# Physicists Set New Record for Network Data Transfer

TAMPA, Florida—An international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology, CERN, and the University of Michigan and partners at the University of Florida and Vanderbilt, as well as participants from 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 to set new records for sustained data transfer between storage systems during the SuperComputing 2006 (SC06) Bandwidth Challenge (BWC).

The high-energy physics team's demonstration of "High Speed Data Gathering, Distribution and Analysis for Physics Discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider" achieved a peak throughput of 17.77 gigabits per second (Gbps) between clusters of servers at the show floor and at Caltech. Following the rules set for the SC06 Bandwidth Challenge, the team used a single 10-Gbps link provided by National Lambda Rail (www.nlr.net) that carried data in both directions. Sustained throughput throughout the night prior to the bandwidth challenge exceeded 16 Gbps (or two gigabytes per second) using just 10 pairs of small servers sending data at nine Gbps to Caltech from Tampa, and eight pairs of servers sending seven Gbps of data in the reverse direction.

One of the key advances in this demonstration was Fast Data Transport (FDT; http://monalisa.cern.ch/FDT), a Java application developed by Iosif Legrand of Caltech that runs on all major platforms and uses the NIO libraries to achieve stable disk reads and writes coordinated with smooth data flow across the long-range network. FDT streams a large set of files across an open TCP socket, so that a large data set composed of thousands of files, as is typical in high-energy physics applications, can be sent or received at full speed, without the network transfer restarting between files. By combining FDT with FAST TCP, developed by Steven Low of Caltech's computer science department, together with an optimized Linux kernel provided by Shawn McKee of Michigan known as the "UltraLight kernel," the team reached unprecedented throughput levels, limited only by the speeds of the disks, that correspond to nine GBytes/sec reading from, or five Gbytes/sec writing to, a single rack of 40 low-cost servers.

Overall, this year's demonstration, following the team's record memory-to-memory transfer rate of 151 Gbps using 22 10-Gbps links last year at SuperComputing 2005, represents a major milestone in providing practical, widely deployable applications. These applications exploit advances in state-of-the-art TCP-based data transport, servers (Intel Woodcrest-based systems) and the Linux kernel over the last 12 months. FDT also represents a clear advance in basic data transport capability over wide-area networks compared to last year, in that 20 Gbps could be sustained in a few streams memory-to-memory over long distances very stably for many hours, using a single 10-Gigabit Ethernet link very close to full capacity in both directions.

The two largest physics collaborations at the LHC, CMS and ATLAS, each encompass more than 2,000 physicists and engineers from 170 universities and laboratories. In order to fully exploit the potential for scientific discoveries, the many Petabytes of data produced by the experiments will be processed, distributed, and analyzed using a global Grid. 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 amount to many tens of Petabytes in the early years of LHC operation, rising to the Exabyte range within the coming decade.

The high-energy physics team also carried out several other demonstrations, making good use of the ten wide-area network links connected to the Caltech/CERN booth: o Vanderbilt demonstrated the capabilities of LStore, an integrated system that provides a single file-system image across many storage "depots" consisting of compact data servers distributed across wide-area networks. Reading and writing between sets of servers at the Vanderbilt booth at SC06 and Caltech, the team achieved a throughput of more than one GByte/sec. o By using five of the 10 10-Gbps links coming into SC06, the team reached an aggregate throughput of more than 75 Gbps, combining disk-to-disk and memory-to-memory transfers. During this part of the demonstrations, the links between Tampa and Jacksonville, the National Lambda Rail Framenet links, and the newly commissioned Atlantic Wave link, were often loaded to full capacity at 10 Gbps in both directions, as shown on the SCInet network "weathermap." o Of particular note was the use of FDT between Tampa and Daegu in South Korea, allowing the group from Kyungpook National University and KISTI to achieve 8.6 Gbps disk-to-disk over a single network path, using NLR's shared Packetnet via Atlanta, and the GLORIAD link between Seattle and Daejeon that was inaugurated in September 2005, shortly before SC05.

