Features:

SUPERCOMPUTING CONFERENCE RETURNS TO PITTSBURGH

If you like your computers to be powerful and speedy, then you need to know about this year's SC2004 conference, beginning this weekend.

SC2004 is the world's leading conference on high performance computing, networking and storage. It will be held in the new David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh on Nov. 6-12. The facility was designed with high-tech in mind and will be the best convention center yet in the annual SC Conference series. Pittsburgh was also the site of SC1996.

SC2004 brings representatives from many technical communities together to exchange ideas, celebrate past successes and plan for the future.

To reflect this important function, the conference theme is Bridging Communities, which represents not only the technical communities participating in the conference but the architecture of the city, too. SC2004 will utilize state-of-the-art technology in the conference high-performance network, SCinet, and in the Access Grid to bring participants from around the world to Pittsburgh.

And at the convention center itself, the Technical Program, Education Program, and Minority Serving Institutions Program will all create bridges to new communities.

This year's highlights include:

• StorCloud, a multi-vendor resource available to conference participants, which may reach a petabyte of random accessible storage. To demonstrate real applications that use this tremendous resource, the StorCloud Challenge will solicit applications developers to participate in a competition for the best storage intensive application.
• InfoStar -- This initiative will provide real-time conference information to the participants in an easily accessible form. Information ranging from speaker information to late room changes to registration information is to be available throughout the conference. These innovations will set the standard for state-of-the-art conference information systems.
• Bandwidth Challenge - Participants are challenged to push the envelope in terms of network throughput as it relates to high performance computing. SC2004 expects to bring 8 OC-192c circuits into the convention center. This kind of bandwidth exceeds the available bandwidth into and out of all but the largest countries in the world.
• Technical Program -- continues the tradition of providing high-quality, peer reviewed papers in research and application areas of high performance computing, networking and storage. Papers are being presented by all communities including industry, Department of Defense, other federal agencies, and universities. The Technical Program will be the highlight of the conference.
• Exhibits! As in past years, there will be industry exhibits showcasing the latest technology available now that will be on the desktop in just a few more years, and research exhibits showcasing what's new in the university, federal government and not-for-profit sectors.

Tuesday morning's keynote address focuses on the innovative National LambdaRail initiative. Tom West, CEO of NLR, will describe the first cutting- edge, national-scale network infrastructure owned and controlled by the U.S. research community, and the revolutionary opportunities new optical networking technologies hold for the emerging field of distributed supercomputing, also known as the Grid.

SC2004 is a not-for-profit annual conference, sponsored by two well- established professional organizations, the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

The most up-to-date information for the technical program is available at: http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/schedule.

Media information is available at: http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/news_media.html.

All registered media must show media credentials in order to receive a press badge. If you are on assignment for a publication, you must produce a letter stating such. Only two persons per organization will receive a media pass to the conference.

Media representatives who register onsite should go to the Media Room, not to the general registration area, when they arrive at the conference. Credentials will be verified in the Media Room and registration materials will be provided.

The SC2004 Media Room will be located in Show Office A, 2nd floor, in the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. The Media Room will be staffed to help you with facilities, scheduling interviews, or to provide any other assistance for your coverage of SC2004.

If you have questions or would like more information, please send email to: sc04-media@sc-conference.org.