Introduction: Distributed high performance computing and gigabit wide area networks

Abstract

In many countries there are nation wide high performance wide area computer networks, e.g. the German broad band science network B-Win or the very high speed backbone network services vBNS of the American National Science Foundation (NSF). They form a part of the Internet, the widest wide area network of them all. Experience with these networks provides a wealth of information, in particular on hardware and software for wide area networking and high performance computing.