Publications

This document highlights the Discom's Distance computing and communication team activities at the 2000 Supercomputing conference in Dallas Texas. This conference is sponsored by the IEEE and ACM. Sandia's participation in the conference has now spanned a decade, for the last five years Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Lab have come together at the conference under the DOE's ASCI, Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiatives, Program rubric to demonstrate ASCI's emerging capabilities in computational science and our combined expertise in high performance computer science and communication networking developments within the program. At SC 2000, DISCOM demonstrated an infrastructure. DISCOM2 uses this forum to demonstrate and focus communication and pre-standard implementation of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, the first gigabyte per second data IP network transfer application, and VPN technology that enabled a remote Distributed Resource Management tools demonstration. Additionally a national OC48 POS network was constructed to support applications running between the show floor and home facilities. This network created the opportunity to test PSE's Parallel File Transfer Protocol (PFTP) across a network that had similar speed and distances as the then proposed DISCOM WAN. The SCINET SC2000 showcased wireless networking and the networking team had the opportunity to explore this emerging technology while on the booth. This paper documents those accomplishments, discusses the details of their convention exhibit floor. We also supported the production networking needs of the implementation, and describes how these demonstrations supports DISCOM overall strategies in high performance computing networking.

This document highlights the Discom{sup 2}'s Distance computing and communication team activities at the 1999 Supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon. This conference is sponsored by the IEEE and ACM. Sandia, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National laboratories have participated in this conference for eleven years. For the last four years the three laboratories have come together at the conference under the DOE's ASCI, Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiatives rubric. Communication support for the ASCI exhibit is provided by the ASCI DISCOM{sup 2} project. The DISCOM{sup 2} communication team uses this forum to demonstrate and focus communication and networking developments within the community. At SC 99, DISCOM built a prototype of the next generation ASCI network demonstrated remote clustering techniques, demonstrated the capabilities of the emerging Terabit Routers products, demonstrated the latest technologies for delivering visualization data to the scientific users, and demonstrated the latest in encryption methods including IP VPN technologies and ATM encryption research. The authors also coordinated the other production networking activities within the booth and between their demonstration partners on the exhibit floor. This paper documents those accomplishments, discusses the details of their implementation, and describes how these demonstrations support Sandia's overall strategies in ASCI networking.

The US and other leading nations are at the forefront of a global trend to implement both national and international enterprise networks via information highways. New or upgraded cabling infrastructures are essential to support these activities. Professionals in the telecommunications industry are keenly aware of the challenges presented by such cabling upgrades. Desktop connectivity must be established before quantum leaps in information flow, as suggested by new technologies and global concepts. Some businesses with campus-type facilities have undertaken this formidable challenge. Universities and other higher-level learning institutions, corporate research facilities, independent and government-funded laboratories, financial institutions, medical facilities, and unique suburban housing test sites have risen to this challenge. Sandia National Laboratories is one such organization. This report presents the lessons learned from this project and gives 13 specific recommendations for manufacturers, buyers, and installers.

Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has adopted strategic, standards-based telecommunication technologies to deliver high-speed communication services to its research and development community. The architecture to provide these services specifies a cabling system capable of carrying high-bandwidth signals to each desktop. While the facilities infrastructure of Sandia has been expanding and evolving over the past four decades to meet the needs of this premier research and development community, the communications infrastructure has remained essentially stagnant. The need to improve Sandia`s telecommunication cable infrastructure gave rise to the Intra-building Recabling Project (IRP). The IRP directed Sandia`s efforts to modernize and standardize the communications infrastructure throughout its New Mexico campus. This report focuses on the development and implementation of the project`s design considerations, concepts, and standards, as well as the adopted transmission media and supporting delivery subsystems.