Professor Harvey Newman of Caltech, head of the HEP team and US CMS Collaboration Board Chair, who originated the LHC Data Grid Hierarchy concept, said, "These demonstrations allowed us to thoroughly field-test a new class of data-transport applications, together with the real-time analysis of some of the data using `ROOTlets,' a distributed form of the ROOT system (root.cern.ch) that is an essential element of high-energy physicists' arsenal of tools for large-scale data analysis.

"These demonstrations provided a new, more agile and flexible view of the globally distributed Grid system of more than 100 laboratory- and university-based computing facilities that is now being commissioned in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America in preparation for the next generation of high-energy physics experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that will begin operation in November 2007, along with several hundred computing clusters serving individual groups of physicists. By substantially reducing the difficulty of transporting Terabyte- and larger scale data sets among the sites, we are enabling physicists throughout the world to have a much greater role in the next round of physics discoveries expected soon after the LHC starts."

David Foster, head of Communications and Networking at CERN said, "The efficient use of high-speed networks to transfer large data sets is an essential component of CERN's LCG plans to deploy computing infrastructure that will enable the LHC experiments to carry out their scientific missions. This demonstration of the high-speed transfer of physics event samples and their analysis made use of equipment at Tampa, Caltech, CERN, and elsewhere, interconnected by the same network infrastructure CERN plans to use in production, and was an important milestone on the road to ensuring full capability when the LHC starts operations in 2007."

Iosif Legrand, senior software and distributed system engineer at Caltech and the technical coordinator for the MonALISA and FDT projects, said, "We demonstrated a realistic, worldwide deployment for distributed, data-intensive applications capable to effectively use and coordinate the network resources. A distributed agent-based system was used for dynamic discovery of resources and to monitor, configure, control, and orchestrate efficient data transfer between several hundreds of computers using hybrid networks."

Richard Cavanaugh of the University of Florida, technical coordinator of the UltraLight project that is developing the next generation of network-integrated grids aimed at LHC data analysis, said, "Future optical networks incorporating multiple 10-Gbps links are the foundation of the Grid system that will drive scientific discoveries at the LHC. A 'hybrid' network integrating both traditional 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."

Shawn McKee, associate research scientist in the University of Michigan department of physics and leader of the UltraLight network technical group, said, "This achievement is an impressive example of what a focused network effort can accomplish. It is an important step towards the goal of delivering a highly capable end-to-end network-aware system and architecture that meet the needs of next-generation e-Science."

Paul Sheldon of Vanderbilt University, who leads the NSF-funded Research and Education Data Depot Network (REDDnet) project that will deploy a distributed storage infrastructure of about 700TB over the next two years, commented on the innovative network storage technology that helped the group achieve such high performance in wide-area, disk-to-disk transfers.

"With IBP and the logistical network technology that Micah Beck and his group at Tennessee have developed, we were able to build middleware, L-Store, that can exploit a tremendous amount of parallelism, both in data transfers across the network and in reading and writing to disk," said Sheldon. "And since L-Store can also do efficient erasure coding in software with minimal data movement, we can build high-quality storage clusters out of commodity parts and push depot costs down to a thousand dollars a TB.

"When you combine this network-storage technology, including its cost profile, with the remarkable tools that Harvey Newman's networking team has produced, I think we are well positioned to address the incredible infrastructure demands that the LHC experiments are going to make on our community worldwide."

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. Multigigabit/s end-to-end network performance will empower scientists to form "virtual organizations" on a planetary scale, sharing their collective computing and data resources in a flexible way. 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.

The new bandwidth record was achieved through extensive use of the SCInet network infrastructure at SC06. The team used all 10 of the 10-Gbps links coming into the showfloor, connected to two Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Series Switches at the Caltech/CERN booth, together with computing clusters provided by Hewlett Packard and a large number of 10-gigabit Ethernet server interfaces provided by Neterion and Myricom.

