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World Network Speed Record Quadrupled

November 24, 2004 World Network Speed Record Quadrupled Caltech, SLAC, Fermilab, CERN, Florida and Partners in the UK, Brazil and Korea Set 101 Gbps Mark During the SC’04 Bandwidth Challenge PITTSBURGH, PA - For the second consecutive year, the “High Energy Physics” team of physicists, computer scientists and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology and their partners at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Fermilab, CERN and the University of Florida, as well as international participants from the UK (University of Manchester, UCL and UKLight), Brazil (Rio de Janeiro State University, UERJ, and the State Universities of São Paulo, USP and UNESP) and Korea (Kyungpook National University, KISTI) joined forces at the Supercomputing 2004 (SC04) Bandwidth Challenge to capture the Sustained Bandwidth Award. Their demonstration of “High Speed TeraByte Transfers for Physics” achieved a throughput of 101 gigabits per second (Gbps) to and from the show floor, which exceeds the previous year’s mark of 23.2 Gbps, set by the same team, by a factor of more than four. The record data transfer speed is equivalent to downloading three full DVD movies per second, or transmitting all of the content of the Library of Congress in 15 minutes. It also has been estimated to be approximately 5% of the total rate of production of new content on Earth during the test. The new mark, according to Bandwidth Challenge (BWC) sponsor Dr. Wesley Kaplow, V.P. of Engineering and Operations for Qwest Government Services, exceeded the sum of all the throughput marks submitted in the present and previous years by other BWC entrants. The extraordinary achieved bandwidth was made possible in part through the use of the FAST TCP protocol developed by Professor Steven Low and his Caltech Netlab team. It was achieved through the use of seven 10 Gbps links to Cisco 7600 and 6500 series switch routers provided by Cisco Systems at the Caltech Center for Advanced Computing (CACR) booth, and three 10 Gbps links to the SLAC / Fermilab booth. The external network connections included four dedicated wavelengths of National LambdaRail, between the SC2004 show floor in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles (two waves), Chicago, and Jacksonville, as well as three 10 Gbps connections across the Scinet network infrastructure at SC2004 with Qwest-provided wavelengths to the Internet2 Abilene Network (two 10 Gbps links), the TeraGrid (three 10 Gbps links) and ESnet. 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) interfaces provided by S2io were used on servers running FAST at the Caltech / CACR booth, and interfaces from Chelsio equipped with transport offload engines (TOE) running standard TCP were used at the SLAC / FNAL booth. During the test, the network links over both the Abilene and National Lambda Rail networks were shown to operate successfully up to 99 percent of full capacity. The Bandwidth Challenge allowed the scientists and engineers involved to preview the globally distributed Grid system that is now being developed in the US and Europe in preparation for the next generation of high energy physics experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scheduled to begin operation in 2007. Physicists at the LHC will search for the Higgs particles thought to be responsible for mass in the universe, supersymmetry, and other fundamentally new phenomena bearing on the nature of matter and spacetime, in an energy range made accessible by the LHC for the first time. The largest physics collaborations at the LHC, CMS and ATLAS, each encompass more than 2000 physicists and engineers from 160 universities and laboratories spread around the globe. In order to fully exploit the potential for scientific discoveries, many Petabytes of data will have to be processed, distributed and analyzed. The key to discovery is the analysis phase, where individual physicists and small groups repeatedly access, and sometimes extract and transport Terabyte-scale data samples on demand, in order to optimally select the rare “signals” of new physics from potentially overwhelming “backgrounds” from already-understood particle interactions. This data will be drawn from major facilities at CERN in Switzerland, at Fermilab and the Brookhaven lab in the U.S., and at other laboratories and computing centers around the world, where the accumulated stored data will amount to many tens of Petabytes in the early years of LHC operation, rising to the Exabyte range within the coming decade. Future optical networks, incorporating multiple 10 Gbps links are the foundation of the Grid system that will drive the scientific discoveries. A “hybrid” network integrating both traditionally switching and routing of packets, and dynamically constructed optical paths to support the largest data flows, is a central part of the near-term future vision that the scientific community has adopted to meet the challenges of data intensive science in many fields. By demonstrating that many 10 Gbps wavelengths can be used efficiently over continental and transoceanic distances (often in both directions simultaneously), the high energy physics team showed that this vision of a worldwide dynamic Grid supporting many Terabyte and larger data transactions is practical. While the SC2004 100+ Gbps demonstration required a major effort by the teams involved and their sponsors, in partnership with major research and education network organizations in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific, it is expected that networking on this scale in support of the largest science projects (such as the LHC), will be