SCinet

During the seven days of the SC09 conference, Portland, Oregon will host of one of the most powerful, most advanced networks in the world – SCinet. Built each year, SCinet brings to life a highly sophisticated, high capacity networking infrastructure that can support the revolutionary applications and network experiments that have become the trademark of the SC Conference. SCinet serves as the platform for exhibitors to demonstrate the advanced computing resources from their home institutions and elsewhere by supporting a wide variety of applications including supercomputing and cloud computing.

Click Here to listen to the Podcast interview with SC09 SCinet Chair, Ralph McEldowney.

Designed and built entirely by volunteers from universities, government and industry, SCinet connects multiple 10-gigabit per second (Gbps) circuits to the exhibit floor, which links the convention center to research and commercial networks around the world such as the Department of Energy's ESnet, Internet2, National LambdaRail, Level 3 Communications, Qwest, and others.

SCinet is powerful enough to transfer more than 300 gigabits of data in just one second – and SC09 exhibitors and attendees are anticipated to push SCinet's capacity and capabilities to the extreme.

View LIVE SCinet network traffic.

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 networks around the world.

Second, SCinet includes an OpenFabrics-based InfiniBand network that provides support for high-performance computing (HPC) applications and storage over a high performance, low-latency network infrastructure. For SC09, the InfiniBand fabric will consist of Quad Data Rate (QDR) 40-gigabit per second (Gbps) circuits linking together various organizations and vendors with up to 120Gbps circuits providing backbone connectivity for the InfiniBand switching infrastructure.

Lastly, each year SCinet builds an extremely high performance experimental network called Xnet (eXtreme net) that serves as a window into the future of networking. Xnet provides exhibitors a means to showcase the "bleeding-edge"--emerging, often pre-commercial or pre-competitive, developmental networking technologies, protocols and experimental networking applications.

SCinet serves as the technological platform for conference competitions like the Bandwidth and Cluster Challenges. These competitions seek to showcase the technical prowess and innovative collaborations of researchers and engineers representing a wide range of disciplines.

New for SC09, the HPC Advisory Council (http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com), which was responsible for some of SC08 application demonstrations, and for the large-scale network demonstration at the International Supercomputing conference, has joined together with the SCinet team to provide several application demonstrations over the SCinet network. Those demonstrations will range from advanced networking capabilities to high visualization, 3-dimantional view applications.

Volunteers from educational institutions, high performance computing centers, network equipment vendors, U.S. national laboratories, research institutions, and research networks and telecommunication carriers work together to design and deliver the SCinet infrastructure. Industry vendors and carriers donate much of the equipment and services needed to build the local and wide area networks. Planning begins more than a year in advance of each SC Conference and culminates with a high-intensity installation just seven days before the conference begins.