Kevin Hayden, SC20 SCinet Chair

Senior Network Engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory

What does it take to deliver a high-speed network for the SC Conference? A year of planning and tremendous support from a community of contributors.

The SC Conference’s dedicated high-speed network, SCinet, celebrates its 30th year at SC20. If you have attended SC within that time, you likely have encountered SCinet in one of three ways: by connecting to Wi-Fi as you’ve moved across the convention center; by selecting an internet connection type for your exhibit booth; or by participating in cutting-edge demonstrations in the SC exhibits hall that often connected you to your colleagues around the country and across the globe.

Thirty years ago, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, SCinet became a critical component of the SC Conference infrastructure. The first version of the network supported 10 Mbps local-area connections and 245 Mbps wide-area capacity. That year, SCinet demonstrated one of the first uses of wide-area networks to support a high-speed, TCP/IP-based distributed application, which provided real-time remote data visualization of a high-resolution MRI scan of a human brain.

Of course this pales in comparison to last year’s SCinet with speeds of up to 400 Gbps and 4.22 Tbps of wide-area capacity in Denver, Colorado, but in 1991, volunteers installed 1.86 miles of fiber in the SC exhibits hall to deliver speeds that were considered industry standards. Yet as networking speeds evolved, and the capacity to transfer data increased, one fact remains true today as it was 30 years ago: this volunteer-built network would not be possible without tremendous support from a community of contributors.

SCinet contributors have donated and loaned millions of dollars in equipment, software, and services that are needed to build and support SCinet each year. From networking equipment coming to us directly from the prototype lab, to the latest network monitoring software available on the market, to the greatest technical minds that build and operate the network, our SCinet contributors are the secret sauce to our success.

In my 15 years as a SCinet volunteer, I’ve watched this incredible community of contributors across academia, government, and industry helping us meet the growing technical demands of high-performance networking, and supporting our efforts to provide the SC Conference community with the best experience possible.

This collegiate spirit among contributors is one of the many reasons why our volunteers choose to participate in SCinet each year. We’ve become a community of networking experts that looks forward to the opportunity to be part of SCinet’s test bed for innovation, all while supporting HPC researchers and conference attendees.

Just last year—and thanks to incredible support from Ciena, Internet2, Juniper Networks, and Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink)—SCinet successfully passed production traffic over a 1,367 mile circuit using a single 400 gigabit Ethernet link between Chicago and Denver, the first such occurrence for an advanced research and education network! SCinet has surely come a long way since its early days in Albuquerque.

As Helen Keller so insightfully pointed out, “alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much.” For SCinet, our contributors enable us to “do so much.” And while we won’t be building SCinet this year as the SC Conference goes virtual, I want to recognize the following organizations for their ongoing support: Ciena, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Internet2, Lumen Technologies, Arista, Chameleon, Corelight, ESnet, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, OSI Global IT, Arista (formerly Big Switch Networks), CALIENT Technologies, Corsa Security, Dell EMC, Extreme Networks, Infinera, Nokia, Red Seal, Spirent Federal Systems, VIAVI, Zayo, EXFO, Front Range GigaPop, InMon, Keysight (formerly IXIA), Lonestar Education and Research Network, Microchip, Noviflow, PIER Group, and Puppet. I look forward to our continued partnership in the future.

I will personally miss the opportunity to work alongside our volunteers and contributors this year. I am grateful for this dedicated community that has been the driving force behind SCinet for 30 strong years, and I look forward to an exciting conference next month, where featured virtual SCinet content will be available for you to learn about this important effort. In the meantime, I invite you to learn more about SCinet milestones over the past 30 years.

With Much Gratitude

SCinet Contributors & Volunteer Organizations

Kevin Hayden, SC20 SCinet Chair

Senior Network Engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory

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.

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.