commonplace within the next three to five years. The network has been deployed through exceptional support by Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, Newisys, S2io, Chelsio, Sun Microsystems and Boston Ltd., as well as the staffs of National LambdaRail, Qwest, the Internet2 Abilene Network, CENIC, ESnet, TeraGrid, AMPATH, RNP and the GIGA project, as well as ANSP / FAPESP in Brazil, KAIST in Korea, UKERNA in the UK, and the Starlight international peering point in Chicago. The international connections included the “LHCNet” OC-192 link between Chicago and CERN at Geneva, the “CHEPREO” OC-48 link between Abilene (Atlanta), FIU (Miami) and São Paulo, as well as an OC-12 link between Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Geant, and Abilene (New York). The “APII-TransPAC” links to Korea also were used with good occupancy. The throughputs to and from Latin America and Korea represented a significant step up in scale, that the team members hope will be the beginning of a trend towards the widespread use of 10 Gbps-scale network links on DWDM optical networks interlinking different world regions in support of science, by the time the LHC begins operation in 2007. The demonstration and the developments leading up to it, were made possible through the strong support of the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, in cooperation with the agencies of the international partners. As part of the demonstration, a distributed analysis of simulated LHC physics data was done using the Grid-enabled Analysis Environment (GAE) developed at Caltech for the LHC and many other major particle physics experiments, as part of the Particle Physics Data Grid (PPDG), GriPhyN / iVDGL and Open Science Grid projects. This involved the transfer of data to CERN, Florida, Fermilab, Caltech, UC San Diego, and Brazil for processing by clusters of computers, and finally aggregating the results back to the show floor to create a dynamic visual display of quantities of interest to the physicists. In another part of the demonstration, file servers at the SLAC / FNAL booth, in London and Manchester also were used for disk to disk transfers from Pittsburgh to the UK. This gave physicists valuable experience in the use of the large distributed datasets and computational resources connected by fast networks, on the scale required at the start of the LHC physics program. The team used the MonALISA (MONtoring Agents using a Large Integrated Services Architecture) system developed at Caltech to monitor and display the real-time data for all the network links used in the demonstration, as illustrated in the figure. MonALISA is a highly scalable set of autonomous self-describing agent-based subsystems which are able to collaborate and cooperate in performing a wide range of monitoring tasks for networks and Grid systems, as well as the scientific applications themselves. Detailed results for the network traffic on all the links used are available at: boson.cacr.caltech.edu:8888 The team hopes this new demonstration will encourage scientists and engineers in many sectors of society to develop and plan to deploy a new generation of revolutionary Internet applications. Multi-gigabit/s end-to-end network performance will lead to new models for how research and business is performed. Scientists will be empowered to form “virtual organizations” on a planetary scale, sharing in a flexible way their collective computing and data resources. In particular, this is vital for projects on the frontiers of science and engineering, in “data intensive” fields such as particle physics, astronomy, bioinformatics, global climate modeling, geosciences, fusion, and neutron science. Harvey Newman, Professor of Physics at Caltech and head of the team said, “This is a breakthrough for the development of global networks and Grids, as well as inter-regional cooperation in science projects at the high energy frontier. We demonstrated that multiple links of various bandwidths, up to the 10 Gbps range can be used effectively over long distances. This is a common theme that will drive many fields of data intensive science, where the network needs are foreseen to rise from tens of Gbps to the Terabit/sec range within the next 5-10 years. In a broader sense, this demonstration paves the way for more flexible, efficient sharing of data and collaborative work by scientists in many countries, which could be a key factor enabling the next round of physics discoveries at the high energy frontier. There are also profound implications for how we could integrate information sharing and on-demand audiovisual collaboration in our daily lives, with a scale and quality previously unimaginable.” Les Cottrell, assistant director of SLAC’s computer services, said: “The smooth interworking of 10GE interfaces from multiple vendors, the ability to successfully fill 10Gbits/s paths both on local area networks (LANs), cross country and inter-continentally, the ability to transmit greater than 10Gbits/s from a single host, and the ability of TCP Offload Engines to (TOE) to reduce CPU utilization, all illustrate the emerging maturity of the 10Gigabit/second Ethernet market. The current limitations are not in the network but rather in the servers at the ends of the links, and their buses.” Further information about the demonstration may be found at: ultralight.caltech.edu/sc2004 and www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monitoring/bulk/sc2004/hiperf.html About Caltech With an outstanding faculty, including four Nobel laureates, and such off-campus facilities as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Palomar Observatory, and the W. M. Keck Observatory, the California Institute of Technology is one of