Jackie Kern is a part-time consultant with the University of Illinois, providing leadership in data center assessment and support for the central infrastructure team after retiring from there in 2017. Jackie is a well-known leader in the SC community, with more than 20 years of experience as a volunteer. Her trajectory included being the first woman to serve as SCinet chair for SC07 in Reno, NV, and going on to serve as SC general chair for SC15 in Austin, TX.

During the past 30 years, SCinet has become the most powerful and advanced network on Earth for each week we’ve held the SC Conference, connecting the SC community to the world. This feature celebrates the dedicated volunteers whose leadership, tireless efforts, and enthusiasm have helped shape the SC experience over the last three decades.

How did you get your start volunteering with SCinet? What did the volunteer team and network look like at the time?

I had been working as a helper within the SC community for several years. My first engagement with SCinet was for SC04 in Pittsburg, PA, when I led SC Global. The SC Global program worked with sites around the world that provided Access Grid technology. This was a multicast networking environment with audio and video technology that allowed groups to virtually meet all over the world. We were able to set up a program and provide content, and at one point we successfully connected sites simultaneously on six continents.

Back then, the network was created by a team of 100 volunteers using 48 miles of fiber and the latest in advanced equipment and technologies, donated by more than 56 contributors. The total SCinet bandwidth was around 200 gigabits per second: that’s 2,000 times faster than the average home cable modem.

What was your experience as SCinet chair, including challenges and lessons learned?

My tenure as SCinet chair for SC07 in Reno, NV, included a fair share of interesting challenges. The first was that the conduit we needed to run fiber into the convention center was crushed. To fix it, we had to cut across the main strip in Reno, which had never been done before. On top of that, we had to wait for an annual motorcycle rally event to conclude before we could do the work! Within a week, we had to cut the road, lay new conduit, seal up the road, and then run fiber into the building so we could start and finish the final network build—just in time for the SC Conference.

During the conference, we also experienced a power bump that affected the entire section of the power grid. The power surged up and down three times. We shut down all the SCinet hardware as quickly as possible, and then systematically brought the equipment back online. Fortunately there were no ill effects from the power surges. As a final step, we divided the show floor into regions and sent teams to touch base with each and every exhibit booth to assess any damage and offer any needed assistance. Needless to say, there were many lessons to be learned, and all-in-all we had a very successful conference despite the challenges.

Jackie Kern and the SCinet volunteer team pose in front of the SCinet network operations center at SC07 in Reno, NV. The quilt in the foreground displays previous SC Conference logos.

How did your experience as SCinet chair shape the next steps in your career and your role in the HPC community?

SCinet was the first big component of the SC Conference that entrusted me with a high-stakes, technical deliverable—even though I had no formal training in the field of networking. I had worked with the SCinet volunteer team long enough that they knew I could bridge the gap between the technical knowledge of the network and the skills required to effectively communicate with other areas of HPC. This trust and success opened the door to many more opportunities for me to lead in the SC environment. It also led me to success within my home institution, as the lessons I learned in the HPC community served me well in the academic environment I worked in daily.

Is there an event or development from your time volunteering with SCinet that stands out as a pivotal achievement?

Being the first woman to lead the prestigious team as SCinet chair was such an honor. It gave me the confidence to continue to strive to do all I could to advance the HPC community. Each city SC visited offered new opportunities and challenges that taught me how to manage during chaos and how to plan and organize large, complex events. In addition, developing relationships with peers in the field from all over the globe was pivotal in my understanding of the many ways people communicate and collaborate. I was able to take those lessons back to my home institution to tailor my work with each facet of the university, whether it was faculty, researchers, administrators, or staff working to provide support for the mission of the university.

In your opinion, why is it important for SCinet to continue their diversity commitment in increasing the participation of women engineers?

I think SCinet’s commitment to diversity is critical. The more perspectives we can bring into problem-solving and development means more opportunities to find the right solutions faster and build bigger and better environments to meet our ever-changing needs. Diversity leads to new ways of thinking, new ideas of how to organize things, and more hands on deck to build a more secure and stable network that supports the growing needs for bandwidth, speed, and security.

