News for and about the Internet2 community

[Greg Wood <>]

SC2002 BANDWIDTH CHALLENGE WINNERS SET NEW NETWORK PERFORMANCE MARKS

Prizes for most daring networking awards sponsored by Qwest Communications

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 third edition of the High-Performance Bandwidth 
Challenge was again sponsored by Qwest Communications and attracted 
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
The annual SC Conferences bring together scientists, engineers, 
visualization artists, programmers, and managers to share ideas and to 
glimpse the future of high performance networking and computing, data 
analysis and management, visualization, and computational modeling. The 
conference is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics 
Engineers Computer Society and by the Association for Computing 
Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture. SC2003 will 
be held in Phoenix, Arizona For more, see:
http://www.sc-conference.org/2003/


###

Media Contacts:
Greg Wood

202-331-5360

Karen Green

217-265-0748

---------------------------------------------------------------i2-news-+
For list utilities, archives, subscribe, unsubscribe, etc. please visit the
ListProc web interface at 

   http://archives.internet2.edu/

---------------------------------------------------------------i2-news--
From LP-APPROVED-BY-MODERATOR
Return-Path: 
<>
Delivered-To: 

Received: from localhost (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1])
        by basie.internet2.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8C0617B47D
        for 
<>;
 Tue, 26 Nov 2002 17:42:55 -0500 (EST)
Received: from lac.uic.edu (unknown [131.193.181.130])
        by basie.internet2.edu (Postfix) with SMTP id 88C6E7B473
        for 
<>;
 Tue, 26 Nov 2002 17:42:53 -0500 (EST)
Received: (qmail 69915 invoked from network); 26 Nov 2002 22:49:20 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO lac.uic.edu) (131.193.181.203)
 by 131.193.181.130 with SMTP; 26 Nov 2002 22:49:20 -0000
Message-ID: 
<>
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 16:45:32 -0600
From: Shirley Connelly 
<>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.4.1) 
Gecko/20020508 Netscape6/6.2.3
X-Accept-Language: en-us
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: 

Subject: Press release:  Lambda Join Demonstration Wins Award at 
Supercomputing 02 Conference
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Virus-Scanned: by AMaViS 0.3.12pre8
Message-Tag: 1559
Reply-To: 

Sender: 

X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.2.09/990901/11:28 -- ListProc(tm) by CREN



Lambda Join Demonstration Wins Award at Supercomputing 02 Conference

November 21, 2002

Baltimore, Maryland.  Project DataSpace, in a collaborative project 
with researchers from Chicago, Ottawa and Amsterdam, has won the 
SuperComputing '02 High Performance Bandwidth Challenge Award for 
Innovative, High Speed, Data Correlation--Best Use of Emerging 
Infrastructure. The group includes researchers from the National Center 
for Data Mining at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), CANARIE, 
and SARA, who have been working together over the past year to produce 
real-time merging of data over lambda networks. At SC02, they presented 
the first demonstration of the technology, with impressive results.


For the past two decades, database researchers have optimized the 
ability of databases to join two tables in a database by a common key, 
such as an employee or product ID.  Database joins are one of the key 
technologies that make data processing practical.

As more and more data is distributed over the internet, the ability to 
join data located in two different global locations is becoming 
critical.  There are two fundamental problems: finding efficient 
protocols to move data over long distances and finding efficient 
algorithms to merge two data streams.

At the Supercomputing '02, significant progress was made on both fronts.

A stream of data was moved over SURFnet connecting a cluster of 
computers at SARA Computing and Networking Services in Amsterdam and a 
cluster of computers at StarLight in Chicago at over 2.8 Gb/s.  At the 
same time a stream of data was moved over Canada's CA*net4 network 
connecting a computer cluster at CANARIE in Ottawa and a UIC computer 
cluster at StarLight in Chicago at over 2 Gb/s. Both streams used a new 
protocol called SABUL designed for high performance data transport 
developed by the National Center for Data Mining/Laboratory for Advanced 
Computing at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

At the same conference, using computer clusters at the StarLight 
facility in Chicago, two streams of data were merged at over 500 Mb/s 
per node in the three node cluster. These so called "lambda joins" are 
an important component for distributed data mining applications.  The 
algorithm for joining two lambda streams was developed by scientists at 
the National Center for Data Mining at the University of Illinois at 
Chicago.

