NRE & INDIS: SCinet Provides the Network for Future Innovation
SCinet represents a group of more than 200 academic and industrial professional volunteers that research and develop innovative tools to provide breakthrough technology to the SC conference exhibition floor. It serves as the platform for exhibitors to demonstrate the advanced computing resources of their home institutions – and elsewhere – by supporting a wide variety of bandwidth-driven applications, including HPC and cloud computing. The Network Research Exhibition (NRE), a team within SCinet, invites network researchers and professionals from government, academia, and industry to submit proposals for demonstrations and experiments at the SC Conference that display innovation in emerging hardware, protocols, and advanced network-intensive scientific applications. Additionally, a selection of NRE participants are invited to share the results of their demonstrations and experiments from the preceding year’s conference as part of the Innovating the Network for Data-Intensive Science (INDIS) workshop. The INDIS workshop debuted at SC14 in New Orleans, offering a full day of inspiration that traditionally includes eight presentations of selected papers, panels that include the previous year’s NRE research presentations, and two keynote speakers (View SC19 INDIS Workshop program). The 2020 edition will be held on Monday, November 16, 2020.
INDIS 2020 is proudly led by an entirely female team this year. Dr. Michelle Zhu, associate professor and associate chair in the Computer Science Department of Montclair State University, has been the INDIS Workshop chair since 2018. Dr. Mariam Kiran, research scientist for Energy Science Network (ESnet) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), has been an SC volunteer since 2018 and serves as Co-Chair with Dr. Sarah M. Neuwirth. Neuwirth, a research associate at the Institute of Computer Engineering in Heidelberg University (Germany), started as a student volunteer with SCinet in 2011. She has been a SCinet volunteer ever since, and has held various team leadership positions since 2015. The call for INDIS paper applications is open, and will close on Friday, September 4, 2020. Researchers and engineers are invited to submit high-quality technical academic papers related to but not excluding these topics and in accordance with these guidelines.
“While SCinet is mostly known for its support of wired and wireless connections for the conference attendees and exhibitors, SCinet also provides a platform for groundbreaking network-related research through the Network Research Exhibition (NRE), Experimental Network (XNET) projects, and the INDIS workshop. The synergy effects between the research work presented at the INDIS workshop and the network demos showcased by NRE enable research opportunities within SCinet.” — Dr. Sarah M. Neuwirth
Neuwirth continued by citing a specific instance: “One example is the SCinet DTN-as-a-Service Framework developed by Jim Chen, associate director of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, and his multi-institutional team from iCAIR/Northwestern University, LBNL, and ESnet. Initially implemented as a prototype through NRE demos at SC17 and SC18 within SCinet, the design and implementation of the framework was presented at SC19 through the research paper “SCinet DTN-as-a-Service Framework” by Yu et al. at the INDIS 2019 workshop, and showcased in the NRE demo “Toward SCinet DTN-as-a-Service” . As of this year, the SCinet DTN-as-a-Service framework is expected to be a standard SCinet service for the SC20 conference.”
Corby Schmitz, IT director, Physical Sciences and Engineering Directorate at Argonne National Laboratory, and adjunct faculty with the Department of Computer Science at Loyola University of Chicago, served as SCinet Chair in 2016 and NRE Co-Chair from 2017 to 2019. During his time as a part of SCinet, Schmitz saw many research innovations fostered through NRE and INDIS.
“Thomas Kroeger and his team, primarily at Sandia, have been working with NRE for a number of years,” Schmitz explained. “They have leveraged the SCinet network to evaluate and experiment in an environment that doesn’t exist in such an accessible form anywhere else in the world. Through their participation in NRE, access to the facilities provided by SCinet and the visibility provided by INDIS, they have been able to incrementally improve the state of the practice and secure ongoing funding for their research. Thomas and his team are one of the many success stories that results when the research community partners with SCinet and utilizes the NRE and INDIS.”
As it will be its 30th anniversary, SC20 is also a milestone for SCinet. In its seventh annual edition, INDIS is eager to analyze the submitted papers, present forward-thinking panels, and reveal NRE endeavors from 2019 that will open new paths and mold the future of SCinet as it embarks on its next 30 years.
—
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.