In 2015 I was general chair of the SC Conference, and that was the same year SCinet introduced the NSF-funded Women in IT Networking at SC program, commonly known as WINS. The program invited women to participate in an apprenticeship experience with SCinet to engage women engineers and technologists to work with cutting-edge equipment and network with world-class colleagues. This effort continues today as the community supports and engages in the WINS program, encouraging women to participate in SCinet.

SCinet is as much about the human network as it is about the physical SC network. What three words would you use to describe the SCinet team and why?

The three words I would use to describe the SCinet team are driven, brilliant, and collaborative. Driven because I have never met another team that will work 24/7 to complete a task no matter how many obstacles are in the way. They are persistent in their pursuit to create the largest and fastest secure network on the planet for one week a year, and remarkably they continue to improve their offering each and every year. Brilliant because they always come up with creative solutions to unique challenges and requests. I have seen this group of individuals work together to do things we never imagined were possible. And collaborative because they work together no matter what. The SCinet team brings together volunteers from industry, government and education to build a robust network that supports everything the HPC community needs to showcase the great things they are doing around the world.

Learn more about SCinet at SC.

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Amber Rasche, SC20 Communications, SCinet Liaison

Amber Rasche is a technical writer with N-Wave, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s enterprise network. In 2016 she had her first SCinet volunteer experience as a participant in the NSF-funded Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program. SC20 marks her fourth year volunteering with the SCinet communications team.

Matthew Zekauskas, senior researcher at Internet2, is SCinet volunteer of legendary status with a total of 21 years participating on the team. Matthew is the technical director on SCinet’s management team for SC20. Due to the virtual nature of SC20, we will not be building the cutting-edge SCinet infrastructure that our attendees have to come to expect as part of their SC experience. This feature aims to spotlight the dedicated volunteers and generous contributors whose tireless efforts and enthusiasm have helped shape the SC experience over the last 30 years.

• Years as a SCinet Volunteer: 21
• SCinet Teams: Measurement, Wide Area Network (WAN) Transport, DevOps, and Management
• If you could be a superhero, what power would you possess? Being in two places at once.

What was your path to start volunteering with SCinet?

My first SC experience was in 1999 in Portland, OR. I was there to support the Internet2 booth on the SC exhibit floor, as well as attend tutorials and participate in the general SC Conference. Back then, I was a new employee at a company called Advanced Network and Services, and my role involved supporting the Internet2 engineering group, specializing in network measurement. Martin Swany, now a professor of computer science at Indiana University, introduced me to SCinet. He talked me into helping a little that year with what was then known as the SCinet measurement team, now integrated into the DevOps team.

I became a full-fledged member of the SCinet team in 2000, where my main role was to take the network traffic map in place for the backbone of Internet2’s first-generation network, known as the Abilene Network, and apply it to model traffic across SCinet’s wide area connections into the convention center. The goal was to visualize traffic in and out of the exhibit show floor, and communicate how demonstrations and experiments at the SC Conference were utilizing the research circuits provided by SCinet.

How would you explain SCinet and what you do as a SCinet volunteer to a family member or friend?

SCinet is a fully volunteer crew that comes together each year to build a temporary computer network to support research demonstrations at the SC Conference. That’s a short and simple explanation of a highly complex, year-long process that involves many moving parts.

SCinet’s technical director is part of the management team and helps to facilitate interactions among technical teams to create the network architecture needed to support each year’s SC Conference. The technical director also helps to guide the tools used by SCinet throughout the year as the team prepares to set up prior to the start of the conference. I have a fairly long history with SCinet and appreciate opportunities to bring some institutional knowledge to helping teams solve problems during the planning stages of SCinet.

The SCinet team has been working hard since January in preparation for SC20. What is one accomplishment that you are proud of?

I am especially proud of the work done by the DevOps, routing, WAN and architecture teams to automate the configuration of SCinet. Automation will allow us to stand up the network faster, with fewer errors, and deploy network changes more quickly. We can avoid the straightforward and repetitive work done every year, and instead concentrate on the interesting aspects of the advanced network for the SC show floor. Because network automation is the general industry trend, our volunteers also gain more experience automating a heterogeneous network, which they can bring back to their home institutions. The collaborative successes of this year’s teams to automate SCinet will carry forward even if we are not physically building a network this year.