The 10 10-Gbps network connections included two National Lambda Rail FrameNet links, one to Los Angeles (the official BWC wavelength) and one to StarLight two NLR PacketNet links used from Korea over GLORIAD and from the University of Michigan over MiLR; two links provided by Internet2's Abilene network used to carry traffic from Caltech and UMICH; one link from ESNET used from Brookhaven National Laboratory; and one link from FLRNET used to carry traffic from Brazil over the CHEPREO/WREN-LILA link. Also, one link provided by AtlanticWave from NYC to DC and Miami was used to carry traffic from CERN coming over the USLHCNet NYC-Geneva circuit and one link provided by UltraLight/FLR from Jacksonville.

The UltraLight/FLR circuit was the only direct WAN circuit available at SC06 and terminated directly on the Caltech equipment on the showfloor. All other circuits were connected through the SCInet infrastructure. During the test, several of the network links were shown to operate at full capacity for sustained periods. The network has been deployed through exceptional support by Cisco Systems and Nortel, as well as the network engineering staffs of National LambdaRail, Florida Lambda Rail, Internet2, ESnet, TeraGrid, CENIC, MiLR, Atlantic Wave, AMPATH, RNP and ANSP/FAPESP in Brazil, KISTI in Korea, the Starlight international peering point in Chicago, and MANLAN in New York.

As part of the SC06 demonstration, a distributed analysis of simulated LHC physics data was carried using the Grid-enabled Analysis Environment (GAE) developed at Caltech for the LHC. This demonstration involved the use of the Clarens Web Services portal developed at Caltech, the use of Root-based analysis software, and numerous architectural components developed in the framework of Caltech's "Grid Analysis Environment." The analysis made use of a new component in the Grid system: "Rootlets" hosted by Clarens servers. Each Rootlet is a full instantiation of CERN's Root tool, created on demand by the distributed clients in the Grid.

The design and deployment of the Rootlets/Clarens system was carried out under the auspices of an STTR grant for collaboration between Deep Web Technologies (www.deepwebtech.com) of New Mexico, Caltech, and Indiana University. In addition to the Rootlets/Clarens demonstration, an innovative literature and database aggregation search tool designed specifically for scientists working in the field of particle physics and developed by Deep Web Technologies was shown. This aggregation tool allowed simultaneous queries to be made on several of the most popular document databases, the results being aggregated and presented to the user in a homogeneous fashion. Deep Web's aggregation system also powers the science.gov website.

The team used Caltech's MonALISA (MONitoring Agents using a Large Integrated Services Architecture-http://monalisa.caltech.edu) system to monitor and display the real-time data for all the network links used in the demonstration. MonALISA is a Dynamic, Distributed Service System that is capable of collecting any type of information from different systems, to analyze it in near-real time, and to provide support for automated control decisions and global optimization of workflows in complex grid systems. It is currently used to monitor more than 300 sites, more than 50,000 computing nodes, and tens of thousands of concurrent jobs running on different grid systems and scientific communities.

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. Vanderbilt demonstrated the capabilities of their L-Store middleware, a scalable, open source, and wide-area-capable form of storage virtualization that builds on the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP) and logistical networking technology developed at the University of Tennessee. Offering both scalable metadata management and software-based fault tolerance, L-Store creates an integrated system that provides a single file-system image across many IBP storage "depots" distributed across wide-area and/or local-area networks. Reading and writing between sets of depots at the Vanderbilt booth at SC06 and Caltech in California, the team achieved a network throughput, disk to disk, of more than one GByte/sec. On the floor, the team was able to sustain throughputs of 3.5 GByte/sec between a rack of client computers and a rack of storage depots. These two racks communicated across SCinet via four 10-GigE connections.

The demonstration and the developments leading up to it were made possible through the strong support of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation, in cooperation with the funding agencies of the international partners.

Further information about the demonstration may be found at:

http://supercomputing.caltech.edu/ http://pcbunn.cacr.caltech.edu/sc2006/ and https://scinet.supercomp.org/2006/bwc/

About Caltech: With an outstanding faculty, including five 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 1,300 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. http://www.caltech.edu.

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, ASC Center for Simulation of Dynamic Response of Materials, Computational Infrastructure for Geophysics, Cascade High Productivity Computing System, and the TeraGrid. http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/.

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. For more information, see http://www.cern.ch.

