Annette Kitajima, principle technologist at Sandia National Laboratories, is this year’s co-chair of the SCinet fiber team. Annette has been volunteering with SCinet for the past 15 years, and has led the fiber team for 11 of those years.

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: 15
• SCinet Team(s) with which you’ve participated: Fiber and Project Management
• If you could be a superhero, what power would you possess? The power to heal.

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

SCinet is a group of volunteers from all over the world who are tasked with building the world’s fastest network for the SC Conference. We provide a platform for researchers to show off and “play” with emerging technologies and prototype equipment in a production environment. Every year my family knows and anticipates my SC schedule. It’s kind of funny—SCinet is like an expected event on the calendar, right up there with Thanksgiving and Christmas.

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

I was recruited by colleagues at Sandia, Rick Maurer and Jim Brandt. Both knew I was looking for hands-on experience with fiber optics and a tangible example of how a network gets built from the ground up. The only experience I had handling fiber in my day job was connecting customer equipment to the local intermediate distribution frames (IDFs).

After several years of being a SCinet distributed network operations center (DNOC) captain, Mitch Kutzko from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who was the SC08 fiber team chair, asked me to take over leading the team. Mitch had done most of the tasks by himself, and it was a manually intensive process, so I suggested that the fiber team have more than one chair to lead the planning efforts. My first fiber team co-lead at SC09 in Portland, Oregon, was Warren Birch from the Army Research Laboratory.

I continue to volunteer with SCinet because this opportunity to learn new skills and network with professionals in my field is truly like no other. I get to work with colleagues from more than 80 organizations, learn from great minds, develop lifelong relationships, and, of course, have a great time while working hard to deliver SCinet. Over the years, these relationships have turned into friendships and colleagues I can count on for help in my day job.

It is very rewarding to collaborate with others on delivering a fast and reliable network for researchers to use at the SC Conference, especially when each year you want to incorporate newer technologies and experiment with network designs. Even though I have been on the fiber team for 15 years, there are new challenges to overcome each year and I look forward to tackling them.

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

I am co-chair of the fiber team with Julie Locke from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Along with a team of volunteers, we provide fiber connections from the SCinet main distribution frame (MDF) to the exhibitor booths, by way of aerial and floor installs which traverse the main SCinet Network Operations Center, and supportive floor DNOCs. Depending on the equipment and architectural design for the year, we use different types of fiber and/or connection types.

What advice do you have for someone who is learning about SCinet for the first time and considering volunteering?

The fiber team is a great place to start as a volunteer because there is no prerequisite skill set or technical experience. Everything you need to know about the job tasks is provided in training before you arrive, as well as on the first day of setup at the convention center. As the setup progresses and the SC Conference show floor opens, you learn everything from how to repair broken thresholds to troubleshooting why a booth doesn’t have internet access. We all throw on our Sherlock hats, don our testing equipment, and methodically search for the issue. Sometimes it is an incorrect switch patch, other times it is broken fiber. Whatever the reason may be, it is always a rewarding experience to solve these problems and provide SC exhibitors access to the world’s fastest temporary network.

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

I have played soccer a couple times a week for about 28 years. At times I played with my older daughter and younger brother, until my younger daughter’s softball activities became a priority for me—which was something I loved trading in for. I enjoyed playing soccer because of the teamwork and camaraderie. The same reasons I enjoy volunteering with SCinet. Now, I do fun runs, refurbish furniture, stitchery, reading, and traveling. Actually, I enjoy doing most anything every day and especially if my family is involved!

Learn more about SCinet.

—

Sara Aly, SC20 Communications, SCinet Liaison

Sara Aly is a communications manager at Internet2. This is her third 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.

––
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.

Shannon Champion, director of networking at PIER Group, is a volunteer on this year’s SCinet wireless team. 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: 2
• SCinet Team(s) with which you’ve participated: Switch/Route support for the Faucet network at SC19, and wireless team volunteer at SC20.
• If you could be a superhero, what power would you possess? Immortality. It would be great to see where we go and what we can achieve.

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

SCinet is a group of leading-edge architects, engineers, and researchers that help facilitate the advancement of research. As a volunteer representing PIER Group, I work closely with the SCinet team to implement and support a best-in-class network allowing critical and leading-edge research to be accomplished, helping advancement of research across the country.

