SCinet

For seven days, the Austin Convention Center will be home to one of the most powerful networks in the world—SCinet. Built each year, SCinet brings to life a highly sophisticated and extreme 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 supercomputing and grid computing applications.

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 like Internet2, ESnet, National LamdbaRail, Qwest Communications and Level 3 Communications. SCinet is powerful enough to transfer more than 100Gbps of data in just one second. And without a doubt, SC08 exhibitors and attendees will push SCinet’s capacity and capabilities—which will include more bandwidth than in 2006 or 2007—to the max. The Austin Convention Center has a strong IT infrastructure in place, with an exceptional IT staff that is excited about working with the SCinet team and the SC08 exhibitors.

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 Open InfiniBand (OpenIB) Network that extends distributed access to devices like disks over a low-latency network.

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. In years past, Xnet was a testing ground for breakthrough technologies like Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) in 1999 and 10-gigabit Ethernet in 2000, which are now in standard use and deployment among telecommunications networks around the globe.

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

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 networks. Industry vendors and carriers donate much of the equipment and services needed to build the LAN and WAN infrastructure. 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.

Online registration for SCinet network connections will open on August 31. Beginning October 1, organizations will be charged a one-time late fee for any new requests or modifications to existing requests. Every effort will be made to accommodate changes after this date but are subject to availability and resources. Each exhibitor booth Point of Contacts (POC) will receive a username and password along with instructions needed to make network connection requests.