the world’s major research centers. The Institute also conducts instruction in science and engineering for a student body of approximately 900 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students who maintain a high level of scholarship and intellectual achievement. Caltech’s 124-acre campus is situated in Pasadena, California, a city of 135,000 at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, approximately 30 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean and 10 miles northeast of the Los Angeles Civic Center. Caltech is an independent, privately supported university, and is not affiliated with either the University of California system or the California State Polytechnic universities. About SLAC The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is one of the world’s leading research laboratories. Its mission is to design, construct, and operate state-of-the-art electron accelerators and related experimental facilities for use in high-energy physics and synchrotron radiation research. In the course of doing so, it has established the largest known database in the world, which grows at 1 terabyte per day. That, and its central role in the world of high-energy physics collaboration, places SLAC at the forefront of the international drive to optimize the worldwide, high-speed transfer of bulk data. About CACR Caltech’s Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) performs research and development on leading edge networking and computing systems, and methods for computational science and engineering. Some current efforts at CACR include the National Virtual Observatory, TeraGrid, Particle Physics Data Grid, GriPhyN, iVDGL, Computational Infrastructure for Geophysics, Geoframework, and Cascade. About Netlab Netlab is the Networking Laboratory at Caltech led by Professor Steven Low, where FAST TCP has been developed. The group does research in the control and optimization of protocols and networks, and designs, analyzes, implements, and experiments with new algorithms and systems. About Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) is a US Department of Energy national laboratory located in Batavia, Illinois, outside Chicago. Fermilab’s mission is to advance the understanding of the fundamental nature of matter and energy through basic scientific research conducted at the frontiers of high energy physics and related disciplines. The Laboratory hosts the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, the Tevatron. Fermilab-supported experiments generate petabyte-scale data per year, and involve large, international collaborations with requirements for high volume data movement to their home institutions. The Laboratory actively works to remain on the leading edge of advanced wide area network technology in support of its collaborations. About CERN CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its member states are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission, and UNESCO have observer status. About StarLight StarLight is an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications. Operational since summer 2001, StarLight is a 1 GE and 10 GE switch / router facility for high-performance access to participating networks and also offers true optical switching for wavelengths. StarLight is being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, in partnership with Canada’s CANARIE and the Netherlands’ SURFnet. STAR TAP and StarLight are made possible by major funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation to UIC. StarLight is a service mark of the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. About the University of Manchester The University of Manchester has been created by combining the strengths of UMIST (founded in 1824) and the Victoria University of Manchester (founded in 1851) to form the largest single-site university in the UK with 34,000 students. On Friday 22nd October 2004 it received its Royal Charter from Her Majesty the Queen, with an unprecedented £300m capital investment programme. With a continuing proud tradition of innovation and excellence, t wenty-three Nobel Prize winners have studied at Manchester. Rutherford conducted the research which led to the splitting of the atom there, and the world’s first stored-program electronic digital computer successfully executed its first program there in June 1948. The Schools of Physics, Computational Science, Computer Science and the Network Group together with the E-Science North West Centre research facility are very active in developing a wide range of e-science projects and Grid technologies. About UERJ (Rio de Janeiro) Founded in 1950, the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ: www.uerj.br) ranks among the ten largest universities in Brazil, with more than 23,000 students. UERJ’s five campuses are home to 22 libraries, 412 classrooms, 50 lecture halls and auditoriums, and 205 laboratories. UERJ is responsible for important public welfare and health projects through its centers of medical excellence, the Pedro Ernesto University Hospital (HUPE) and the Piquet Carneiro Day-care Policlinic Centre, and it is committed to the preservation of the environment. The UERJ High Energy Physics group includes 15 faculty, postdoctoral and visiting Ph. D physicists and 12 Ph. D. and Masters students, working on experiments at Fermilab (D0) and CERN (CMS). The group has constructed a Tier2 center to enable it to take part in the Grid-based data analysis planned for the LHC, and has originated the concept of a Brazilian “HEP Grid”, working in cooperation with USP and several other universities in Rio and São Paulo. About UNESP (São Paulo) Created in 1976 with the administrative union of several isolated