NEW ORLEANS, La, Oct. 9 — From November 16th-21st, New Orleans will host the annual Supercomputing Conference (SC14). Supercomputers are the world’s largest and fastest computers that have 10,000 times the processing capability of a home computer, and are capable of performing quadrillions of calculations per second.
To support the revolutionary supercomputing demos planned, the Conference is also building the world’s fastest network – SCinet, which will serve all of the expected 10,000+ conference attendees and 325 exhibitors at SC14. This network will be built the week of November 10th by a team of experts from around the world. On average, an undertaking of this magnitude would normally take 6-8 months. Private media tours may be possible.
SCinet will feature more bandwidth than any other network in the world. Highlights:
- Close to 1 Terabit of bandwidth
- Nearly 90 miles of fiber optic cable deployed throughout the Convention Center
- Over $20 million in loaned state-of-the-art equipment from the world’s leading network vendors
- Specialized software that allows attendees to view the inner workings of the network’s usage in real-time
- Over 110 volunteers representing 58 global organizations spanning academia, government and industry have participated in building SCinet
With this much bandwidth you can:
- Download enough e-books to fill eight Kindle Fires in one second or 500 in one minute
- Download enough content to fill eight iPhones in one second or 1,000 in two minutes
- Watch over 900 streaming uncompressed HDTV channels simultaneously
Basic scientific research today produces massive petabytes of data that need to be shared globally by researchers and analyzed by supercomputers. This is critical for scientists to solve challenges like hurricane predictions, pandemics, finding cleaner energy technologies, understanding climate change and developing new cancer drugs. The Supercomputing Conference builds this network each year to allow researchers and industry to show off new supercomputing applications that will eventually be in home computers in 10-15 years.
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Source: SC14