SC Global Seeking to Bridge Communities Through High-Quality Technical Presentations
PITTSBURGH, PA - It’s time to start planning to participate in SC Global 2004, the Access Grid-enabled component of SC2004. SC Global offers a chance for people to participate in SC2004 without leaving home, and to contribute to SC2004 from a remote location. During SC Global 2003, 80 sites participated remotely, using Access Grid, inSORS Grid, Windows Media, and VBrick, from locations in 10 countries spread across five continents. This year's conference will be held November 6-12, 2004, in Pittsburgh, PA.

“This year, we'd like to see all submissions for SC04 papers, panels, and birds-of-a-feather sessions express an interest in being part of SC Global," said Jackie Kern of NCSA, SC Global 2004 Chair. “We want to bring a wide selection of topics related to high performance computing, networking and storage to an international audience through SC Global and to continue to represent many forms of diversity within the community of high-performance computing.”

SC Global will connect the main conference location in Pittsburgh 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 2004 will focus on traditional SC technical program content, as well as the showcase of collaborative technologies for which SC Global has traditionally been known. The SC Global committee looks forward to receiving proposals for a wide variety of sessions, ranging from technical papers on cluster architecture, to panels on grid middleware, to birds-of-a-feathers on international networking.

By their nature, most successful proposals for the SC Global program will be collaborative undertakings. Therefore, proposals will be reviewed not only for their technical excellence, but also for their feasibility as an AG event. However, presenters do not need to have an Access Grid node if they will be presenting from the conference site in Pittsburgh.

Proposals for SC Global -– which must be submitted between March 29 and April 19 -- must include information about the AG locations proposed to give presentations during the proposed 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 preparation, and does not require any proposal in April.)

Sites interested in participating in SC Global as a Satellite or Observer Site are encouraged to attend the AG Retreat 2004, at Ryerson University, June 9-11, 2004.
SC Global committee members include both veterans of previous SC Global events and new voices in the AG community; they represent organizations from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan.

For detailed information, please visit:
• SC Global 2004: www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/scglobal.html
• Access Grid: www.accessgrid.org
• Access Grid Retreat: www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/fl/flevents/ag/agr04/