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

In my role with PIER Group, I focus on current and future networking technologies and aligning those technologies with each of our research and education clients. My day job includes in-depth collaboration with all of our network manufacturers, in-depth collaboration with our customers architects and engineers, and final approval of all customer design and implementation recommendations.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the research and education community for more than two decades. I get to work closely with network architects and engineers across higher education and high performance computing. Many of my peers from the community have volunteered with SCinet over the years, and have always encouraged us to participate as well. I personally appreciate the opportunity to work and collaborate with a talented group of networking colleagues from academia, government, and industry.

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

I am part of the team that is responsible for the wireless network for the SC conference. In a typical year, the wireless network connectivity is set up for conference workshops and tutorials, conference committee rooms, exhibit floor, the hallways, and other public spaces. For SC20, we had committed to providing all the necessary wireless hardware and licensing to support SCinet, as well as deploy an engineering team to assist with installing and supporting the network during the conference.

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

I enjoy traveling and sailing when I have time.

Learn more about SCinet.

—
Sara Aly, SC20 Communications, SCinet Liaison

Sara Aly is a communications manager at Internet2. This is her third year volunteering with the SCinet communications team.

Greg Veldman, senior storage administrator at Purdue University, is this year’s chair of the SCinet DevOps team, and a member of the SCinet power team. 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: 7
• SCinet Team(s) with which you’ve participated: Network Security, DevOps (formerly IT Services), and Power
• If you could be a superhero, what power would you possess? The ability to see the future.

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

SCinet is the world’s fastest temporary network, existing only for a brief period each November to help the SC Conference demonstrate what is state-of-the-art in the fields of high-performance computing and networking. I am part of a behind-the-scenes team that spends “a year planning, a month building, a week operating, and a day tearing down” this network, as the SCinet adage goes.

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

I attended my first SC Conference 15 years ago and was a participant in a friendly HPC competition known as the Bandwidth Challenge. The competition utilized SCinet and that is how I came to know of the network. My curiosity about just what was involved in building such a world-class network each year led to a conversation with a work colleague who was volunteering with SCinet at the time. He suggested I should volunteer with the team behind building SCinet and introduced me to my first volunteer role with the network security team.

For my second year volunteering with SCinet, I transferred to the IT services team, which was later combined with the measurement team, and became known as the DevOps team.

The best part of SCinet is getting to work with a team of extremely talented and dedicated engineers to solve some very complex technical challenges and expand my technical skills, and the spirit of camaraderie and friendship that exists within the SCinet team.

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

I like to say that the DevOps team is essentially three teams merged into one. We’re part software development, part general IT services, and part measurement and monitoring. Most of our year is spent wrangling the software and infrastructure tools other teams need to be successful, including the SCinet intranet which is the main network planning tool that we’ve designed and written completely in-house. Exhibitors may know this tool as the connection request system (CRS), but that’s only one user experience of a much larger and more complex entity. The DevOps team also manages SCinet’s year-round IT presence, including our websites, mailing lists, accounts, and various other services that SCinet uses.

Immediately prior to the start of the SC Conference, specifically during SCinet’s staging and setup periods, our focus turns toward network services such as domain name system (DNS), dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP), and network time protocol (NTP), all of which we install and manage for SCinet. Finally, when the conference swings into full gear, we transition to monitoring the production network, deploying tools that can alert SCinet engineers to potential problems, and generating the various network graphics and charts that are displayed all around the show floor.

In addition to being a DevOps team lead this year, I’m also a member of the SCinet power team which is responsible for making sure all physical SCinet locations at the conference have appropriate electrical connections, and sufficient capacity, to power all the gear deployed.

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

One of our big efforts this year, which is new for SC20, is the addition of centrally-supported cloud services to the list of tools available to SCinet and the SC Conference planners. I’ve personally been hard at work behind the scenes to help deploy these services, including making sure appropriate security settings are in place, appropriate access is provisioned for new people who join the team, and integrating the services with our existing accounts management and automation processes. It’s rewarding to see all that work come together to provide a new service, one which has proved particularly useful this year as we’ve all had to collaborate online much more.

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

I’ve always enjoyed fixing and making things, and most weekends you can find me at work doing some sort of repair or enhancement to our house or yard. I’ve been into woodworking since I was in high school, and in the last couple of years have been getting into metalworking, including teaching myself how to weld. I also enjoy teaching my kids how to do some basic tasks with me in my workshop.

Learn more about SCinet.

—
Sara Aly, SC20 Communications, SCinet Liaison

Sara Aly is a communications manager at Internet2. This is her third 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).

