High-speed supercomputer communications in broadband networks

High-speed communication across Wide Area Networks (WANs) is currently of great interest to the computer communications industry. It is needed wherever a huge amount of data is created and made available to remote computer systems. Areas of investigation in computer science are the coupling of supercomputers (metacomputing), high-resolution visualisation of data and distributed access to huge amounts of data. Within the Gigabit Testbed West (GTB-West) a high-speed communication link has been installed between the research center Forschungszentrum Julich (FZJ) and the National Research Center for Information (GMD) at Sankt Augustin. Amongst the research fields Metacomputing, Visualization and the distributed usage of huge amount of data, the installation, management and performance evaluation of the data communication links are the main points of interest to the GTB-West project. Possible solutions to connect supercomputers for Metacomputing applications based on different communication technologies like HIPPI, Sonet and ATM are discussed and the pros and cons of the final implementation are presented. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.