SCinet Preps World’s Fastest Network Infrastructure at SC16

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From left: SCinet volunteers J.P. Velders, Paul Wefel, Conan Moore and Davey Wheeler

From left: SCinet volunteers J.P. Velders, Paul Wefel, Conan Moore and Davey Wheeler

Over at the SC16 Blog, JP Velders writes that planning for the SCinet high-bandwidth conference network is a multiyear process.

The planning of each conference takes multiple years, with the work – for most involved – gradually picking up the pace as the previous year’s conference has yet to conclude. For SCinet, the planning revolves mainly around figuring out how to provide our (un)seen services and best “wire-up” the venue to meet the needs of attendees, exhibitors, presenters and other contributors.

SC16Created each year for the conference, SCinet brings to life a very high-capacity network that supports the revolutionary applications and experiments that are a hallmark of the SC conference. SCinet will link the convention center to research and commercial networks around the world. In doing so, SCinet serves as the platform for exhibitors to demonstrate the advanced computing resources of their home institutions and elsewhere by supporting a wide variety of bandwidth-driven applications including supercomputing and cloud computing.

Volunteers from academia, government and industry work together to design and deliver the SCinet infrastructure. Industry vendors and carriers donate millions of dollars in equipment and services needed to build and support the local and wide area networks. Planning begins more than a year in advance of each SC conference and culminates in a high-intensity installation in the days leading up to the conference.

scinetFor SC16, volunteers face a daunting setup involving approximately 89 miles of fiber installed on the exhibit floor alone.

The success of any large conference depends on the, often unseen, hard work of many. During the last quarter century, the SCinet team has strived to perfect its routine so that conference-goers can experience a smoothly run Show. The SCinet team will continue to overhaul and improve that routine of planning, Inventory, Staging and Setup to make SC a recurring success. That “wiring-up” ranges from ensuring there is WiFi coverage in every nook and cranny, along with wired Internet services in tutorial and meeting rooms, to providing upwards of 3 TB per second of external bandwidth to the SC16 exhibit floor booths. Before SCinet goes live each year, there are several periods in which all SCinet volunteers put in a tremendous amount of effort to build a high-speed and high-bandwidth network that runs as smoothly as possible.”

Registration is now open for SC16, which takes place Nov. 13-18 in Salt Lake City.

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