|
|
SC99, the annual conference of high-performance networking and computing, attracted a record number of participants to the Oregon Convention Center in Portland last November. Over 5,000 people attended the conference, which is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery.
The conference featured three days of technical presentations, as well as awards presentations and exhibits. One of the highlights was a special session on the future of high-performance computing, including a demonstration of the first-ever cluster based on Intel's IA-64 ItaniumĒ processor. This processor was designed to provide the scalability, floating-point performance, and architectural features that the high-performance computing market and e-Business applications will need in the 21st century.
Each year the conference constructs a special on-site network environment that exists only for the duration of the conference. According to OSU computer science professor Cherri Pancake, who chaired this year's event, SCinet "was definitely the hottest network on the planet. It had more capacity going out from the convention center to the rest of the world than all the networks in Washington and Oregon combined." This year SCinet ran an internal fiber optic network using DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) gear from Nortel Networks. It provided up to 16 channels operating at either 2.4 Gb/s (OC-48) or 10Gb/s (OC192).