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It’s time to start planning your participation in SC Global 2004, the Access Grid™-enabled component of SC2004. SC Global offers a chance for people to participate in SC2004 without leaving home and to contribute to SC2004 from a remote location. SC Global will connect the main conference location in Pittsburgh with remote sites around the world using the Access Grid (AG), an ensemble of resources that can be used to support human interaction across the grid. The AG runs over high-performance IP networks, and has been in use since the summer of 1999 for distributed conferences, workshops, and meetings. During SC Global 2003, eighty sites participated remotely using Access Grid, inSORS Grid, Windows Media, and VBrick, from locations spread across five continents and 10 countries. This year's conference will be held November 6-12, 2004, in Pittsburgh, PA; remote participation is expected to exceed that of last year. Many SC Global committee and remote site representatives are meeting June 9 – 11 at the annual AG Retreat, held by Argonne National Laboratory at Ryerson University in Toronto. “Early participation in technical preparations is the key to a successful SC Global event, and the AG Retreat is an excellent opportunity for us to move our planning into high gear,” said Jackie Kern, SC Global 2004 Chair. “Beginning technical preparations now allows for extensive testing and debugging of the global technical infrastructure and AG nodes across the world that will participate in the proceedings.” In addition to the Papers, Panels, Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, and collaborative technologies showcase for which SC Global has traditionally been known, this year’s SC Global event will include the SC Keynote talks broadcast over the AG. The keynote address and other selected SC Global sessions will be recorded by Internet2 Commons, using inSORS IG Recorder software. SC Global technical test cruises will begin Tuesday June 8th and run through October. Each geographical region will have a test cruise once a week to focus on local and regional issues; once a month, global test cruises will be held for purposes of testing the overall global infrastructure. Interested sites should register at http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/fl/events/scg2004/ to be contacted with dates and times for the appropriate test cruises. More details about SC Global (including the full SC Global program, when it becomes available) will be available at http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/scglobal.html. For detailed information, please visit: * SC Global 2004: http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/scglobal.html * SC Global 2004 technical test cruises: http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/fl/events/scg2004/ * Supercomputing 2004: http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/ * Access Grid: http://www.accessgrid.org/ * Access Grid Retreat: http://www.mcs.anl.gov/fl/flevents/ag/agr04/