Super-Powered SC Conference Network Goes Live

For seven days, the Oregon Convention Center will be home to the most powerful network in the world – SCinet. Built each year for the annual SC conference, SCinet brings to life a highly sophisticated and extreme local and wide area network fabric that can support the revolutionary applications and network experiments that have become a trademark of the conference.

SC09 held from November 14-20, 2009, focuses on the latest advances in high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. With a massive 400 Gigabits per second in bandwidth capacity – more than most networks in the world – SCinet supports exhibitors from industry and academia to demonstrate their most aggressive supercomputing and networking applications that are either in production or in an experimental or pre-commercial state.

SCinet is designed and built by over 140 volunteers from universities, government and industry and leverages $20 million in donated equipment from leaders in the technology sector who seek the opportunity to showcase their products in this highly advanced network environment. This year, the team has deployed over 200 miles of fiber optic cable in the Oregon Convention Center and is utilizing over 34 miles of fiber in the regional Portland area to make these network capabilities possible.

SCinet links the conference center to research and commercial networks around the world like the Department of Energy’s ESnet, the Internet2 Network and National LambdaRail. SCinet will support the exa-floods of data from SC09 exhibitors and attendees and will then measure and monitor every aspect of the network's performance to provide the public a unique real-time window into the core of this powerful network’s inner-workings and operations. Live network traffic will be available online via: http://measurement.sc09.org/public

"The SCinet team has worked diligently over the past twelve months to design and build what we consider to be the most robust network capable of supporting the leading-edge applications of the conference’s exhibitors and attendees, who are known for pushing network and computing resources to the extreme each year,” said Ralph McEldowney, Chief, Advanced Technologies Section, Air Force Research Laboratory Supercomputing Resource Center and SC09 SCinet committee chair. Full Story