Conference Testbeds

Each year, the IEEE/ACM International Conference on High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analytics designs, implements, and operates two temporary networks. One is a production network that provides wired and wireless internet access for attendees and exhibitors and bandwidth for live streaming of sessions and workshops.

Another is a wide area network (WAN) and local area network (LAN) that supports network research experiments and demonstrations, for example, as part of the Network Research Exhibition (NRE) program and SCinet’s Experimental network projects (XNET). iCAIR participates in these activities by working with the SCInet WAN/LAN group to design and provision a national testbed with international extensions to support a wide range of network research experiments and demonstrations.

From its inception, iCAIR has participated in the international Data Mover Challenge (DMC), a key event of the Supercomputing Asia (SCA) conference series. iCAIR participates by designing and implementing the DMC international testbed and engaging in the competition challenge.

The competition, which is staged once every two years, brings together experts from industry and academia in a bid to test their software and solutions for transferring huge amounts of research data. DMC challenges international teams to demonstrate the most advanced and innovative solutions for data transfer across servers in various countries connected by 100Gbps international research and education networks.

The challenge is to optimize point-to-point data transfers among sites to advance research collaboration and sharing. Participants from around the world compete by deploying the best software tools on Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs) set up within existing international networks across the globe. The DMC competition Co-organized by the HPC Centers from Australia, Japan, Singapore, and Thailand, SCA is an annual international conference encompassing an umbrella of notable supercomputing events with the key objective of promoting a vibrant and relevant HPC ecosystem in Asia.

iCAIR has participated in using the OFCnet testbed for demonstrations in 400 Gbps WAN transport and quantum networking. The annual OFC conference at the San Diego Convention Center typically occurs each March and showcases optical, photonic, and fiber communications technology.

Recently, the conference organized a testbed, OFCnet, as part of the Exhibition floor to allow research experiments and demonstrations within the convention center and through an external gateway with up to 34 Tbps of bandwidth. The gateway provides access to both CENIC and ESnet. As part of this initiative, OFC created a separate quantum track (SC-Q) within its technical program. The SC-Q track includes papers on devices, systems, and networks for quantum communications.

iCAIR has participated in multiple demonstrations staged on international testbeds organized by the TNC conferences, which are managed by the GEANT, the organization that operates the international European network.

From its inception, iCAIR was been a participant in the NSF funded (CISE/CNS), Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), a unique virtual laboratory for at-scale networking experimentation envisioning future internets.

iCAIR also has staged demonstrations at the GENI Engineering conferences, which have provided testbed capabilities for experiments and demonstrations.

iCAIR was a founding member of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) initiative, which established an international organization to develop and promote new concepts, methods, and technologies based on international lightpath (lightwave/lambda) networking.

During its annual conferences, the GLIF initiative supported the development of international testbeds to enable demonstrations of innovative lightpath technology. This organization comprised National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), networking consortia, corporations, universities, and other institutions.

GLIF participants provided testbed lightpaths internationally to support multiple research and development initiatives to create new international communication services. As a globally integrated facility, the GLIF initiative supported data-intensive scientific research, optical middleware development, the creation of new network management techniques, and specialized testbeds.

The primary showcase for the world's most advanced network-based applications was the biannual iGRID conferences, which demonstrated the power and potential of the "International Grid." Many innovative, next-generation applications were demonstrated at the iGrid international applications and technology showcases. These iGRID demonstrations were organized by the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago and other organizational partners, including iCAIR, which also staged demonstrations during the conferences.

The goal of iGRID events was to showcase the evolution and importance of global research community networking, especially by demonstrating applications being prototyped on the Global Grid. iGrid highlighted achievements in Grid architecture development and advancements in science, engineering, cultural heritage, distance education, media communications, and art and architecture. These demonstrations also showcased the potential for the "Global Lambda Grid," distributed infrastructure based on dynamic lightpath provisioning.