SC2003 Bandwidth Challenge Deadline Approaches

Published 07/11/2003

The Fourth Annual High Performance Bandwidth Challenge will be held at SC2003 in Phoenix, Arizona, November 15-20, 2003. The competition pits applicants from science and engineering research communities across the globe against one another to stress the SCinet network infrastructure while using real applications to move information across the multiple research networks that connect to SCinet.

The primary measure of performance will be the verifiable network throughput as measured from the contestant's equipment through the SCinet switches and routers to external connections. The judging criteria for 2003 include:

• Measurement of sustained TCP utilization
• Quality of IPv6 implementation
• Innovative features of non-stock TCP implementations
• Applicability to the real world
• Efficiency and effectiveness of multi-continent implementations
• Improvement over previously demonstrated methods
• Quality of first-time demonstrations

Potential contestants must submit notification of intent to participate by July 18, 2003 to < bwc@scinet.supercomp.org>. Upon receipt of this notification, SCinet will contact contestants with instructions on the content and format of their full proposals. The full proposals must be received by August 8 to be included in the SC2003 Final Program.

Please note that the Bandwidth Challenge is a separate competition from the HPC Challenge, which also will be held at SC2003.

To support Bandwidth Challenge contestants, SCinet facilitates access to the networks, provides technical support to applicants, and makes arrangements for equipment and floor and rack space to applicants with demonstrable needs. SCinet anticipates delivery of as many as four OC-192c wide-area network interconnects to the Phoenix Convention Center.

Qwest Communications is sponsoring the award of one or more monetary prizes for the applications that make the most effective and/or courageous use of SCinet resources. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory won the competition for "Highest Performing Application" at SC2002 in Baltimore, Maryland, with a wide-area distributed simulation using Cactus, Globus, and Visapult software that demonstrated a peak data transfer rate of 16.8 gigabits per second.

For more information, see http://scinet.supercomp.org/2003/ExhibitorKit/EK-BWC.html, or send e-mail to < bwc@scinet.supercomp.org>.