SCINet 2000 reviewed in Wall Street Journal

[Bill Nickless]

November 1, 2000

Texas Journal



Broadband Rarely Looks This Broad


DALLAS -- Within days, the Dallas Convention Center could have the fastest 
Internet connection in these parts.

SC2000, a conference on high-performance computing and networking that runs 
Nov. 4-10, promises to draw 5,000 people and some of the fastest and 
flashiest computing on the planet. And it's bringing along bandwidth vast 
enough to swallow most home Web surfers completely.

Qwest Communications International Inc. and conference organizers are 
stringing some 40 miles of fiber-optic cable throughout the convention 
center to create networks that will carry 10 gigabits of information a 
second, roughly 167,000 times the speed of a residential Internet 
connection. It's enough bandwidth to carry 130,000 simultaneous telephone 
conversations, or move 16 CD-ROMs of data every second. "It's really, 
really big," says Steve Wagner, regional vice president for Qwest local 
broadband services.

It has to be. SC2000 is show-and-tell for supercomputing centers far and 
wide. This month's exhibits will include real-time weather modeling, remote 
electron-microscope imaging and scientific simulations of spacecraft 
re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. Many of them rely on powerful computers 
hundreds or thousands of miles away.

And the network's designers want users to push its limits. "We want to see 
what happens," says Bill Kramer, the conference's "information architect" 
and head of high-performance computing at Lawrence Berkeley National 
Laboratory in California. "We'd love it if [users] totally saturated it."

URL for this Article:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=WJ-CO-20001101-000203.djml


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Bill Nickless    http://www.mcs.anl.gov/people/nickless      +1 630 252 7390
PGP:0E 0F 16 80 C5 B1 69 52 E1 44 1A A5 0E 1B 74 F7     nickless at mcs.anl.gov
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