Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) apprenticeship program selects highly qualified early- to mid-career women working in IT (Informational Technology) careers to join the SCinet volunteer workforce for the SC Conference. Wendy Huntoon, WINS Co-lead, explained that the program’s main goal was “to address the prevalent gender gap in the Information Technology field, primarily network engineering, by partnering with SC and SCinet skill development and professional development.”

“The original idea for the program came through a discussion between me, Jason Zurawski and Marla Meehl at the February 2014 Winter Conference for The Quilt,” Huntoon said. “The underlying issue was Jason’s observation that the number of women participating in SCinet had declined significantly. While I had not participated directly for years, Jason knew that I had been one of the original instigators for SCinet (in 1991) and original female volunteers.”

While women make up 59% of the total workforce, they are averaging only 30% of the workforce across major tech companies. With the WINS program, SCinet has been working hard to change that curve. In 2007, 15 of the 105 volunteers were women, the largest group until 2015. In 2020, 44 of 113 volunteers and 40% of the SCinet leadership are woman. The WINS program’s end goal is to contribute to developing the next generation of IT women leaders in the United States.

“Over time, the long-term goals for the program have expanded,” Huntoon emphasized. “In addition to increased female participation in SCinet, we are also focused on providing broader skill and professional development opportunities outside of SC; leadership training and opportunities with SC, SCinet, and in general; as well as opportunities to interact with and present to broaden the research and education community.”

The program is designed toward women of all ages, races, backgrounds, IT-related professions, and geographical areas. This year, SCinet is proud to include 10 past WINS participants, nine of whom have leadership roles

The Selection Process

This year, WINS selected from a pool of especially qualified candidates, representing a variety of universities and national labs. Three participants were carefully chosen by the review committee, led by Huntoon.
“Selecting the top candidates was not easy due to the high quality of the applications,” Meehl, co-PI of the WINS program, said. “We want to thank the review committee for their diligent work in picking the participants.”
The committee included:

• Eli Dart, ESnet
• Wendy Huntoon, Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER)
• Dave Jent, Global Research Operations Center/Quilt
• John Kolb, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Amy Philipson, Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP)
• Amber Rasche, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
• Linda Winkler, Argonne National Laboratory

“The WINs application peer-review process has been fortunate to receive an impressive collection of strong applications each year,” said Linda Winkler, SC20 Space Chair and member of the candidature review committee. “The review process has evolved to weigh candidates’ technical skills, experience, and motivation, as well as the potential benefit from attending SC both personally and professionally. We focus on selecting individuals who will benefit from the experience and will use it to mentor others.”

Meanwhile, the SCinet teams reviewed the candidates and have enthusiastically welcomed all four awardees.

“We believe this group represents talented and diverse future leaders in our community,” Meehl added.

SC20 WINS Awardees

Kristen Beneduce

Kristen Beneduce, from Sandia National Laboratories, will work with the Network Security Team, mentored by Soledad Antelada Toledano, of NERSC-Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, herself a WINS awardee in 2017 and a 2020 Co-chair on SCinet’s Network Security and WINS team. Toledano noted that this year “eight out of 15 members on the Network Security team are female,” and most are WINS awardees or alumni.

“This welcoming environment brings a unique opportunity to WINS awardees to participate and have a deep-dive, hands-on experience and accelerated training as they work side by side with leading network, software, and systems engineers who create a state-of-the-art security architecture,” Toledano explained. “This experience will also provide Kristen and the other WINS awardees with the opportunity to build a great network of expert peers and bring a new set of skills and lessons learned to their back-home institutions.”

Melinda DeHerrera

Melinda DeHerrera, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, will join the Fiber Team.

“I first heard about this program from a fellow colleague that works for the NIE Telecommunications team. I just loved the concept of women being brought together from all parts of the US to build a network from scratch and see the benefits of its functionality as a whole till the end. I was super excited to have been one of the few chosen this year to attend and was crossing my fingers that it was going to fly.”

DeHerrera will be mentored by Julie Locke, co team lead and past WINS awardee, with Annette Kitajima.

