SCIENCE

Called SCinet, the network is created each year exclusively for SC, the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. SCinet provides conference attendees and exhibitors with the high capacity networks they need to support the emerging computing applications and networking experiments that are now the trademark of the SC conference tradition. The 23rd annual conference in the series, SC10 will be held in New Orleans November 13–19.

SCinet serves as the platform for exhibitors to demonstrate some of the most advanced computers and applications in the world by supporting a wide variety of bandwidth-driven applications such as those typically found in supercomputing and cloud computing. This year’s state-of-the-art network will boast capacity of over 260 gigabits per second – that’s enough data to allow the entire collection of books at the Library of Congress to be transferred in less than thirty seconds. SCinet will also, for the first time ever, host a full production wide area 100 Gigabit Ethernet connection.

“SCinet provides a high performance, production-quality network that enables attendees and exhibitors to connect to the Internet and research networks around the world,” explains Jamie Van Randwyk, manager, Informatics and Systems Assessments Department at Sandia National Laboratories and chair of SCinet. “The aggregate bandwidth of SCinet exceeds the bandwidth in all but a few countries of the world, enabling extraordinary one-of-a-kind application demonstrations that can only happen in this kind of environment.”

This year SCinet features three major components.

First, it provides a high performance, production-quality network with direct wide area connectivity that enables attendees and exhibitors to connect to the Internet and other leading research networks around including the Department of Energy's ESnet, Internet2, National LambdaRail, Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI), and others.

Second, SCinet includes an InfiniBand network that provides support for supercomputing applications and storage over a high performance, low-latency network infrastructure. For SC10, the InfiniBand fabric consists of Quad Data Rate (QDR) 40, 80, and 120-gigabit per second (Gbps) circuits linking together various organizations and vendors with high-speed 120Gbps circuits, providing backbone connectivity through the SCinet InfiniBand switching infrastructure.

The third component is new to SC. Beginning this year, SCinet is introducing the SCinet Research Sandbox. Sandbox participants will take advantage of SCinet’s unique infrastructure to demonstrate 100G networks for a wide variety of applications, including petascale computing, next-generation approaches to wide area file transfer, security analysis tools, and data-intensive computing.

SCinet also serves as the technological platform for competitions at SC10, including the Student Cluster Challenge. These competitions showcase the technical prowess and innovative collaborations of researchers and engineers across a wide range of disciplines.

“Building SCinet is truly an amazing, collaborative effort,” says Jeff Boote, Internet2’s Assistant Director of Research and Development and Chair of SCinet for 2011. This year, vendors have donated over $24 million in equipment to build the network. Planning begins more than a year in advance of each SC Conference, and the work culminates with a high-intensity installation just seven days before the conference begins. Even more remarkably, SCinet is an all-volunteer effort: the network is built by a group of over 100 volunteers including scientists, engineers, and students from all over the world.

Members of the media are invited to visit the on-site network operations center and see the network in action during SC10. Media registration for the conference is open. Members of the press can attend for free.