DENVER, CO -- In less than two weeks, SC2001 will convene at the Denver Convention Center and, for the first time, at locations in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and even the South Pole.

SC Global, a new feature at this year's conference, will use Access Grid technology to link the conference in Denver with participants at Access Grid nodes worldwide. These remote participants--or SC Constellation Sites--will not only tune in to the technical program and keynote addresses in Denver, they will serve up their own presentations, participate in panel discussions, and conduct remote workshops, educational sessions, and birds of a feather meetings. Moreover, SC Global content will extend beyond high-performance computing and networking, with many Constellation Sites offering sessions in telemedicine, social sciences, and the arts.

Thirty-six sites have confirmed their participation in SC Global, 28 of which will contribute content to the conference. These include sites all across the U.S. and in Beijing, China; Juelich, Germany; Tsukuba, Japan; Toronto, Canada; Manchester, England; Stuttgart, Germany; Bologna, Italy; Sydney, Australia; Porto Alegre, Brazil; and the National Science Foundation's South Pole Research Center.

"The breadth and scope of the SC Global participants is truly remarkable. They come from 10 countries and six continents, and they will be much more than passive participants in the conference," said Ian Foster, senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, and head of the SC Global project. "The SC Global participants will enrich the conference by providing international perspectives on computing and networking issues and by broadening the content traditionally available at this conference. In addition, the whole SC Global program will make people more aware of the potentials of grid technologies in bringing people together for scientific and artistic collaborations."

The Access Grid is an integrated environment that supports group-to-group communication using high-speed networks over the Internet. It provides high-quality audio and real-time video that allow groups at multiple sites to interact and share data and scientific instruments. The Access Grid is a National Computational Science Alliance project led by Argonne, a key Alliance partner.

Among the remote sessions that will originate from Constellation Sites are: *A workshop on high-performance computing and its applications to oil and gas research, originating from Cineca Supercomputing Center, Bologna, Italy. *A collaborative course in parallel scientific computing, originating from the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks; the University of Montana; and the Albuquerque High-Performance Computing Center at the University of New Mexico. *A panel discussion on how the new Asia-Pacific Grid can contribute to the region's science and technology, with participants from Japan, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the U.S. *A series of workshops on Grid infrastructure originating from Juelich University, Juelich, Germany. *A series of presentations on advanced networking and application research in China, originating from Beijing University and TsingHua University.

The SC Global Showcase will feature presentations that expand beyond the typical SC fare. Among the SC Global Showcase offerings are performance art from sites in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Netherlands; a musical performance with voice, instruments, and images coming from three locations; and a transcontinental dance performance with digital animation, video art, music, and dancers at numerous locations. SC Global Showcase also will illustrate the Access Grid as a tool for telemedicine, with demonstrations of telecollaborative radiology from the University of Manchester (England) and an application called Visible Embryo, which allows researchers and clinicians to view high-resolution images of embryos.

For more on SC Global, including a schedule of events, see http://www.scglobal.org/. SC2001, the annual high-performance networking and computing conference, will take place Nov. 10-16. For more information, see http://www.SC2001.org/.

Contact:
Karen Green
NCSA
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
ph: +1.217.265.0748

Julie Wulf
Argonne National Laboratory
wulf@mcs.anl.gov
ph: +1.630.252.7163