High Performance Networking with WiFi 6E Shares Same Stage Where Beatles Performed
The Beatles performing September 1964 (left) and SCinet staging October 2022 (right), both at what is now the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center Arena in Dallas, Texas.
Photos: Hans C. Addleman, AP photo
Ground-breaking Technology and Revolutionary Musicians Distinguish the Same Dallas Venue
The Beatles and High Performance Networking may seem like entirely unrelated topics. But they’re connected this fall at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas.
In 1964 the Beatles broke musical ground when they performed here, and now 58 years later another ground-breaking performance is underway.
“John, Paul, George, and Ringo performed in the venue where we’re now staging SCinet for SC22. Whereas they created amazing music, we’re staging record-breaking network capacity, including the first SCinet use of Wifi 6E technology for conference attendees. ” — Matt Zekauskus, Internet2
Zekauskus, who is SCinet Chair this year, is directing an international team of more than 175 volunteer engineers, technicians and students. It’s all in preparation for SC22, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis.
The SCinet team at SC includes 16 committees that range from plain English names like architecture, communications, contributor relations, experimental networks, help desk, logistics, power, network security and volunteer services to more jargon-heavy terms like dev-ops, edge, fiber, NRE and WAN transport.
It takes that team more than a year to plan, a month to build, a week to operate and a single day to dismantle the network. All of it involves extensive collaboration, or as Lennon and McCartney called it, HELP!
Starting October 19, equipment racks were initially staged in the convention center’s arena and then moved to its exhibit hall to deliver connectivity across half a million square feet. Those racks weighed about four tons.
When SC22 starts on November 13, thousands of attendees are expected to descend on Dallas from all over the world, but they won’t be isolated from global connections. SCinet will connect attendees, exhibitors, and network performance experiments to other high performance sites in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia.
The speed of that global network is expected to break the 3.02 Terabits per seconds (Tbps) delivered for last year’s conference in St. Louis, by delivering 5.01 Tbps of bandwidth to Dallas. That’s fast enough to download the movies “HELP!” and “A Hard Day’s Night” along with the entire movie collection in iTunes in about seven minutes.
About SC22
SC22 is the premier international conference showcasing the many ways high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis lead to advances in scientific discovery, research, education, and commerce. The annual event, created and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), attracts thousands of HPC professionals and educators from around the globe to participate in its complete technical education program, workshops, tutorials, a world-class exhibit area, demonstrations, and the world’s fastest temporary computer network.