What keeps you coming back as a SCinet volunteer each year?

During my years as a SCinet volunteer, I’ve learned a lot about other areas of networking and amassed a sizable number of professional contacts. At least three things keep me coming back to volunteer:

1. The people. It’s great to be part of a very talented and motivated team. We are all learning from each other and sharing expertise.
2. Exposure to cutting-edge technologies. In particular, I appreciate getting the hands-on experience and having opportunities to work with the latest networking equipment. SCinet is a unique environment where industry and researchers work together to ensure that the equipment interoperates, so the scope of that exposure is unmatched.
3. New and challenging problems. I enjoy solving problems, and there are often challenging problems to solve on the path to creating SCinet and helping others use the network to effectively demonstrate their systems.

In addition to volunteering with SCinet, what do you do for fun?

Hiking, traveling, and high-performance driving are some of my favorites—but I’ve also been known to just binge-watch movies.

For hiking, I mostly enjoy day hikes or less. There are several parks and nature preserves with trails near my home that I frequent. I also like to hike in combination with my travels, particularly exploring national parks within and outside the U.S. When I travel to a new place, whether for work or vacation, I make sure to carve out time to simply explore. My most recent vacation included exploring southern Australia and Tasmania.

My high-performance driving experience includes competing alongside my brother in the One Lap of America rally for the last 19 years. Unfortunately, it was canceled due to COVID this year, but in typical years it involves time trials at race tracks around the country, starting at The Tire Rack in Indiana. Participants must drive between race venues, covering 5,000 miles without trailering their cars or any support vehicles. My brother and I usually end up mid-pack, but we enjoy the friendly competition with other teams nonetheless, including a number of them who are repeat offenders like us.

Learn more about SCinet.

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Amber Rasche, SC20 Communications, SCinet Liaison

Amber Rasche is a technical writer with N-Wave, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s enterprise network. In 2016 she had her first SCinet volunteer experience as a participant in the NSF-funded Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program. SC20 marks her fourth year volunteering with the SCinet communications team.

Linda Winkler, senior network engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, is a fixture in the SC community. She has 21 years of SC volunteer experience, and all but two of those years were dedicated to planning, building and operating the conference’s high-performance network—SCinet. Linda served as SCinet chair for SC12 in Salt Lake City, UT.

During the past 30 years, SCinet has become the most powerful and advanced network on Earth for each week we’ve held the SC Conference, connecting the SC community to the world. This feature celebrates the dedicated volunteers whose leadership, tireless efforts, and enthusiasm have helped shape the SC experience over the last three decades.

When you first started volunteering with SCinet, what did the network and volunteer team look like at the time?

My first year volunteering with SCinet was for SC95 in San Diego, CA. SC95 included a project called I-WAY, or Information Wide Area Year, which brought a huge amount of wide-area bandwidth into the conference center and involved working with application developers to utilize remote resources in unprecedented ways. The scope of the experiment involved interconnecting 11 wide-area testbed and agency networks involving multiple carriers (Ameritech, AT&T, Bell Atlantic, MCI, PacBell, Sprint), 17 supercomputing centers, five virtual reality research sites, and more than 60 application groups. The entire SCinet team at the time was roughly a dozen volunteers.

Linda Winkler in the captain’s chair, surrounded by SCinet colleagues in a far-out exhibit at SC12.

From the origin stories you’ve heard, what spurred the introduction of SCinet into the SC Conference and sealed its place as an integral part of SC?

Research exhibitors at the SC Conference wanted a way to demonstrate their work, but dragging their expensive and fragile hardware around the country to support those demonstrations was problematic. What they needed was a dedicated network infrastructure to connect to remote resources. While building that network was challenging at the time, some very talented and industrious folks saw it as a challenge worth pursuing. It took the commitment and cooperation of a number of vendors as well, because some of the early technology such as HIPPI, or high performance parallel interface, was not really ready for use in a wide-area network environment.