Institutes of Higher Education in the State of Sao Paulo, the São Paulo State University, UNESP, has campuses in 24 different cities in the State of São Paulo. The university has 25,000 undergraduate students and almost 10,000 graduate students. Since 1999 the university has a group participating in the DZero Collaboration of Fermilab, which is operating the São Paulo Regional Analysis Center (SPRACE). About USP (São Paulo) The University of São Paulo, USP, is the largest institution of higher education and research in Brazil, and the third in size in Latin America. The university has most of its 35 units located on the campus of the capital of the state. It has around 40,000 undergraduate students and around 25,000 graduate students. It is responsible for almost 25% of all Brazilian papers and publications indexed on the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The SPRACE cluster is located at the Physics Institute. About Kyungpook National University (Daegu) Kyungpook National University is one of leading universities in Korea, especially in physics and information science. The university has 13 colleges and 9 graduate schools with 24,000 students. It houses the Center for High Energy Physics(CHEP) in which most Korean high-energy physicists participate. CHEP (chep.knu.ac.kr) was approved as one of the designated Excellent Research Centers supported by the Korean Ministry of Science. About the Particle Physics Data Grid (PPDG) The Particle Physics Data Grid is developing and deploying production Grid systems vertically integrating experiment-specific applications, Grid technologies, Grid and facility computation and storage resources to form effective end-to-end capabilities. PPDG is a collaboration of computer scientists with a strong record in Grid technology, and physicists with leading roles in the software and network infrastructures for major high-energy and nuclear experiments. PPDG’s goals and plans are guided by the immediate and medium-term needs of the physics experiments and by the research and development agenda of the computer science groups. About GriPhyN and iVDGL GriPhyN and iVDGL are developing and deploying Grid infrastructure for several frontier experiments in physics and astronomy. These experiments together will utilize Petaflops of CPU power and generate hundreds of Petabytes of data that must be archived, processed, and analyzed by thousands of researchers at laboratories, universities and small colleges and institutes spread around the world. The scale and complexity of this “Petascale” science drive GriPhyN’s research program to develop Grid-based architectures, using “virtual data” as a unifying concept. IVDGL is deploying a Grid laboratory where these technologies can be tested at large scale and where advanced technologies can be implemented for extended studies by a variety of disciplines. About CHEPREO Florida International University (FIU), in collaboration with partners at Florida State University, the University of Florida, and the California Institute of Technology, has been awarded an NSF grant to create and operate an interregional Grid-enabled Center from High-Energy Physics Research and Educational Outreach at FIU. CHEPREO encompasses an integrated program of collaborative physics research on CMS, network infrastructure development, and educational outreach at one of the largest minority universities in the US. The center is funded by four NSF directorates including Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Scientific Computing Infrastructure, Elementary, Secondary and Informal Education, and International Programs. About Open Science Grid The Open Science Grid aims to build and operate a persistent, coherent national grid infrastructure for large scale U.S. science, by federating many of the grid resources currently in use at DOE and NSF-sponsored U.S. labs and universities. The plan is to iteratively extend and adapt existing grids, such as Grid2003, to enable the use of common grid infrastructure and shared resources for the benefit of scientific applications. The Open Science Grid Consortium includes scientific collaborations, scientific computing centers and existing and new grid research and deployment projects, involving both computational and application scientists, working together to provide and support the set of facilities, services and infrastructure needed. About Internet2® Led by more than 200 U.S. universities working with industry and government, Internet2 develops and deploys advanced network applications and technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the creation of tomorrow’s Internet. Internet2 recreates the partnerships among academia, industry, and government that helped foster today’s Internet in its infancy. About the Abilene Network Abilene, developed in partnership with Qwest Communications, Juniper Networks, Nortel Networks and Indiana University, provides nationwide high-performance networking capabilities for more than 225 universities and research facilities in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. About The TeraGrid The TeraGrid, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a multi-year effort to build a distributed national cyberinfrastructure. TeraGrid entered full production mode in October 2004, providing a coordinated set of services for the nation’s science and engineering community. TeraGrid’s unified user support infrastructure and software environment allow users to access storage and information resources as well as over a dozen major computing systems at nine partner sites via a single allocation, either as stand-alone resources or as components of a distributed application using Grid software capabilities. Over 40 