Publications Details

Using a private SMDS/ATM network to provide long-haul supercomputing visualization services

Naegle, J.H.; Testi, N.; Pavlakos, C.; Chen, H.

Sandia National Laboratories is prototyping a service for providing a distributed visualization capability between its Albuquerque, New Mexico and Livermore, California sites. The service will allow TCP/EP LAN users to process computationally intensive codes on the Cray Y-MP 8/864 and use the Application Visualization System, (AVS) running on a visualization server to display the results to desktops in Livermore (or Albuquerque). The long-haul environment presents several technical challenges such as high delays (up to 42 milliseconds), potential error rates, and security concerns which can affect the quality of the services. The network design requires low latency switch gear and high speed LAN connections (FDDI) to make the visualization/computational services useful to the customer. This paper will describe tie network design used and will report performance characteristics of the applications utilizing this service.