SC16 Opens in Salt Lake City

SC16, annual super computing confernce is underway this week, November 13-18, in Salt Lake City with with more than 12,000 conference exhibitors and attendees expected.

SCinet, the high-performance, experimental network built specifically for the conference, will deliver more than 5 Tbps of internal network bandwidth.

The Utah Education Network (UEN) and CenturyLink are partnering wtih SCinet to enable tens of 100 Gbps Ethernet circuits to bring 3.15 Tbps of Wide Area Network bandwidth to the convention center. UEN guides this collaboration with national and international research & education networks and commodity Internet providers.

For SC16, the SCinet team used more than $32 million in vendor-provided equipment and services. They also installed 56 miles of fiber optic cable and 200+ wireless access points that can support more than 10,000 simultaneous users on the conference wifi. The wireless network supports eduroam, the worldwide education roaming service, which allows anyone from participating institutions to securely access the protected wireless network using their home organization’s login credentials.

“SCinet is more than hardware and software; its unprecedented scale is achieved by volunteers and vendors from around the world,” said Corby Schmitz, SCinet chair and manager of network communications operations and support at the Argonne National Laboratory. “SCinet hardware is supplied by vendors, and then volunteers collaborate to design a network architecture that exists nowhere else in the world.”

Platinum vendor contributors: CenturyLink, Ciena, Cisco, Coriant, Corsa, ESnet, Infinera, Internet2, Juniper, Zayo
Gold vendor contributors: Arista, Brocade Communication Systems, UEN/CloudLab
Silver vendor contributors: ADVA, ECI Telecom, Gigamon, InMon, Ixia, Metaflow, Nokia, Reservoir, Spirent, Splunk, Viavi
Bronze vendor contributors: Cablexpress, Commscope, Leverage, Palo Alto, Puppet Labs, RedSeal

http://www.supercomputing.org