Getting to Know SCinet: Why #HPCmatters

SCinet connects computing resources around the world during the SC conference every year. This robust, state-of-the-art network is always the fastest, most reliable network during the conference, allowing attendees to run HPC demos that display the latest and greatest from HPC hardware and software. SCinet covers the operations, deployment, and configuration of everything from high performance networking and routing to the wireless you use at SC.

Composed of more than 15 teams and hundreds of volunteers, we, the SCinet volunteers, are the people that make your data move really fast—from your demos to your email! But how does HPC matter to us at SCinet? Here are just a few thoughts we had…

“I see HPC in my daily work. It has broadened my horizons as I work more and more with the researchers who are doing data-intensive science. Understanding the HPC researcher’s problems and what barriers they are facing, and being able to connect people to solve these problems is what I do. These goals translate into what we build every year for SC and the HPC community: a robust, state-of-the-art network for collaborations and researchers that brings everyone together.”

- Kate Mace, Clemson University

                                                       SCinet Chair

“HPC is vital for enabling our researchers to do things in new and different ways.   Reducing the time to science is one of the key outcomes for research inthe HPC environment.  Being in an HPC operational service delivery environment, it’s exciting to see how our researchers are positively affecting society as a whole.”

- Matt Link, Indiana University

   Infrastructure Team Co-chair

"HPC is innovation—it’s ideas. I see it in my work everyday, and I see it while working on SCinet because we connect these ideas and innovations that are HPC. We see amazing contributions that HPC makes to science every year at SC and this is truly astonishing.”

- Virginia Bedford, USACE/ERDC/ITL

   Help Desk Co-chair

“My everyday job is in a support role which doesn’t allow too much visibility into HPC applications. Being a part of SC and SCinet allows me to not only continue to support my community but to see that HPC is becoming the foundation of all research.”

- Annette Kitajima, Sandia National Laboratories

   Fiber Team Chair

“Seeing the things that you can apply HPC to—it can be anything! Like physics, bioinformatics, etc. The exposure of what you can do with HPC is endless.”

- Lance Hutchinson, Sandia National Laboratories

   Interconnect Team Chair

"HPC matters to Louisiana at SCinet because it is the single, best event for information gathering toward future developments in computation, interconnect and networking. These three components make up the heart of a HPC instrument used for scientific discovery.”

"HPC is about connecting data sources with computers, simulations and scientists. The networks play a crucial role and have evolved into highly scalable programmable parts of applications. Software defined networking, demilitarized zones (DMZs) and network function virtualization are three examples of the exciting developments that enrich the HPC library for building the next series of HPC applications. SCinet's 'Innovating the Network for Data Intensive Science' (INDIS) workshop is a platform for exchange of these ideas and to publish the scientific results obtained during SC14."

-Prof. dr. ir. C.T.A.M. de Laat

                                        University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Science, Informatics Institute