High-speed supercomputer communications in broadband networks

High speed communication across wide area networks is currently of great interest in computer communications industry. It is needed wherever a huge amount of data will be 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 Jülich GmbH (FZJ) and the National Research Center for Information (GMD) at Sankt Augustin. Amongst the research fields Metacomputing, Visualization and distributed usage of huge amount of data the installation, management and performance evaluation of the data communication links are main points of interest to the GTBW 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.