ENGINEERING

DENVER, CO -- Efficiently storing and moving hundreds of terabytes of information across networks through standard protocols remains a key challenge of the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration’s Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), and is the focus of demonstrations by more than a dozen collaborating businesses and government research laboratories today at the Supercomputing 2001 annual meeting. The demonstration will focus on improving utilization of available bandwidth for interactive scientific visualization. “This powerful technique for scientists to manipulate and intuitively grasp data is particularly suited to high-speed networking, since collaborators are often widely distributed geographically and the calculations are information-rich,” said Mike Koszykowski, of Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., who is the ASCI Program Manager for the Problem Solving Environment (PSE) initiative. To promote standard technology development, ASCI PSE researchers at Sandia, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories (the Trilab Testbed) are collaborating with researchers in the Distance Computing (DISCOM), Visual Interactive Environment for Weapons Simulation (VIEWS) and Scalable I/O (SIO) initiatives. Industry partners include: AT&T (NYSE: T), Avici Systems (NASDQ: AVCI), Brocade (NASDQ: BRCD), DataDirect Networks, Nishan Systems, Riverstone Networks Inc. (NASDQ: RSTN), Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE: SGI), Spirent Communications (NYSE: SPM), Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDQ: SUNW) and VERITAS Software Corporation (NASDQ: VRTS). Avici Systems’ TSR ® and SSR™ core routers serve as the foundation for the backbone network. In addition, Avici’s Composite Links™ technology provides load balancing and fast failover over the Wide Area Network (WAN) Trilab testbed. Spirent SmartBits provides a fibre channel performance testing device to measure the overall latency and total throughput of the storage network. Spirent Adtech provides the WAN emulation tool to help simulate real-world network impairments such as latency and frame-loss. Riverstone contributes RS 8000 series metropolitan aggregation routers that differentiate traffic for receiving desirable Quality of Services from the Avici-based backbone network. Riverstone’s Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology addresses critical Quality of Service issues by providing highly secure, end-to-end MPLS tunnels for data traffic across an entire metro network. Nishan Systems presents IP Storage switches that implement the emerging iSCSI and iFCP protocols for extending the Fibre Channel (FC) Storage Area Networks (SAN) over the IP network. Brocade is providing Silkworm 6400 FCFC FC fabrics that interconnect the SGI Onyx3, Sun Fire 4800, and the DataDirect Network’s storage subsystems. DataDirect Networks and Sun Microsystems bring terabytes of fast, virtualized Fibre Channel storage to hold the large datasets for the scientific visualization demo. VERITAS ServPoint™ Appliance Software for SAN , running on a Sun Fire 4800 Server, virtualizes heterogeneous storage devices and natively provides WAN connectivity utilizing the iSCSI protocol. The appliance software also interoperates with the Nishan Systems IPS 4300 hardware to provide an alternate high performance WAN solution. Additionally, VERITAS SANPoint Control™, running on a Sun Blade 1000 Workstation, is being used for the SAN configuration and management. Following the demonstrations, the partners will validate test results over an operational AT&T WAN. AT&T is providing and managing an OC-48 (2.5Gb/s) wavelength service between customer premises in Albuquerque, N.M. to Livermore over AT&T’s next-generation optical network. ASCI provides modeling and simulation capability for the Department of Energy’s Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship activities at the three Defense Programs laboratories (Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore). Advanced computations and three-dimensional modeling and simulation are developed to ensure safe and reliable maintenance of the nation’s nuclear arsenal in the absence of nuclear testing. The SC2001 demonstration, in booth R375, shows an animation of the mixing of light fuel bubbles in supersonic combustors subjected to a shock wave. Sandia is a multiprogram Department of Energy laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major research and development responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness. For further information visit www.sandia.gov