ACADEMIA

UltraScience Net transferred 164 terabytes of data -- the equivalent of 10 to 20 times the Library of Congress -- in 24 hours and helped the team led by Caltech take top honors in the bandwidth challenge at Supercomputing 2005 in Seattle. DOE's UltraScience Net was extended to the show floor at SC 05 by a team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in just days to provide an aggregate bandwidth of 60 gigabits per second. Furthermore, UltraScience Net, developed over the last two years at ORNL, carried a significant portion of the data (164 of 400 terabytes) and provided a significant portion of the bandwidth that made the transfer possible by the winning team. Ultimately, the network will support high-performance computing at DOE facilities and universities and will make possible collaborative large-scale projects typical of today's research. In other news, government agencies and private companies are turning to Oak Ridge National Laboratory for modeling, simulation and fine-tuning of their wireless sensor networks. The Extreme Measurement Communications Center (EMC2), headed by Wayne Manges of the Engineering Science and Technology Division, is focusing on advancing the use of wireless technology under extreme conditions typical of industrial settings. "Through EMC2, our resources are diverse and include parallel computing and measurement equipment for high-performance wireless and wired network characterization," Manges said. Ultimately, ORNL and several organizations will develop wireless network standards to be adopted by the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society and others. In addition to its work to develop a fault-tolerant communication infrastructure for the electric grid of the future, ORNL's EMC2 is involved in projects with Honeywell, Eaton and General Electric.