teraflops of computing power, 1.5 petabytes of online storage, and multiple visualization, data collection, and instrument resources are integrated at the nine TeraGrid partner sites. Coordinated by the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, the TeraGrid partners include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Indiana University, Purdue University, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas-Austin. About National LambdaRail National LambdaRail (NLR) is a major initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications. NLR puts the control, the power, and the promise of experimental network infrastructure in the hands of the nation’s scientists and researchers. About CENIC CENIC (www.cenic.org) is a not-for-profit corporation serving California Institute of Technology, California State University, Stanford University, University of California, University of Southern California, California Community Colleges, and the statewide K-12 school system. CENIC’s mission is to facilitate and coordinate the development, deployment, and operation of a set of robust multi-tiered advanced network services for this research and education community. About ESnet The Energy Sciences Network, is a high-speed network serving thousands of Department of Energy scientists and collaborators worldwide. A pioneer in providing high-bandwidth, reliable connections, ESnet enables researchers at national laboratories, universities and other institutions to communicate with each other using the collaborative capabilities needed to address some of the world’s most important scientific challenges. Managed and operated by the ESnet staff at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ESnet provides direct high-bandwidth connections to all major DOE sites, multiple cross connections with Internet2 / Abilene, connections to Europe via GEANT, to Japan via SuperSINET, as well as fast interconnections to more than 100 other networks. Funded principally by DOE’s Office of Science, ESnet services allow scientists to make effective use of unique DOE research facilities and computing resources, independent of time and geographic location. About Qwest Qwest Communications International Inc. (NYSE: Q) is a leading provider of voice, video and data services. With more than 40,000 employees, Qwest is committed to the “Spirit of Service” and providing world-class services that exceed customers’ expectations for quality, value and reliability. About UKlight The UKLight facility (www.uklight.ac.uk) was set up in 2003 with a grant of £6.5M from HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) to provide an international experimental testbed for optical networking and support projects working on developments towards optical networks and the applications that will use them. UKLight will bring together leading-edge applications, Internet engineering for the future, and optical communications engineering, and enable UK researchers to join the growing international consortium which currently spans Europe and North America. A “Point of Access” (PoA) in London provides international connectivity with 10 Gbit network connections to peer facilities in Chicago (StarLight) and Amsterdam (NetherLight). UK research groups gain access to the facility via extensions to the 10Gbit SuperJANET development network, and a national dark fibre facility is under development for use by the photonics research community. Management of the UKLight facility is being undertaken by UKERNA on behalf of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). About AMPATH Florida International University’s Center for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment (CIARA) has developed an international, high-performance research connection point in Miami, Florida, called AMPATH (AMericasPATH: www.ampath.fiu.edu). AMPATH’s goal is to enable wide-bandwidth digital communications between US and international research and education networks, as well as a variety of US research programs in the region. AMPATH in Miami acts as a major international exchange point (IXP) for the research and education networks in South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean and offers connectivity to the Abilene Internet2 network and StarLight. Since June 2001, the AMPATH project has connected four National Research and Education Networks in South America: REUNA of Chile, RNP of Brazil, CNTI of Venezuela and RETINA of Argentina; the Academic Network of Sao Paolo, ANSP, which is a State-funded network; the University of Puerto Rico; the Arecibo observatory; and the Gemini-South telescope. About RedCLARA RedCLARA is an advanced network designed to interconnect national research and education networks in Latin America and the Caribbean (LA&C) region, and to provide access to the global research community through inter-regional connections. RedCLARA began operations on September 1, 2004, based on a 155 Mbps backbone ring linking the national research networks of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Panama, and connecting them to GÉANT at 622 Mbps via a link between São Paulo, Brazil and Madrid, Spain. These circuits are being leased from Global Crossing, and the RedCLARA points of presence are equipped with routers generously donated by Cisco. By 2005, the national networks of a further 13 countries are expected to be connected to RedCLARA. RedCLARA is the major product of the ALICE project, coordinated by DANTE, with 80% of the cost provided by the European Commission and 20% by the LA&C partners, most of which are associates of the Latin American Cooperation for Advanced Networking (CLARA), a not-for-profit association registered in Montevideo, Uruguay. About RNP RNP, the