SDSC harnessed the power of a new very-high-speed network (vBNS) for the first time by distributing portions of a computation across HPC systems on the east and west coasts.

The vBNS linked portions of a global climate model running on Cray C90 supercomputers at SDSC and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). This new network technology made it possible to develop and run applications and services with very-high-bandwidth demands, allowing geographically distributed researchers to work together on more complex computational experiments than was possible to date. The vBNS was implemented by MCI Communications Corp. with major support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The vBNS, which stands for very-high-speed Backbone Network Services, provided high-speed interconnection among the NSF supercomputer centers and connections to NSF-specified Network Access Points (NAPs).