News for and about the Internet2 community

[Jan Eveleth <>]

Super Network Supports Supercomputing 2005

Nov. 17, 2005--Seattle, Washington USA. For the first time ever in a
real-world environment, Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) and its
strategic partners have brought together more than one-half terabit per
second (i.e., 500 gigabits per second) of bandwidth in deploying SCinet,
the very high performance network built to support Supercomputing 2005
(SC|05) in Seattle. The network is provisioned through multiple dark fiber
strands brought by the University of Washington from the convention center
to major telecommunications facilities in the city.

DWDM gear from Ciena, Cisco and Nortel were used to provision more than 50
10Gbps circuits and a native 40Gbps circuit. These circuits were then
interconnected to numerous high-bandwidth national backbones, including
National LambdaRail, CANARIE, Internet2's Abilene Network and UltraScience
Net. International networks worked with these various North American
facilities to reach the Seattle venue. In particular, Pacific Rim networks
in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Australia utilized the Pacific Wave
distributed peering exchange facility, a joint project between PNWGP and
CENIC.

"As a direct result of many strategic investments by the University of
Washington and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, Seattle is one of the few
places in the world where SC|05 could benefit from an abundance of
first-rate networking resources including metropolitan fiber,
carrier-grade telecommunications facilities, a world-class engineering
team, and an ever growing concentration of national and international
networks," said Steve Corbato, director of network initiatives for
Internet2.

"This staggering amount of bandwidth," he continued, "was deployed
seamlessly and provides a truly impressive demonstration of the rapidly
evolving suite of network capabilities in support of leading-edge
computational science."

Among the many events relying on this bandwidth were massive storage- and
data-retrieval tools, the Internet2 Land Speed Record attempts (IPv4 and
IPv6), data grids, multi-point real-time, high-definition video from points
around the world, super high-definition video, and 3D imaging.

Professor Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information Technology [Calit2], a partnership of
the University of California at San Diego and UC Irvine, and principal
investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded OptIPuter project
offered this observation: "The Terabit Era has arrived! This unprecedented
achievement of PNWGP and SC|05 demonstrates that the United States needs
to broaden its strategic technology leadership agenda from a focus on
faster individual supercomputers to supernetwork-connected resources on a
global scale."