ACADEMIA

Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:LVLT) today announced it is supplying wavelength services for the annual 'Bandwidth Challenge' at SC2003, an international conference on high-performance computing and networking. The conference is being held this week at the Phoenix Civic Plaza Convention Center in Arizona. In support of the event, Level 3 is providing three separate 10-gigabit wavelength circuits that together will enable the transmission of more than 30 billion bits per second of bandwidth into Phoenix from Los Angeles. The 10-gigabit wavelengths were provisioned using Level 3's award-winning ONTAP(SM) system. Level 3 is also providing dedicated Internet access service for exhibitors and attendees. "Increasingly, Level 3 has been an important network partner for the SC conferences," said Jim Rogers, SC2003 Network Chair. "For the third year, Level 3 services will enable exhibitors to access research networks including TeraGrid, Abilene and ESnet across the SCinet infrastructure. This year, Level 3 is supplying 30 gigabits per second of wide-area-network bandwidth to reach advanced research facilities including Caltech and SLAC." "We are pleased to once again take part in this exciting event," said Sureel Choksi, president of Transport and Infrastructure Services for Level 3. "We believe network computing and other applications coming out of the research and education market will serve as a key driver of future demand for bandwidth, both across North America and around the world." SC2003 highlights the most innovative developments in high-performance computing and networking, bringing together scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators and managers. The high-performance Bandwidth Challenge is an annual event at the SC conference and consists of multiple research teams that compete against each other to design and demonstrate the most innovative and bandwidth-intensive application. The primary criteria that will be used to determine this year's winner of the Bandwidth Challenge will be the verifiable network throughput as measured from the contestant's equipment through the network's switches and routers to external connections.