"Visible Woman" Arrives in San Diego...At Top Speed; First Public Demonstration of Networking at Gigabit Speeds over 1,000+ miles.

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 4, 1995--Attendees of Supercomputing `95 at the San Diego Convention Center Monday through Friday (Dec. 4 through 8) will be treated to an eye-catching demonstration of very high-speed, high-performance networking.

Visitors to Booth 840 (sponsored by the HIPPI Networking Forum, or HNF) will be greeted by the "Visible Woman," a three-dimensional computer rendering of the human body displayed on a 6-foot-high by 8-foot-wide screen.

The Forum is an international group of vendors working to advance High Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI) networking. An ANSI standard with data rates of over 1600 megabits per second, HIPPI is the fastest networking technology currently available.

The "Visible Woman," a digital atlas of the human body, is created from digitized photographs of one-third millimeter slices of a human body, taken from head-to-toe. These images can be manipulated by a powerful computer to display any view of organs, bones and blood vessels.

This is the largest high-speed HIPPI network ever demonstrated publicly. Linking computers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Caltech, JPL, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center, it stretches over 1,000 miles and employs fiber optic links supplied by USWest, MCI and Pacific Bell. (Known as the "CASA Gigabit Testbed," it has been used over the past five years to refine wide-area, gigabit-per-second networking, using HIPPI technology over a Synchronous Optical Network, or SONET).

Within the San Diego Convention Center, the HIPPI network links nearly two dozen exhibits on the exhibition floor, and is linked to the show's overall network (known as "SCinet'95"). The HNF will be demonstrating a range of applications, from real-time transmission of uncompressed video and IP networking, to clustered computing, visual simulation, virtual reality, and the first gigabit World Wide Web server. All this will be accomplished at HIPPI data rates -- speeds up to 1600 million bits per second. These demonstrations represent solutions to challenges presented by the scientific, research and medical communities, as well as the motion-picture and other industries. For example, visitors will see how high-bandwidth networking lets directors view in real time film rushes transmitted from remote locations, and how engineering designers exchange vast amounts of data for faster product deployment.

"Development of fiber optic, or Serial-HIPPI, has decreased in cost to as little as $2,000 per port and is quickly making HIPPI a viable option for local area networks, where the need is to exchange large amounts of information among a number of devices to solve data intensive problems," said Jim Toy, HIPPI Networking Forum President. "The network at Supercomputing not only demonstrates HIPPI's capability at the local level, but validates the combination of TCP/IP and SONET as the high-performance wide-area networks of the future. No other technology -- ATM, FDDI, Fibre Channel, or Fast Ethernet -- comes close to matching HIPPI's speed locally, and SONET's efficiency for the wide area."

The HIPPI network at Supercomputing is the result of a coordinated effort by HIPPI Networking Forum members including Applied Micro Circuits Corp., Avaika Networks Corporation, Broadband Communications Products, CERN, Cray Research, E-Systems, Essential Communications, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Loral Defense Systems, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Maximum Strategy, Methode Electronics, Myriad Logic, NetStar Inc., Network Systems Corporation, PsiTech Inc., Silicon Graphics Inc., TRW, Sony/TRI-PLEX Systems, the University of Illinois, and the University of Minnesota.

For more information about the HIPPI Networking Forum, or its participation in Supercomputing `95, contact John Kerr (PsiTech) 714-964-7818, Bill Boas (Essential Communications) 505-344-0080 or Simon Fok (Avaika Networks) 415-962-1687.

CONTACT: Shandwick USA

Mary Ellen Amodeo

612/832-5000, x375

[e-mail] or

Kathleen O'Donnell

612/832-5000, x356

[e-mail]