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HPCC Program support for large-scale networking research has had a significant impact in advancing communications technology and has led to important advances in the mode of communications now being adopted by the commercial sector. In the past few years, the Federally supported communications infrastructure has taken a vital lead in every area of research and education. Advances in networking technology have changed the way education is delivered, science and business are conducted, and every-day activities of Americans are pursued. |
Several HPCC networking projects have advanced the availability and effectiveness of distributed applications. The NSFNET Connections Program, for example, supports the acquisition of high performance network connections at research institutions to provide capabilities that are required for state-of-the-art scientific and engineering applications. This Program also supports connections at lower-speeds that facilitate the extension of the Internet into K-12, public libraries, and museums.
Two National Laboratories are collaborating with universities and private industry on the ESNet and GigaNet projects to interconnect multiple parallel supercomputers via a high-speed ATM network. The enhanced network will allow researchers to work concurrently on a single computation-intensive or information-intensive application. This joint agency metacomputing experiment provides the computing power to solve very large-scale problems.
The Air Pollution Distance Learning Network is used in training researchers to employ advanced climate models as well as to disseminate information for environmental problems. Researchers have used this network to collaborate through a national video broadcast, using the Multicast Backbone (MBONE) on the Internet, while providing simultaneous distribution to an interested international audience. Use of this Network and the MBONE for such collaborations has provided state and local agencies with useful evidence of the practical uses of the Internet.
A collaboratory project at the Advanced Light Source -- a new, high-powered synchrotron light source for producing copious, focused X-rays -- is providing investigators from nine geographically distributed institutions remote access to analytical tools for lithography and crystallography for research in material sciences.
Advances in wireless and mobile information systems have spurred a revolution in microsystems technology needed to make portable devices usable as research tools. These techniques range from the development of highly capable, low power, small size "smart radios," to distributed computing systems that can deal with mobility and sporadic connectivity patterns. Researchers have also developed an experimental system to investigate issues of seamless and transparent migration across different kinds of networks, variable bandwidth availability, data consistency problems caused by frequent disconnections, and access to resources in the host environment.
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The next step beyond parallel computing is wide area computing. As wide area networks close the bandwidth gap with local area networks, it becomes possible to treat geographically dispersed resources as a tightly linked system. Wide area computing uses high-speed networks to connect supercomputing and data resources to create virtual computers with teraflop-class computing capacity, thus providing the potential for petabytes of information resources, and immersive collaborative environments. |
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