Bandwidth Challenge Teams Compete at SC2003

PHOENIX, Nov. 26 -- Teams of scientists from research organizations around the world competed to see who could move the most scientific data across networks in the fourth annual High-Performance Bandwidth Challenge, held during the SC2003 conference on high-performance computing and networking last week in Phoenix.

Once data was moved and performance tracked, a team representing the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Caltech and Los Alamos National Laboratory had achieved a new record from sustained throughput -- 23.21 Gb/s -- surpassing last year's record by about 5 Gbs.

"While the results are impressive, the challenge is not just about blasting bits across the network," said 2003 Bandwidth Challenge co-chair Kevin Walsh, of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. "It's really about driving science; and this year's competition clearly illustrates the role of high-performance, highpbandwidth networks in current scientific research in such areas as physics, biology and chemistry, as well as computer science."

Walsh added that cutting-edge science carried out on an international scale is pushing currently available bandwidth, and projections are that Grid computing advances will grow along with increases in high-performance, high-bandwidth networks.

"Seven of the top 10 computer systems worldwide are cluster-based systems that require high-performance networking," said Bobby Johnson, president and CEO of Foundry Networks. "There is a growing intelligent bandwidth requirement for a wide variety of scientific, research and educational institutions leveraging speeds of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and beyond."

SC2003 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.

Qwest Communications sponsored prizes for the winning teams. For a list of teams and winners, visit: www.sc-conference.org/sc2003/nr_finalbwc.html