinet, the high-performance network
built each year to support the SC conference, on the floor of the Baltimore
Convention Center.
SCinet will feature more than 40 billion bits per second (Gbps) of external
network capacity, more than ever before. With 50,000 times the speed of a
typical home broadband connection, the network connections to the SC2002
exhibition floor could transmit a DVD-quality feature-length movie in less
than a second. Eight separate external connections, ranging in speed from 155
million per second (Mbps) to 10 Gbps, will all be carried on separate
wavelengths of light via DWDM (dense wave division multiplexing) into the
Baltimore Convention Center on a single fiber optic pair.
"SCinet represents the work of individuals from the best of the leading-edge
networking community," said Dennis Duke, chair of SCinet and professor of
physics at Florida State University. "We're looking forward to deploying and
demonstrating the potential of the latest networking technologies at SC2002."
SCinet will deploy 57 miles of fiber optic cable on the convention center show
floor to support 150 individual connections to exhibitors. SCinet supports a
broad range of interconnect technologies, including 10 Gigabit Ethernet, OC-
48c and OC-192c Packet over SONET (POS), and dark fiber. For the first time,
multiple connections on the show floor network are being aggregated onto a
single pair of fiber using DWDM. IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol,
will be implemented conference-wide. Attendees and exhibitors also will have
free access to the emerging IEEE 802.11a wireless technology, the 54 Mbps
successor to the IEEE 802.11b(WiFi) technology.
In addition to supporting demonstrations by a record-breaking number of
exhibitors, SCinet will host the third edition of the High-Performance
Bandwidth Challenge. Sponsored by Qwest Communications, this competition will
feature entries from science and engineering research communities across the
globe, which will use SCinet's unique capabilities to demonstrate emerging
techniques or network applications.
Entries in the Bandwidth Challenge this year are: "Bandwidth to the World,"
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; "Data Services and Visualization," Sandia
National Laboratories; "Global Telescience featuring IPv6," National Center
for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR); "Grid Datafarm for a HEP
Application," National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and
Technology; "Real-Time Terascale Computation for 3D Tele-Immersion,"
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; "Wide Area Distributed
Simulations using Cactus, Globus and Visapult," Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory; "Bandwidth Gluttony-Distributed Grid-Enabled Particle Physics
Event Analysis," California Institute of Technology; and "Data Reservoir,"
University of Tokyo.
SCinet Sponsor Organizations are:
-- Aaronsen Group Aeronautical Systems Center
-- Argonne National Laboratory AT&T
-- California Institute of Technology
-- CIENA Corporation
-- Cisco Systems
-- Computer Sciences Corporation
-- Energy Sciences Network
-- Florida State University
-- Force10 Networks
-- Hewlett-Packard Company
-- Indiana University
-- Internet2
-- Juniper Networks
-- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
-- Los Alamos National Laboratory
-- LuxN Corporation
-- Marconi Communications
-- Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX)
-- GigaPoP
-- Mitre
-- National Center for Supercomputing Applications
-- National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
-- Nortel Networks
-- Oak Ridge National Laboratory
-- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
-- Packet Design
-- Qwest Communications
-- San Diego Supercomputer Center
-- Sandia National Laboratories
-- Spirent Communications
-- Stanford Linear Accelerator
-- U.S. Army Research Laboratory
-- University of Florida
-- University of North Texas
For more information on SCinet, please visit http://scinet.supercomp.org .
About SC2002
SC2002 brings together scientists, engineers, visualization artists,
programmers, and managers to share ideas and to glimpse the future of high
performance networking and computing, data analysis and management,
visualization, and computational modeling. The conference is sponsored by the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society and by the
Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer
Architecture.
http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2002.