Shashwitha Puttaswamy

Shashwitha Puttaswamy, from George Washington University, was selected to the Routing Team. She will be guided by co-team lead Jessica Shaffer, of Georgia Tech, with Debbie Fligor, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Both Shaffer and Fligor are past WINS awardees.

Jennifer Kim

Jennifer Kim, an IT Manager at Montgomery County Community College, will be part of the Edge Team.

“My initial learning of the program was through my leadership shortly after starting my current role and happened to be the year of WINS’ inception,” Kim said. “I look forward to the energy that surrounds SCinet and tapping into the wealth of knowledge and experience of the collective Edge team. I also look forward to getting to know fellow awardees and their journeys to SCinet.”

Kim will be mentored by Angie Asmus, IT Security Analyst/Interim Cybersecurity Team Lead at Colorado State University. Asmus was a WINS awardee in 2016 and has been with the Edge Team since, serving as its lead for the last two years.

“We are looking forward to introducing Jennifer Kim to SCinet and the Edge Team,” Asmus added. “As a WINS alumnus, I realize the importance of mentoring women looking to further their career in IT and networking. By participating in SCinet and the Edge Team, Jennifer will be able to learn what SCinet is, how it all comes together, and fully participate in our team as we plan and build the edge network. She will also have the opportunity to learn from some great minds and grow her professional network.”

Past Awardees Become Leaders

The WINS experience does not end after the SC conference. It is an ideal opportunity to grow and develop a long-lasting mentoring and peer networks. Amber Rasche is a technical writer supporting N-Wave, NOAA’s enterprise network. In 2016, she had her first SCinet volunteer experience as one of seven women selected to participate in the WINS program. SC20 marks her fourth year volunteering with the SCinet communications team.

“Participating in WINS has been a catalyst for some exciting changes in my professional career, including several opportunities to take on leadership responsibilities as a SCinet volunteer, and a new professional role providing communications support for a national, high-speed network,” Rasche shared. “I credit WINS with helping me establish connections within the communities that support high-performance networking across educational institutions, government agencies, and HPC facilities. From a career mentor who encouraged me to apply to WINS to a fellow SCinet volunteer who referred me to a new job opportunity, I am grateful to know this community and to be part of it. Serving on the WINS Application Review Committee feels like coming full circle as I am now able to support the success of future WINS participants and give back to the program that has supported my professional career.”

Huntoon added: “Early on, we realized that activities outside of SCinet were needed in order to build on the experiences the WINS volunteers had during SC and SCinet. To that extent, we have, since the program’s inception, supported WINS presentations at regional and national conferences, such as the annual conferences for the regional R&E Networks (KINBER, NYSERNet, CENIC, etc.), national conferences (Internet2 Global Summit and Technology Exchange, PEARC, etc.). Initially, participation and presentations focused on discussing the WINS program and diversity activities but have recently expanded to highlight the technical skills of the WINS participants.

Making WINS Possible

This annual program is grant-funded.

“The primary funding has come from the National Science Foundation, first as a supplemental grant then through a second grant to fund a three-year project,” Huntoon explained. “We are currently on the second no-cost extension for the primary grant (NSF 2016 grant #ACI-1640987), which has included supplemental funding for WINS to do a review and then report on long-term sustainability.”

WINS awardees receive in-kind and travel support from the Department of Energy through ESnet. The in-kind support has been essential in contributed staff support from people such as Lauren Rotman, Zurawski, Kate Mace, and others to help WINS interact effectively with SC and SCinet, as well as with mentoring, communications, and so many other facets for the program. Juniper has sponsored the in-person WINS luncheon during SC for a number of years. The luncheon allows all the WINS participants, SCinet mentors, sponsors, and other supporters to meet in person, get an update on the program, and let participants develop more personal ties.

Other organizations, such as PNWGP, have provided WINS-branded giveaways at SC each year. Since 2019, WINS has accepted contributions to fund volunteer travel and other associated expenses from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, including International Networks at Indiana University, SC Steering Committee, and more recently Ciena.