The SCinet infrastructure built each year for SC provides an opportunity for researchers to push the envelope with large-scale experiments. This presents a huge risk/reward opportunity for researchers and exhibitors. Many key technologies (10G, 100G, 400G) were introduced, trialed, and stressed at SC over the years, while others were introduced and then disappeared quietly (HIPPI, Asynchronous Transfer Mode, and Infiniband).

Since its beginning, SCinet has always strived to support a microcosm for high performance computing and networking as the landscape continues to dramatically evolve. It pushes the boundaries of what is possible through demonstration of multi-vendor interoperability of new technologies, while bridging the gap between theory and practice. SCinet is able to provide advanced capabilities to exhibitors and, at the same time, adapt to learn how to manage new infrastructure and services.

Linda Winkler served as the SCinet vice chair when SC returned to Salt Lake City in 2016. Here she is helping to coordinate SCinet teardown, a massive undertaking that must be completed in less than 24 hours at the end of the conference.

What was your path to becoming SCinet Chair?

After several years leading the SCinet routing team, I wanted to explore a different challenge. Being SCinet chair involves orchestrating a large, complex, all-volunteer organization and facilitating a multi-vendor collaboration among SCinet’s contributors. All of this presents a number of interesting challenges. Despite those and the huge time commitment, the experience was very rewarding. My objectives were to expand the scope of my responsibilities and learn more about the larger SC Committee. I ultimately found that serving as SCinet chair offered incredible exposure to the HPC community. I was able to connect with new peers in the field and develop key contacts within industry-leading networking and computing companies.

What advice do you have for early career professionals in the fields of network engineering and high performance computing that are learning about SCinet for the first time and are considering volunteering?

Just do it! Learning from top talent in these fields—in a challenging, but supportive environment—is an incredible opportunity. The breadth and scope of SCinet’s efforts are expansive, and the volunteer team is immensely resourceful and willing to share insights. As a result, you may experience more in a short time with SCinet than across years in your day job. Everyone works extremely hard, and the payoff is tremendous.

SCinet is as much about the human network as it is about the physical SC network. What three words would you use to describe the SCinet team and why?

Dedicated, resourceful, and creative. All volunteers want the entire team to be successful, and they work hard to make SCinet the best it can be each year. There are any number of things that may go wrong. The team is always up for the challenge.

Participants in the NSF-funded Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program pause for a photo with the WINS management team and selection committee. WINS was developed as a means for addressing the prevalent gender gap that exists in network engineering and HPC. Linda Winkler has volunteered with the WINS selection committee since the program’s pilot year in 2015.

Read Linda Winkler’s Paper

SCinet: 25 Years of Extreme Networking (2018) (PDF)

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Amber Rasche, SC20 Communications, SCinet Liaison

Amber Rasche is a technical writer with N-Wave, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s enterprise network. In 2016 she had her first SCinet volunteer experience as a participant in the NSF-funded Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program. SC20 marks her fourth year volunteering with the SCinet communications team.

Angie Asmus, cybersecurity team lead and security analyst at Colorado State University, is this year’s chair of the SCinet edge network team. Angie was introduced to SCinet in 2016 as one of seven women selected to participate in the NSF-funded Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program. During the past five years, her trajectory on the edge team has included serving as deputy chair in 2018 and chair in 2019 and 2020.

Due to the virtual nature of SC20, we will not be building the cutting-edge SCinet infrastructure that our attendees have to come to expect as part of their SC experience. This feature aims to spotlight the dedicated volunteers and generous contributors whose tireless efforts and enthusiasm have helped shape the SC experience over the last 30 years.

• Years as a SCinet Volunteer: 5
• SCinet Team(s): “Born and bred on the edge team”
• If you could be a superhero, what power would you possess? Healing

How would you explain SCinet and what you do as a SCinet volunteer to a family member or friend?

We are a group of volunteers working together over the span of a year to design and deliver the fastest network in the world for the SC Conference.

What was your path to start volunteering with SCinet? What keeps you coming back as a SCinet volunteer each year?

I was introduced to SCinet as a WINS awardee in 2016, which supported my participation and landed me a spot on the network edge team. I keep coming back because it provides me an opportunity to do something different from the cybersecurity-focused role I have in my day job, administering our campus security infrastructure, including our firewalls, VPN solution for remote work as well as site-to-site VPNs for third-party integrations, two-factor authentication, F5 load balancers, and security within our NSX-T environment. SCinet is an environment where I can take my technical skills in a different direction, and with the edge team I am able to do hands-on work by providing Layer 2 access for the conference. Also, the people are what makes SCinet special. We are one big family, and we learn from and rely on each other. It’s something really unique to be a part of.