"Lambda data joins are an excellent early example of how CA*net4's 
lightpath provisioning facility can be used to help build new and 
innovative distributed services,' according to Bill St. Arnaud, Senior 
Director for Advanced Networks at CANARIE.

To many network engineers, lambda and lightpath are used interchangeably 
to describe a low layer end-to-end dedicated communications channel of 
effective guaranteed bandwidth. Using protocols such as SABUL, it is now 
possible to use lambdas to move large data sets over long distances as 
fast as the data can be pulled from disk.  Using lambda joins, it is now 
possible to merge two such streams and look for patterns.

"With lambda joins, it is now practtical to look for correlation in 
data even if the data is scattered around the world," said Robert 
Grossman, Director of the National Center for Data Mining at the 
University of Illinois at Chicago and President of the Two Cultures Group.

This demonstration was awarded one of the three Quest Bandwidth 
Challenges Awards presented at this year's Supercomputing 02 Conference.


For more information, contact:

Shirley Connelly, Associate Director, NCDM
312 413 2176, 
.

Robert Grossman Director, NCDM
312 413 2176, 
.


National Center for Data Mining

The National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at the University of 
Illinois at Chicago (UIC) was established in 1998 to serve as a national 
resource for high performance and distributed data mining. The Center 
sponsors research projects, standards, testbeds, and outreach.  The 
Center is coordinating the development of the Predictive Model Markup 
Language (PMML), the standard for data mining models, and sponsoring the 
Terra Wide Data Mining Testbed, a worldwide testbed for high performance 
and distributed data mining. For more information about NCDM, see 
www.ncdm.uic.edu.


SURFnet

SURFnet operates and innovates the national research network, to which 
two hundred institutions in higher education and research in the 
Netherlands are connected. To remain in the lead SURFnet puts in a 
sustained effort to improve the infrastructure and to develop new 
applications to give users faster and better access to new Internet 
services. For more information please visit www.surfnet.nl. For SARA, 
see www.sara.nl.



SARA Computing and Networking Services

SARA is the Dutch National Supercomputing Facility. SARA provides High 
Performance Computing and Networking Services and Visualization 
(including Virtual Reality) facilities to the Dutch Academia and 
Research institutions, and to commercial business. SARA is a 
not-for-profit foundation. SARA does the day-to-day operational 
management of the SURFnet network.

CANARIE, Inc.

CANARIE is Canada's advanced Internet development organization, a 
not-for-profit corporation supported by its members, project partners 
and the Government of Canada. Canarie's mission is to accelerate 
Canada's advanced Internet development and use by facilitating the 
widespread adoption of high-performance, end-user enabled networks and 
by stimulating the development of new, next generation products, 
applications and services to run on them. Following a $110M funding 
agreement with Industry Canada, Canarie, Inc. designed, developed and is 
operating CA*Net 4, Canada's national research and innovation network.
For more information, visit www.canarie.ca.

StarLight

StarLight(sm), the optical STAR TAP(sm) initiative, is an advanced 
optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized 
for high-performance applications. Operational since summer 2001, 
StarLight is a 1GigE and 10GigE switch/router facility for 
high-performance access to participating networks and will ultimately 
become a true optical switching facility for wavelengths. StarLight is 
being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the 
University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the International Center for 
Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, and the 
Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National 
Laboratory, in partnership with Canada's CANARIE and Holland's SURFnet.  
For more information please visit www.startap.net/starlight.







--


-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shirley Connelly                      Tel: 312-413-2176            
Associate Director                    Fax: 312-355-0373                                               
Laboratory for Advanced Computing     http://www.lac.uic.edu 
National Center for Data Mining       http://www.ncdm.uic.edu

Univ. of Illinois at Chicago                                       
322 SEO, M/C  249                      Email:                           
851 S. Morgan Street                   Email:                             
Chicago, IL 60607-7045                                              
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Project DataSpace:  http://www.dataspaceweb.net


---------------------------------------------------------------i2-news-+
For list utilities, archives, subscribe, unsubscribe, etc. please visit the
ListProc web interface at 

   http://archives.internet2.edu/

---------------------------------------------------------------i2-news--