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20Mbps? Are they kidding me?

PyCon 2008 used a 45Mbps DS3.

And, then, that's nothing compared to SCinet

Disruptive technologies is a very real area of study. Supercomputing 2006 and 2007 even had a panel on it. (My phd adviser is one of the people listed there) Although somewhat buzz-wordy, the idea is to signify technologies that have the potential to bring about great change within an industry.

Just to name one kind of such technology for computing, if someone could get automatic parallelization to work reliably, that would be a very disruptive technology. (20 years of research has yet to achieve this, but people keep trying)

I was at sc06 last week. I am working (as a research assistant) at that National Center for Datamining, University of Illinois at Chicago. We won this bandwidth challenge by transmittting data using the UDT protocol. The results are here https://scinet.supercomp.org/2006/bwc/ (click on the NCDM link).

The SC|05 (SuperComputing) conference in November, will have some tracks on high performance storage capabilities as well as a special initiative called StorCloud of which the goal is to build a petabyte scale storage farm on the show floor (http://sc05.supercomp.org/initiatives/storcloud.p hp) A lot of the major storage vendors will be at this conference too.

While not all of this may fit in with your organization's goals and requirements exactly, you might find it a useful forum just to check out what these folks are up to and take an opportunity to chat with them.

Just a thought. Good luck!

This year's Supercomputing 2003 Bandwidth Challenge netted some cool results in this area including 23+gbps inside the US, 7.56gbps between the US and Japan, and 8.96gbps throughput to a remote network filesystem using GPFS. There are even some pretty graphs. My former co-workers at SDSC were involved in a lot of this work.

"I don't see the Olympics being much of a factor on Internet advertising."

Until the online Olympics audience becomes much bigger, advertisers will continue to spend their ad budgets on TV. Yet this audience won't grow in any meaningful way until some of the Olympic restrictions are lifted and sites are able to afford broadcast rights.

now.... on http://www.supercomp.org/sc98/TechPapers/sc98_Full Abstracts/Challenger602 it says they received over 600 million hits during the 1998 olympics. What's up with that????

BTW, check out that site above because you linux folk will like their approach to mass distributed web serving...

• Put students in groups, simulate as computer consultant companies and write proposals about the school or schoolboard, such as make overhead presentations, presents full proposals, write related programs as suggested in their proposals, define what hardware needs to be improved in offices and school computer labs.
• If you have a lot of old computers like 386s or 486s... get them to know how to set up their own linux box... without using binaries... that means they have to compile almost everything in their linux box.
• If you have a lot of powerful computers... get them to write some GL programs, like rotate 3D box with random rainbow colours.
• Put students in groups and ask them to make web sites for the school... including setting up the Aparche server, CGI + HTML + JavaScript, may be XML or ASP.
• Database programs... using DBase or COBOL... note: highschool students mostly will not impressed by this kind of projects.

You may also want to try this:
Exploring the Link between Real and Virtual Experiences in the Classroom with VRML and 3D Modeling

Hope this help.