SCinet is a high-performance network that is built, once a year, in support of the annual International Conference for High Performance Computing and Communications also known as the Supercomputing Conference

Supercomputing Conference

SC , the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, is the name of the annual conference established in 1988 by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society...

. It is the primary network for the conference and is used by attendees to demonstrate and test high-performance distributed applications.

Originated in 1991 as an initiative within the SC conference to provide networking to attendees, SCinet has grown to become the "World's Fastest Network" during the duration of the conference. Over the years, SCinet has been used as a platform to test networking technology and applications which have found their way into common use.

At SC|05 http://www.sc05.org, SCinet initiated a conference wide InfiniBand

InfiniBand

InfiniBand is a switched fabric communications link used in high-performance computing and enterprise data centers. Its features include high throughput, low latency, quality of service and failover, and it is designed to be scalable...

 infrastructure, combining various IB hardware vendors utilizing OpenIB software.

In previous years, SCinet deployed conference wide networking technologies such as ATM

Asynchronous Transfer Mode

Asynchronous Transfer Mode is a standard switching technique designed to unify telecommunication and computer networks. It uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing, and it encodes data into small, fixed-sized cells. This differs from approaches such as the Internet Protocol or Ethernet that...

, FDDI

Fiber distributed data interface

Fiber Distributed Data Interface provides a 100 Mbit/s optical standard for data transmission in a local area network that can extend in range up to . Although FDDI logical topology is a ring-based token network, it does not use the IEEE 802.5 token ring protocol as its basis; instead, its...

, HiPPi

HIPPI

HIPPI is a computer bus for the attachment of high speed storage devices to supercomputers. It was popular in the late 1980s and into the mid-to-late 1990s, but has since been replaced by ever-faster standard interfaces like SCSI and Fibre Channel.The first HIPPI standard defined a 50-wire...

before they were deployed commercially.