You are co-chair of the SCinet network edge this year. Tell us more about your team and responsibilities.

In a typical year, the edge team provides commodity network connectivity for the SC Conference. This includes wired connectivity for the conference workshops and tutorials, Student Cluster Challenge, SC Committee spaces, and SCinet Network Operations Center, as well as the infrastructure for the conference wireless network. To deliver these services, our team deploys switching equipment in all of the network closets around the convention center, exhibit hall, and meeting rooms.

We do a lot of work ahead of the conference to design our architecture and switching configurations based on the convention center layout and network requests. During the conference, we typically spend our time deploying switches and troubleshooting any issues to ensure a positive experience.

All seven volunteers on this year’s network edge team are returning SCinet volunteers. Most were on the edge team last year, but we also have a volunteer who transitioned from another SCinet team. I think this speaks to just how rewarding the SCinet volunteer experience is. They are a great group who know how to make the hard work a lot of fun!

With SC20 going virtual, our team won’t be designing and delivering that commodity network connectivity this year. Instead, we’re pivoting to provide virtual content and support to our colleagues who are preparing for a great virtual SC experience this year.

The SCinet edge team has been working hard since January in preparation for SC20. What is one accomplishment that you are proud of?

With SC20 going virtual, we won’t be building SCinet in Atlanta this year, but I’m still proud of the work our team did to prepare for SC’s newest host city. We learned a lot about the layout of the convention center in preparation to design the switching architecture—and we were able to conduct most of that work virtually in lieu of on-site visits. We documented all this information, along with lessons learned, for future SCinet teams that may need it.

Ultimately, I’m also really proud of our SCinet and SC volunteer community, which has continued to work well together despite the challenges introduced by the pandemic. This is a unique time that has necessitated new strategies for communication and collaboration to keep us all together as we strive to deliver the best SC experience possible.

In addition to volunteering with SCinet, what do you do for fun?

I have four kids, so most of my free time revolves around them. As a family, we enjoy anything sports related, both playing and watching. We are avid Minnesota Vikings and Iowa State Cyclone fans!

Learn more about SCinet and Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS).

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Amber Rasche, SC20 Communications, SCinet Liaison

Amber Rasche is a technical writer with N-Wave, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s enterprise network. In 2016 she had her first SCinet volunteer experience as a participant in the NSF-funded Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program. SC20 marks her fourth year volunteering with the SCinet communications team.

Debbie Fligor, lead network engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is this year’s co-chair of the SCinet routing team. In 2015, Debbie was one of five women selected to participate in the pilot of the NSF-funded Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program, now in its sixth year. Debbie’s volunteer experience has taken her from serving as a member of the routing team from 2015-2018 to co-leading the routing team since 2019.

• Years as a SCinet Volunteer: 6
• SCinet Team: Routing
• Which superhero power would you possess? The ability to answer questions like this.

How would you explain SCinet and what you do as a SCinet volunteer to a family member or friend?

SCinet is a very fast network that is connected to many places around the world at high speeds. Companies and researchers connect to it so they can demonstrate how their new products support high-speed, long-distance networks, or enhance researchers’ ability to move data related to their research. SCinet also can provide opportunities for researchers to test new ideas and protocols at a scale that they don’t normally have access to at their home institutions. I help design the network and get it built within the three weeks we have to put it all together.

What was your path to start volunteering with SCinet? What keeps you coming back as a SCinet volunteer each year?

I first heard about SCinet from network engineers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which is a unit on my campus. It always sounded interesting, but initially the timing didn’t work out for me and I couldn’t go. A few years later when my children were older and travel was easier, SCinet was so popular that getting on the routing team wasn’t easy. For SC14, I was all set to join—I had a spot on the team and a commitment from my boss to pay my travel costs—when state budget cuts suddenly left my home institution without the money to send me. I finally made it to SC15 as a WINS participant. With WINS covering the travel costs, my boss could support me with a flexible work schedule to accommodate my day-job responsibilities and travel to Austin, TX, to help set up and operate SCinet.