About Netlab: Caltech's Networking Laboratory, led by Professor Steven Low, develops FAST TCP. The group does research in the control and optimization of protocols and networks, and designs, analyzes, implements, and experiments with new algorithms and systems. http://netlab.caltech.edu/FAST/.

About the University of Michigan: The University of Michigan, with its size, complexity, and academic strength, the breadth of its scholarly resources, and the quality of its faculty and students, is one of America's great public universities and one of the world's premier research institutions. The university was founded in 1817 and has a total enrollment of 54,300 on all campuses. The main campus is in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has 39,533 students (fall 2004). With over 600 degree programs and $739M in FY05 research funding, the university is one of the leaders in innovation and research. For more information, see http://www.umich.edu. About the University of Florida: The University of Florida (UF), located in Gainesville, is a major public, comprehensive, land-grant, research university. The state's oldest, largest, and most comprehensive university, UF is among the nation's most academically diverse public universities. It has a long history of established programs in international education, research, and service and has a student population of approximately 49,000. UF is the lead institution for the GriPhyN and iVDGL projects and is a Tier-2 facility for the CMS experiment. For more information, see http://www.ufl.edu. 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. See www.startap.net/starlight. About UERJ (Rio de Janeiro): Founded in 1950, the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ; http//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 master's 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 São Paulo, the São Paulo State University, UNESP, has 39 institutes in 23 different cities in the State of São Paulo. The university has 31,000 undergraduate students from 168 different courses and almost 12,000 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). This group is now a member of CMS Collaboration of CERN. See http://www.unesp.br. 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 percent of all Brazilian papers and publications indexed on the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The SPRACE cluster is located at the Physics Institute. See http://www.usp.br. 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 GLORIAD: GLORIAD (GLObal RIng network for Advanced application development) is the first round-the-world high-performance ring network jointly established by Korea, the United States, Russia, China, Canada, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries, with optical networking tools that improve networked collaboration with e-Science and Grid applications. It is currently constructing a dedicated lightwave link connecting the scientific organizations in GLORIAD partners. See http://www.gloriad.org/. About Vanderbilt: One of America's top 20 universities, Vanderbilt University is a private research university of 6,319 undergraduates and 4,566 graduate and professional students. The university comprises 10 schools, a public policy institute, a distinguished medical center and the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center. Located a mile and a half southwest of downtown Nashville, the campus is a park-like setting. Buildings on the original campus date to its founding in 1873, and the Peabody section of campus has been registered a National Historic Landmark since 1966. Vanderbilt ranks 23rd in the value of federal research grants awarded to faculty members, according to the National Science Foundation. 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 (CHEPREO; www.chepreo.org) 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 U.S. 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 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. For more information, visit: www.internet2.edu. 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. For more information on Abilene please see http://abilene.internet2.edu/. 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. Visit http://www.nlr.net for more information. About the Florida LambdaRail: Florida LambdaRail LLC (FLR) is a Florida limited liability company formed by member higher education institutions to advance optical research and education networking within Florida. Florida LambdaRail is a high-bandwidth optical network that links Florida's research institutions and provides a next-generation network in support of large-scale research, education outreach, public/private partnerships, and information technology infrastructure essential to Florida's economic development. For more information: http://www.flrnet.org. About CENIC: CENIC (www.cenic.org) is a not-for-profit corporation serving the 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 multitiered advanced network services for this research and education community. About ESnet: The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet; www.es.net) 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, and connections to Europe via GEANT and 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 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 U.S. and international research and education networks, as well as a variety of U.S. 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. The AMPATH IXP is home for the WHREN-LILA high-performance network link connecting Latin America to the U.S., funded by the NSF award #0441095, and the Academic Network of Sao Paulo (award #2003/13708-0). About the Academic Network of São Paulo (ANSP): ANSP unites São Paulo's University networks with Scientific and Technological Research Centers in São Paulo, and is managed by the State of São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). The ANSP Network is another example of international collaboration and exploration. Through its connection to WHREN-LILA, all of the institutions connected to ANSP will be involved in research with U.S. universities and research centers, offering significant contributions and the potential to develop new applications and services. This connectivity with WHREN-LILA and ANSP will allow researchers to enhance the quality of current data, inevitably increasing the quality of new scientific developments. http://www.ansp.br. About RNP: RNP, the National Education and Research Network of Brazil, is a not-for-profit company that promotes the innovative use of advanced networking, with the joint support of the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Education. In the early 1990s, RNP was responsible for the introduction and adoption of Internet technology in Brazil. Today, RNP operates a nationally deployed multi-gigabit 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 300 universities, research centers, and technical schools. http://www.rnp.br About AtlanticWave: The AtlanticWave service, officially launched by the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) and a group of collaborating not-for-profit organizations, is a distributed international research network exchange and peering facility along the Atlantic coast of North and South America. The main goal of AtlanticWave is to facilitate research and education (R&E) collaborations between U.S. and Latin American institutions. AtlanticWave will provide R&E network exchange and peering services for existing networks that interconnect at key exchange points along the Atlantic Coast of North and South America, including MAN LAN in New York City, MAX GigaPOP and NGIX-East in Washington D.C., SoX GigaPOP in Atlanta, AMPATH in Miami, and the São Paulo, Brazil, exchange point operated by the Academic Network of São Paulo (ANSP). AtlanticWave supports the GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility-www.glif.is) Open Lightpath Exchange (GOLE) model. About KISTI: KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information) is a national institute under the supervision of MOST (Ministry of Science and Technology) of Korea and is playing a leading role in building the nationwide infrastructure for advanced application researches by linking the supercomputing resources with the optical research network, KREONet2. The National Supercomputing Center in KISTI is carrying out national e-Science and Grid projects as well as the GLORIAD-KR project and will become the most important institution based on e-Science and advanced network technologies. See http://www.kisti.re.kr. About Hewlett Packard: HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com. About Neterion, Inc.: Founded in 2001, Neterion Inc. has locations in Cupertino, California and Ottawa, Canada. Neterion delivers 10-Gigabit Ethernet hardware and software solutions that solve customers' high-end networking problems. The Xframe(r) line of products is based on Neterion-developed technologies that deliver new levels of performance, availability, and reliability in the data center. Xframe, Xframe II and Xframe E include full IPv4 and IPv6 support and comprehensive stateless offloads that preserve the integrity of current TCP/IP implementations without "breaking the stack." Xframe drivers are available for all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, IBM's AIX, Sun's Solaris, and SGI's Irix. Neterion has raised over$42M in funding with its latest C round taking place in June 2004. Formerly known as S2io, the company changed its name to Neterion in January 2005. Further information on the company can be found at http://www.neterion.com/.