National Education and Research Network of Brazil, is a not-for-profit company which promotes the innovative use of advanced networking, with the joint support of the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Education. Historically, RNP was responsible for the introduction and adoption of Internet technology in Brazil. Today, RNP operates a nationally deployed high-performance network used for collaboration and communication in research and education throughout the country, reaching all 26 states and the Federal District, and provides both commodity and advanced research Internet connectivity to more than 200 universities, research centers and technical schools. About CPqD CPqD is the largest center for telecommunications research and development in Latin America, applying almost 30% of its annual turnover in R&D activities, and is one of the the ten leading software producers in Brazil. CPqD has special competence in the areas of systems for operations and business support, of highly specialized consulting services and of laboratory services. CPqD solutions of high technological complexity are in widespread use in Brazil, as well as in the USA, Europe and Latin America. About Project GIGA Project GIGA is a large-scale networking testbed project, under development in Brazil, which is concerned with optical networking technologies, and applications and telecommunications services associated with a high capacity IP network. The testbed network was inaugurated in May, 2004, and is 735 km in extension, interconnecting 17 universities and research centers located in seven cities in the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Network capacity is currently based on multiple 2.5 Gbps wavelengths, with expected future upgrade to 10 Gbps. The project is jointly coordinated by RNP and CPqD, and is financed by the Brazilian government agency, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos (Finep), with resources from the Fund for the Development of Telecommunications Technology (Funttel). About KISTI KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information), which was assigned to play the pivotal role in establishing the national science and technology knowledge information infrastructure, has been founded through the merger of the Korea Institute of Industry and Technology Information (KINITI) and the Korea Research and Development Information Center (KORDIC) in January, 2001. KISTI is under the supervision of the Office of the Prime Minister and will play a leading role in building the nationwide infrastructure for knowledge and information by linking the high-performance research network with its supercomputers. About APII-TransPAC Based on the agreement made by the Ministers at the 1st APEC TELMIN meeting held in Seoul, Korea in 1994 to build an advanced information infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region, the APII Testbed project was jointly proposed by Korea and Japan at the 12th APEC TEL meeting in 1995. The APII Testbed project aims to provide the information infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region that will build a basis for bridging the digital divide, and conduct joint R&D efforts on application services. TransPAC is the US-Asia-Pacific Network Consortium proposed by Indiana university to provide high performance international Internet service connecting the Asia Pacific Advanced Network to other global networks for the purpose of international collaborations in research and education. About Newisys Newisys®, Inc., a creative technology company significantly impacting the server-computing environment, is dedicated to designing and delivering enterprise-class server & storage products. Newisys offers a family of robust designs targeted for integration into OEM product offerings. About Sun Microsystems Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision - “The Network Is The Computer™”- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries. About Boston Limited With over 12 years of experience, Boston Limited is a UK-based specialist in high end workstation, server and storage hardware. Boston’s solutions bring the latest innovations to market, such as PCI-Express, DDR II and Infiniband technologies. As the pan-European distributor for Supermicro, Boston Limited works very closely with key manufacturing partners as well as strategic clients within the academic and commercial sectors, to provide cost-effective solutions with exceptional performance. About S2io, Inc Founded in 2001, S2io Inc. has locations in Cupertino, California and Ottawa, Canada. S2io delivers 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware & software solutions that enable OEMs to solve their customers’ high-end networking problems. The company’s line of products, Xframe®, is based on S2io-developed technology and include full IPv6 support and comprehensive stateless offloads for TCP/IP performance without “breaking the stack”. S2io has raised over $42M in funding with its latest C round taking place in June 2004. About Chelsio Communications Chelsio Communications is leading the convergence of networking, storage and clustering interconnects with its robust, high-performance and proven protocol acceleration technology. Featuring a highly scalable and programmable architecture, Chelsio is shipping 10-Gigabit Ethernet adapter cards with protocol offload, delivering the low latency and superior throughput required for high-performance computing applications. Source: California Institute of Technology ultralight.caltech.edu/sc2004/BandwidthRecord Contact: Robert Tindol California Institute of Technology tindol @ caltech.edu Harvey B. Newman California Institute of Technology newman @ hep.caltech.edu