This article is promoted by the IEEE Computer Society.
Every year, the world’s foremost high performance computing (HPC) experts come together at SC, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, to elevate the field to its next echelon.
Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and its Technical Community on High Performance Computing and the Association for Computing Machinery and its Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC), SC provides the leading technical program for the HPC community, enabling the sharing of best practices in all areas of high performance computing to expand technical capabilities.
And with every new HPC development comes an increasing demand for bandwidth and capacity, which is where SCinet comes into focus. Each year, hundreds of high performance networking experts assemble as a unified team to build the fastest and most powerful volunteer-built network in the world.
SCinet leverages state-of-the-art technology provided by industry leading organisations and the expansive expertise of its participants to create a network that not only powers the conference but also unveils exactly what HPC networking can do.
This year, SCinet will be amping up its capacity during SC25, taking place 16-21 November in St Louis, Missouri, United States. The high performance computing community is convening for a week of sessions, speakers, and networking, and the SCinet team will be fuelling these opportunities for thousands of scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, and developers.
“SCinet takes a year to design, a month to build, a week to operate, and one day to tear down, but it is the ultimate in workforce development,” explained Nathaniel Mendoza, SC25 SCinet chair and senior network engineer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, US.
“It’s a way to do cool things and learn the state of the industry. We bring in roughly US$50 million in equipment that you know you don’t get to play with every day.”
Setting records
There’s a reason SCinet’s tagline is ‘Immensely Powerful, Insanely Fast’: The reality lives up to the hype.
For instance, at SC24 in Atlanta, SCinet deployed 67,122 feet of fibre optic cable, matching the length of more than 185 football fields laid back-to-back. The network achieved a record-breaking 8.71 terabits per second (Tbps) – or one trillion bits per second – of peak bandwidth, supported by 30 wide-area network circuits (18 at 400 gigabits per second or Gbps, 11 at 100 Gbps, and one at 10 Gbps) and 450 wireless access points.
Each year the team working on SCinet outdoes itself, powered, in part, by the latest technology, but also fuelled by HPC networking leaders. And while record-breaking is a nice bonus, the SCinet team is more focused on building a solution that supports the needs of the broader HPC community.
“HPC is everywhere,” said Dylan Jacob, SC26 SCinet chair and acting group lead at Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), the Department of Energy’s dedicated network for scientific research, which is headquartered at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, US.
“It’s in all industries, and so it’s critical to what we do today. Each year new products with greater network capacity hit the market, and our hardware contributors are eager to showcase them at SC. At the same time, researchers are just as excited to tap into faster speeds and increase processing power to boost the performance of their experiments and demos as well. That’s what drives SCinet,” he said.
Powering the HPC community
At its core, SCinet seeks to provide the advanced network necessary to meet the demands of the community, so it should come as no surprise that the community itself remains a number one priority for those who dedicate hundreds of hours to the SCinet mission each year.
“For me, SCinet is about, ‘How do we teach and grow our community together?’” said Mendoza. “I stayed in this community, and I found my people. I really want people to come and find theirs. I think that’s the strongest thing you can offer, a way to say, ‘Here are your people’.”
SCinet also provides lasting opportunities to all who engage. Participants tap into a network for life. Leaders liken the SCinet experience to an internship or summer camp where the stakes are high and collaboration is critical to success. But in that pressure-cooker environment, relationships are forged in stone, and friends and colleagues are truly made.
“SCinet welcomes volunteers from all backgrounds and experience levels,” noted Jacob. “Everyone puts in hard work, but the relationships we build and the chance to work with cutting-edge technology are what makes it all worthwhile.”
Mendoza concurred. “Not only is SCinet a way for us to build our skills, but it also helps us build our community. We all do very specific, specialised things, and with SCinet, you grow a rolodex of people you can ask for help. We create that community, and then, you’re getting to work with your friends.”
And at the end of the day, the SCinet community strives to power possibility for HPC at large, and that’s a mission its volunteers recognise as worth supporting.
For more information on SCinet, visit sc25.supercomputing.org/scinet. To register to attend SC25, visit sc25.supercomputing.org.
This article is promoted by the IEEE Computer Society.
link