—
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.

Soledad Antelada Toledano, cybersecurity engineer with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, is this year’s co-chair of the SCinet network security team, and also co-chair of the SCinet Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) team.

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: 4
• SCinet Team(s) with which you’ve participated: Network Security
• If you could be a superhero, what power would you possess? I am a superhero 🙂

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

The SC Conference is held once a year in the U.S. to showcase the latest technology advancements of the biggest and fastest supercomputers in the world. To give support to the conference and the supercomputer demos that are performed during the show week, a group of volunteers build the biggest network in the world every year at the conference. That network is called SCinet and it is a state-of-the-art model and vision of the future of networks. The network takes a year to design, a month to build, and a week to operate during the SC Conference. More than 200 volunteers are needed to build SCinet and make networking dreams come true!

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

I was honored to receive a WINS award in 2017 which fully funded my participation to join the SCinet network security team. The NSF-funded WINS program was developed as a means for addressing the prevalent gender gap that exists in information technology particularly in the fields of network engineering and high performance computing. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has continued to support and ensure my participation in the following years since my first participation.

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

This is my fourth year with the SCinet security team. I was the network security co-chair for SC19 in Denver, Colorado, and I’m in the same role for SC20. Along with my co-chair, Nathaniel Mendoza from Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), we are responsible for assembling a team of vendors that provides the hardware and software needed for building the security stack; assembling the team of volunteer engineers; closing the gender gap; designing a state-of-the-art network security architecture; hosting regular meetings with the team and vendors; and deciding strategies for tapping, distributing, and monitoring the SCinet network traffic and Network Research Exhibitors (NRE) experiments.

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

One accomplishment I feel proud about is the increased participation of women engineers on this year’s SCinet security team: half of the engineers on our 14-person team are women! This is a first for the SCinet security team, and builds on an organizational commitment to increase the participation of women with technical backgrounds on SCinet teams. I’m encouraged by our efforts to attract talented women engineers and hope that they will find their time with SCinet to be a rewarding and worthwhile experience.

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

I like traveling, learning new things, and getting to know different people and cultures. I’m also a big beach goer 🙂

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

—
Sara Aly, SC20 Communications, SCinet Liaison

Sara Aly is a communications manager at Internet2. This is her third year volunteering with the SCinet communications team.

Carlos Rojas-Torres, network engineer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), is this year’s co-chair of the SCinet wireless team. Carlos also holds cross-appointments with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and Front Range GigaPop. His SCinet volunteer experience started back in 2012 and includes past participation across four technical teams.

• Years as a SCinet Volunteer: 6 years in total (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020)
• SCinet Team(s) with which you’ve participated: Fiber, Wide Area Network, Edge, and Wireless
• Which superhero power would you possess? Flight

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 from around the world in charge of planning and building the fastest network in the world for the SC conference. It’s also where the newest and most exciting network technologies are going to be on display.

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

I was first invited to participate in 2012, where I joined the fiber team under the leadership of Lance Hutchinson and Annette Kitajima from Sandia National Laboratories. I was hooked right away! Coming back is a no-brainer; the learning experience, the exposure to the newest and latest technologies, and the friendships that develop over time make SCinet a really unique and valuable experience.

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

I am co-chair of the wireless team with Loren Adams from Georgia State University. Our team is responsible for the wireless network for the SC conference, and provides connectivity for conference workshops and tutorials, conference committee rooms, the exhibit floor, hallways and other public spaces. As a team lead, my main responsibilities are to co-manage a diverse team of talented volunteers, each with their own areas of expertise, and to ensure a safe and rewarding experience for everyone involved.

We’re all seeing and feeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our world. How are you keeping your team engaged in the planning process for SC20?

The truth is, keeping the team engaged is not a hard task; the sense of belonging, responsibility and affinity is what is keeping the team moving forward. We know we are part of something very special, and we have the opportunity to contribute to the SC conference in 2020 and beyond. That being said, as a team lead it’s important to facilitate open, honest, and inclusive communications with our team. We are offering virtual opportunities for our team members to volunteer this year because we don’t want anyone to feel excluded from participation.

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

I love spending time with my family, hiking, biking, playing racquetball, snowboarding, and when possible, traveling to new places.

Learn more about SCinet at SC.

—

Sara Aly, SC20 Communications, SCinet Liaison

Sara Aly is a communications manager at Internet2. This is her third 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.