What keeps me coming back to SCinet is a combination of the people and the experience. Working with so many talented people who are all smart and passionate about getting the network built and working—and pulling it off in the alloted time—is a really unique experience. I also get to work with equipment that is at an entirely different scale than what I do with my day job. Now as a SCinet team lead, I get to help design the network as well. All of that together is a lot of fun and gives me many chances to learn new things that I can bring back to my university.

Tell us about your SCinet team this year and what you are responsible for.

This year I am co-lead of the routing team with Nathan Miller from the U.S. Department of Energy’s ESnet. We are responsible for coming up with the network design at the convention center and integrating it with the designs of other SCinet teams, including wireless, edge, and the wide area network teams. This involves many things: picking technologies that we want to try, reaching out to contributors to engage with them, and getting contributors to help by loaning equipment for the network. It also involves recruiting team members and engaging with them to make sure they are in sync with the design and are able to help with early testing of ideas in the lab. We also make diagrams of the network design, inventory the permanent equipment like the patch panels and management switches, come up with the list of things we need to purchase to support our part of the network, and generate the final list of equipment we need from contributors.

Once onsite, we will inventory the received equipment, make the plan for getting it racked and connected, coordinate the team in getting all of the network installed and up, oversee the migration from the staging area to the show floor, make sure support tickets are handled, check that team members actually eat dinner and take breaks, and plan social events for the group.

We’re all seeing and feeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our world. Despite the unprecedented challenges, what are you and your team most excited about for SC20? How are you keeping your team engaged in the planning process for SC20?

I think our team is most excited to have a solid plan to deploy Ethernet VPN, or EVPN, technology in the network, after a few years of planning and testing. EVPN is a modern way to connect two or more separate Layer 2 sections of the network together so that they work as one logical network. In the past, SCinet connected Layer 2 sections of the network together directly, by configuring that network on every device in between the places it needs to go. While this method worked, it limited how redundant paths could be built and involved more risk of network loops, which could negatively impact all of SCinet. With the new EVPN technology, the logical network is tunneled across the devices in the middle with a protocol like VXLAN. If everything works correctly, then engineers just define the network at the edges where it is needed, and the tunnels are generated automatically. This is really helpful for SCinet because we facilitate a lot of connections for researchers—from their booths to other booths in the SC exhibit hall, to wide area circuits, or to both. Being able to make those interconnects by “just” defining the network in those locations, letting EVPN and VXLAN make the interconnects, will make it easier and faster to deploy those network connections.

This achievement has been a few years in the making. Earlier iterations attempted to use MPLS as the underlying protocol, and we had issues getting everything tested and talking to each other in the time we had available for network staging and setup before the show had to go live. More recently when we tried to use VXLAN, we ran into similar timing issues and contributor interoperability issues. (There are two ways to do VXLAN, and not all contributors picked the same way!) For SC19 we tried something new, which was setting up a virtual lab so that we could do interoperability testing and try to get things working before we went onsite. We made more progress, but VXLAN is complex and we didn’t get our orchestration platform talking to all the contributors’ devices before we needed to start making final implementation plans. This year for SC20, we spun up the virtual lab sooner and updated the contributor images. We believe this will allow us to get orchestration and VXLAN interoperability going in time to be ready to actually use EVPN on this year’s network.

Working in that virtual lab to build a network model of what we want to use onsite this year is one of the key ways we are keeping the team engaged. With technology like this, our team members can now participate remotely even during COVID-19.

In addition to volunteering with SCinet, what do you do for fun?

Many different things! Some of them include Tae Kwon Do (with classes on Zoom during shelter-in-place), knitting, drumming, and video games. I have a lot of flowers on my Animal Crossing island.

Learn more about SCinet and Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS).

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Amber Rasche, SC20 Communications, SCinet Liaison

Amber Rasche is a technical writer with N-Wave, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s enterprise network. In 2016 she had her first SCinet volunteer experience as a participant in the NSF-funded Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program. SC20 marks her fourth year volunteering with the SCinet communications team.