The university's Department of Computer Science, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, won the Maximum Bandwidth Distance Product Award in the conference's Bandwidth Challenge. The university team recorded a maximum bandwidth of 7.56 Gbps over a 24,000 kilometers (15,000 mile) route that crossed the Pacific Ocean three times between the U.S. and a university site in Tokyo. The team won the category at a speed of 181,440 terabit-meter/second by combining hardware and software technologies to resolve latency over TCP.

"This new record shows that the basic technology has been established to support scientific research projects using ultra-high-speed networks between Japan and Europe or the United States", stated Professor Kei Hiraki, Ph.D., head of the Tokyo University Department of Computer Science.

"This is particularly exciting for projects that share large amounts of experimental or observational data. We see this achievement as a contribution to the worldwide effort to realize networks that have never before been available."

Professor Hiraki said his team chose the T320, which was installed in Tokyo and supported by network solution partner Net One Systems, for its performance advantages and IPv6 features and also because the Internet2's Abilene network relies on Juniper Networks platforms.

SCinet, the state-of-art, on-site network designed and built especially for the annual SC conference, was also built with Juniper Networks core routing platforms. The T640 and T320 platforms formed the core of the network, which handled all SC2003 network traffic, including supercomputer applications being run by researchers participating in the conference.