Latest
News November 27, 2002--The
High-Performance Bandwidth Challenge awards announced last week at SC2002
established new records for network performance, with one winning application
demonstrating a five-fold increase over the previous top-mark set last
year. The High-Performance Bandwidth Challenge, held at the annual SC
Conference, is a competition for leading-edge network applications developed
by teams of researchers from around the world. For the third consecutive
year, a team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory captured the
competition for the "Highest Performing Application" with a
wide area distributed simulation using Cactus, Globus and Visapult software
demonstrating a peak data transfer rate of of 16.8 gigabits per second,
nearly 25,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The
winning team included the Albert Einstein Institute, Argonne National
Laboratory, ESnet, Force10 Networks, Masaryk University, the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the National Energy Research
Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Poznan Supercomputing and Networking
Centers, Sandia National Laboratories, and the University of Amsterdam. The Data Reservoir application, demonstrated by Fujitsu Laboratories and University of Tokyo, won the award for the "Most Efficient Use of Available Bandwidth," with a peak of 585 megabits per second. With a peak transfer
rate of 2.4 gigabits per second, the award for the "Best Use of Emerging
Network Infrastructure" went to Project DataSpace, which was demonstrated
by a team from CANARIE, the National Center for Data Mining at the University
of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, SARA (Stichting Academisch
Rekencentrum) and StarLight. Ten outstanding entries
competed in the third edition of the High-Performance Bandwidth Challenge,
which was again sponsored by Qwest Communications. Additional network
monitoring and measurement support was provided by CalNGI, Internet2,
the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, the
San Diego Supercomputer Center, Spirent Communications, and the University
of Florida. The competition took
place live on the SC2002 show floor in Baltimore using SCinet, the state-of-art,
on-site network designed and built especially for the annual SC conference.
SCinet featured more than 40 gigabits per second (Gbps) of external network
capacity, itself a new record and more than 50,000 times the speed of
a typical home broadband connection. For more information about this year's
High-Performance Bandwidth Challenge, see: http://scinet.supercomp.org/bwc/ About SC Conferences Media Contacts: Karen Green
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