Sandia`s network for SC `97: Supporting visualization, distributed cluster computing, and production data networking with a wide area high performance parallel asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network

The advanced networking department at Sandia National Laboratories has used the annual Supercomputing conference sponsored by the IEEE and ACM for the past several years as a forum to demonstrate and focus communication and networking developments. At SC `97, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) combined their SC `97 activities within a single research booth under the Advance Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) banner. For the second year in a row, Sandia provided the network design and coordinated the networking activities within the booth. At SC `97, Sandia elected to demonstrate the capability of the Computation Plant, the visualization of scientific data, scalable ATM encryption, and ATM video and telephony capabilities. At SC `97, LLNL demonstrated an application, called RIPTIDE, that also required significant networking resources. The RIPTIDE application had computational visualization and steering capabilities. This paper documents those accomplishments, discusses the details of their implementation, and describes how these demonstrations support Sandia`s overall strategies in ATM networking.