“WINS success is a direct result of the support we have received from our various sponsors, home institutions (UCAR, KINBER, ESnet), and the community as a whole,” Huntoon noted.

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Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

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.

The Women in IT Networking at SC program, better known as WINS, was created to remedy the vast gender gap in Information Technology, particularly in network engineering and high-performance computing. When the program started in 2015, 13.93% of SC professional volunteers were women. By 2017, the number climbed to 20.97%. This upward trend is clear, and WINS continues to enable this growth.

Kevin Hayden, SC20 SCinet Chair and Senior Network Engineer for Argonne National Laboratory, says that “SCinet receives excellent WINS participants that come to learn with us, though end up teaching us new ways as well. While it was not a specific goal, 46% of SCinet senior leadership positions are held by women and underrepresented groups this year, as opposed to an average of 25.8% in computer and mathematical occupations in the 2019 US workforce.”

WINS provides selected candidates with travel support, per diem and full access to the SC conference as part of SCinet, SC’s dedicated high-capacity network infrastructure. They join SCinet teams that coincide with their field of interest, where they work side by side with world-leading network and software engineers from diverse labs and universities, as well as top technology manufacturers, to create an incredibly fast, ephemeral network system.

“Throughout the WINS program, Wendy Huntoon, former President and CEO of KINBER, has led the selection committee encompassing an excellent group of community leaders,” said Marla Meehl, Section Head of Network Engineering and Telecommunications Section (NETS) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, manager of Front Range GigaPoP (FRGP) for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and Principle Investigator of the NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure WINS grant.

Meehl added, “They do a marvelous job of reviewing the candidates thoroughly, have a detailed ranking process, and make very thoughtful selections. Every year, they have chosen an excellent group of women who have been very successful. They have fine-tuned and improved the process through the years, making sure to address size of organizations, areas of the country, and diversity within WINS.”

An Ideal Opportunity

SCinet has the privilege of working with state-of-the-art and early prototype equipment provided by partner contributors, allowing the network to consistently set a new record for faster connections every year, attaining 4.22 terabits per second in 2019. Hence, SCinet serves as an ideal professional development opportunity for WINS participants to expand their skill sets with new knowledge they can take back to their home institutions. They also meet like-minded peers to network, test new products and engage with during events throughout the week.

Meehl pointed out, “WINS also provides more than SCinet. It provides a focused mentoring and peer experience with other women and leaders who are there to ensure a positive and successful experience. This program also provides follow-up with professional growth experiences in other venues.”

Huntoon, who is a co-PI with Meehl on the NSF WINS grant, confirms that, “Outside of the SCinet experience, which has led to many promotions and some job changes, I think attending the I2 Tech Exchange has also been an excellent experience for a number of WINS participants.”

She continued, “WINS has had great support from I2 in providing this follow-up experience and exposure. It has broadened their professional network, exposure to additional technical knowledge, and raised awareness of them to a broader community.”

When the conference ends, WINS participants report on their experiences, what they learned, and what they found useful, as well as answer targeted questions that are taken into account to drive additional gender diversity outreach efforts. Their reflections are shared with their home institutions, SCinet leadership, project leaders, the Department of Energy/ESnet and NSF.

About WINS

Since 2015, the Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program has supported talented early-to-mid career women who help build the ephemeral high-speed network that powers the annual SC Conference. WINS is led and co-financed by the National Science Foundation via a grant to UCAR and KINBER, for domestic participants, and ESnet, which supports participants from different backgrounds.

Apply Today

WINS Application Deadline: May 1, 2020

For more information about the WINS program watch this interview with Marla Meehl and Wendy Huntoon.

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Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

During SC19, six volunteers enjoyed the distinction of participating as part of Women in IT Networking at SC, known as WINS. WINS provides travel support to the conference, where the volunteers are paired with a mentor and work hand-in-hand over a 19-day period to create SCinet, the world’s fastest temporary network. WINS is a joint effort between SCinet, Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER), and University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).

