Media contact: Jon Bashor, 510-486-5849

SC Global Seeking Innovative, Collaborative Ideas for Connecting SC2003 Conference to the World – and Bringing the World to Phoenix

PHOENIX, AZ. - It’s time to start planning to participate in SC Global 2003, the Access Grid-enabled component of the SC2003 Conference Technical Program, and this year's premiere showcase for innovative uses of collaboration technologies in the context of high performance computing and networking.

SC Global offers a chance for people to participate in SC2003 without leaving home, and to contribute to SC2003 from remote locations. During SC Global’s debut at SC2001, 43 sites participated remotely, from locations in 11 countries spread across six continents. This year’s conference will be held Nov. 15-21 in Phoenix, AZ.

SC Global will connect the main conference location in Phoenix with remote sites around the world using the Access Grid (AG), an ensemble of resources that can be used to support human interaction across the grid. The AG runs over high-performance IP networks, and has been in use since the summer of 1999 for distributed conferences, workshops, and meetings both large and small.

SC Global 2003 will include both innovative uses and discussions of advanced collaboration technologies, and the traditional SC Technical Program content (including Papers, Panels, and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions). The SC Global committee looks forward to receiving proposals for a wide variety of sessions, ranging from technical papers to distributed artistic performances.

By their nature, most successful proposals for the SC Global program will be collaborative undertakings. Therefore, proposals will be reviewed not only for their innovative use of collaborative technologies and how compelling an experience they create for participating sites, but also for their feasibility as an AG event.

Proposals for SC Global – which must be submitted between April 7 and 25 – must include information about all AG locations proposed to participate in a given session. In addition to the Constellation Sites, which present sessions in the SC Global program, Satellite Sites will be able to interactively participate in the conference, and Observer Sites to passively view the sessions. (Participating as a Satellite or Observer Site requires less stringent preparations, and does not require any proposal in April.)

Anyone wanting to learn more about SC Global and form collaborations with other AG users to develop proposals for the SC Global program is encouraged to participate in the 2003 Access Grid retreat, to be held at Argonne National Laboratory on April 15 and 16.

SC Global was held for the first time in 2001, featuring sessions such as:

• Showcase presentations of highly innovative content, including: Dancing Beyond Boundaries, featuring dancers at distributed locations performing together; Remote AG Explorer Robot; presentations by and discussion with scientists from the South Pole Research Lab; and multispectral thermal images of the World Trade Center site shortly after the September 11 attacks.
  
• Papers such as: “Supporting Efficient Execution in Heterogeneous Distributed Computing Environments with Cactus and Globus;” “Optimization of Component-Based Applications within a Grid Environment;” and “Adapting Globus and Kerberos for a Secure ASCI Grid.”
  
• Panels and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions such as: “Can the Asia Pacific Grid Contribute to the Science and Technology in the Asia Pacific Region?”, “The Computational Continuum from Human Genomes to Human Health”, and “Broadening the Grid - Increasing Minority Serving Institution Participation”
  

In 2003, the number of participating sites may as much as triple, due in large part to the continued rapid growth of the AG. While there were 75 AG locations in existence in November 2001 and 43 participated, there are 147 AG locations today, and many more expected to come online before the fall.

SC Global committee members include both veterans of SC Global 2001, and new voices in the AG community; they represent organizations from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.

For detailed information, please visit:

SC Global 2003: http://www.scglobal.org/
Access Grid: http://www.accessgrid.org
SC2003 conference: /sc2003/

SC2003 is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (ACM SIGARCH).