Reference

SCinet

SCinet is the research network built for the annual SC supercomputing conference. It is assembled specifically for the event, run for the week the conference is open, and then dismantled — which is why it is often described as one of the most powerful networks in the world that only exists for a few days at a time.

Why a conference builds its own network

The demonstrations on an SC exhibition floor move data at a scale ordinary venue networking cannot carry. Research teams bring live visualisations, remote instrument control and large-scale data transfers between the conference and their home laboratories. Rather than scale a venue network up, the conference builds a dedicated one, staffed by volunteers from universities, national laboratories, network operators and equipment vendors.

The Bandwidth Challenge

For a number of years SCinet hosted the Bandwidth Challenge, a competition in which teams pushed real scientific workloads across the network and were measured on sustained throughput. Entries were judged on genuine application traffic rather than synthetic tests, which made the results a useful snapshot of what production research networking could actually achieve at the time. Results for individual years were published on SCinet’s own pages as each conference ran.