About Myricom: Founded in 1994, Myricom, Inc., created Myrinet, the High-Performance Computing (HPC) interconnect technology used in thousands of computing clusters in more than 50 countries, and in far more systems on the TOP500 Supercomputer list than any other low-latency interconnect. With its new Myri-10G solutions, Myricom achieves a convergence at 10-Gigabit data rates between its low-latency Myrinet technology and mainstream Ethernet. Myri-10G bridges the gap between the rigorous demands of traditional HPC and the growing need for affordable computing speed in enterprise data centers. Myricom solutions are sold direct and through channels. Myri-10G clusters are supplied by OEM computer companies including IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun, and by leading cluster integrators worldwide. Privately held and based in Arcadia, California, Myricom achieved and has sustained profitability since 1995 with eleven consecutive profitable years through 2005.

About the National Science Foundation: The NSF is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 "to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense...." With an annual budget of about \$5.5 billion, it is the funding source for approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America's colleges and universities. In many fields such as mathematics, computer science, and the social sciences, NSF is the major source of federal backing.

About the DOE Office of Science: DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the nation and ensures U.S. world leadership across a broad range of scientific disciplines. The Office of Science also manages 10 world-class national laboratories with unmatched capabilities for solving complex interdisciplinary problems, and it builds and operates some of the nation's most advanced R&D user facilities, located at national laboratories and universities. These facilities are used by more than 19,000 researchers from universities, other government agencies, and private industry each year.

Written by Robert Tindol

Caltech Media Relations