The size of High Performance Compute Clusters has been growing rapidly, sometimes scaling to tens of thousands of nodes. A key aspect of HPC performance is the characteristics and performance of the network. Within HPC, each node within the cluster needs to be able to communicate with other resources - storage, for example - and with other nodes in the cluster for control and inter-process communications. As a cluster scales in size, careful consideration with respect to IPC, management and storage access is required to ensure the highest application performance and availability.This session will present best-practices for building large networks to support the most demanding HPC environments, and includes proven design recommendations for building scalable Ethernet, InfiniBand and Storage fabrics. Additionally, troubleshooting techniques, tips and tools to simplify management of infrastructure will be discussed in this session.

The processing power and network bandwidth required for true immersive telepresence applications are only now beginning to be available. We draw from our experience developing stereo based tele-immersion prototypes to present the main issues arising when building these systems. Tele-immersion is a new medium that enables a user to share a virtual space with remote participants. The user is immersed in a rendered three-dimensional (3-D) world that is transmitted from a remote site. To acquire this 3-D description, we apply binocular and trinocular stereo techniques which provide a view-independent scene description. Slow processing cycles or long network latencies interfere with the users' ability to communicate, so the dense stereo range data must be computed and transmitted at high frame rates. Moreover, reconstructed 3-D views of the remote scene must be as accurate as possible to achieve a sense of presence. We address both issues of speed and accuracy using a variety of techniques including the power of supercomputing clusters and a method for combining motion and stereo in order to increase speed and robustness. We present the latest prototype acquiring a room-size environment in real time using a supercomputing cluster, and we discuss its strengths and current weaknesses.