From October 23-30, the six WINS awardees began with SCinet’s staging. As network equipment arrived at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, the volunteers made sure the inventory was complete and dispatched it as needed. As part of the Network Security team, WINS participant Stacy Vincent, from the University of Utah, was impressed by the process.

We unboxed those millions of dollars of equipment, screwed them into racks, and patched the racks (connected them with fiber optic cable), as well as the initial power-up and configuration of equipment.” — Stacy Vincent

Meanwhile, Cassie Dymecki, WINS awardee from Ciena on the Wide-area Network (WAN) team, said she found that the experience helped her “to understand the various networking roles and applications in a collaborative and open environment.” The WINS participants were impressed to see nearly 200 volunteers representing 18 countries from 79 organizations, as well as by the roughly $80 million worth of state-of-the-art equipment provided by 34 contributors.

The SCinet objectives and its complexity, at this point, started to sink in: two weeks to set up a network to support the multi-terabyte demands of thousands of vendors and tens of thousands of attendees.” — Stacy Vincent

From November 10–16, all of the SCinet, WINS, and student volunteers united again in Denver for Setup. During this stretch, WINS volunteers participated in installing 66 miles of fiber optic cable, including 92 spools for the floor alone, 372 aerial strands, 257 wireless access points, 3,524 fiber patches, and 1,812 equipment interfaces. To give an idea of the scope of the undertaking, David H. Smith, a volunteer with SCinet’s Wireless team, recorded 216,666 steps over seventeen days. To help fuel the teams’ work, Kay Stewart, a volunteer with SC19’s Culture and Marketing team, started each day with eight dozen donuts. Over the week, the teams consumed 32 cases of water, 18 cases of sparking water, 17 cases of juice, 12 cases of tea, 36 cases of soda, and likely incalculable amounts of coffee and snacks. After the hard days, the teams would gather each night to get to know one another, plan the next day, and play games in a shared suite.

During the conference, the WINS volunteers made sure everything remained up and running, ultimately sharing in the new SC record of 4.22 TB/per second of WAN capacity and 2.0 TB/per second of peak network traffic.
By the end of the two-day teardown in November, the SC19 WINS awardees all left the program feeling more knowledgeable and eager to implement new ideas and methods within their respective institutions.

Allie Tsuruda, from the University of Hawaii, noted the experience provided her with new tools, as well as a new network.

Through this experience, I was able to work with equipment that I don’t normally get to work with at my home institution, be a part of building a network from the ground up, and make connections with people from different parts of the country.” — Allie Tsuruda

Cassie Dymecki, part of the WAN team from Ciena, explained the experience helped her to connect the dots between vendors, service providers, and customers, so she will be able to provide better service to clients by having a more global view of their needs.

The work I did at the conference provided me insight I can apply for a more holistic view of networking.” — Cassie Dymecki

By working with the Network Security team, Lindsey Whitehurst, of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said she became familiar with technologies that could be introduced into her lab’s environment.

In addition to working with new technologies, I also provided input on things I know well and fine-tuned other cyber security skills.” — Lindsey Whitehurst

In addition, Whitehurst found having another woman in cyber security as a mentor was particularly valuable, enabling her to better evaluate her own qualifications while surrounded by like-minded peers. (Notably, in 2019, only 24% of the network security field was represented by women.)

In serving as a WINS mentor to Merritt Johnson, from Guilford College, Jeff Hagley, Wireless Team lead from Internet2, also grew from this experience.

Being a WINS mentor was a great experience for me. Merritt was a great addition to the Wireless team and SCinet as a whole. For me, it was a great opportunity to meet and work with a talented engineer that I probably would not have had otherwise. The WINS program also introduced me to a number of great people, and I was honored to have a small part in the program.” — Jeff Hagley

Johnson also found the opportunity valuable, noting the experience helped her assess “how much I know and how much there is to learn!” She also appreciated having a “wonderful time getting to hang out and to get to know other geeky people.”

Applications for WINS at SC20 will open March 2, 2020.

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Christine Baissac-Hayden, SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.