Members of the KeystoneREN leadership team participated in SC24, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, which was held Nov. 17-22, 2024 in Atlanta, GA at the Georgia World Conference Center. Nearly 18,000 attendees from around the world gathered at this annual event featuring an eventful week packed with sessions, speakers, demonstrations, and networking. SC is an unparalleled mix of scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, and developers and who convene to learn, share, develop relationships and elevate global HPC community efforts across domains and industries. And SCinet is a global multi-terabit network created each year specifically for the SC Conference and built from the ground up to support participant demos that are the true hallmark of this international HPC conference. This year SCinet offered an 8.41 Tbps Wide Area Network bandwidth, delivered on 27 circuits including 18 400G, 8 100G, and 1 10G circuit.

Highlights from SC24 in Atlanta, GA this year included:

Keynote Dr. Nicky (Nicola) Fox, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, presented an exciting and visually epic tour of select NASA missions highlighting the role and importance of HPC in helping NASA achieve these incredible successes and continue its mission. From Dr. Fox’s unique perspective leading NASA’s diverse portfolio of science and research missions, she shared her insights into the role of advanced supercomputing and data analytics in enabling the agency’s vision. The keynote presentation underscored the importance of HPC, AI, and ML technologies in knowledge discovery, fostering collaboration, and finding solutions to complex global challenges.

KeystoneREN leadership participation in the annual Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) luncheon which celebrated the five recipients of the 2024 WINS scholarship award this year including one recipient from Pennsylvania, Danielle Southerland, University of Pennsylvania. WINS is a program that seeks to address the gender gap within the information technology industry, particularly in network engineering. Each year WINS funds highly qualified women, selected through a competitive application process, to join the conference’s SCinet team. WINS scholarship recipients, including the five that participated this year, spend weeks and months working on planning for and then building out the multi-terabit SCinet global network created each year specifically for the SC conference. The SCinet network is built from the ground up to support live participant demos and other bandwidth intensive events that are the true hallmark of this global HPC conference. KeystoneREN is a proud sponsor of WINS and continues to support and promote inclusivity initiatives in the R&E community.

An invitation to join the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Joint Engineering Team (JET) meeting and present an update on KeystoneREN network initiatives and highlights including an update on the PA Science DMZ, an NSF-funded project that addresses critical infrastructure and connectivity gaps in five participating institutions including Pennsylvania State University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), Lafayette College, The Digital Foundry at New Kensington (DFNK), and Swarthmore College. Ken Miller, Chief Technology Officer, KeystoneREN, presented these PA network initiative updates along with other agency and state/regional/national networks worldwide. In addition to the updates provided by Ken, there were also highlighted updates from Internet2, NOAA’s N-Wave, DREN, StarLight, and several other relevant global R&E networks.

Excellent demonstrations and information on Quantum Computing and Quantum Networking including exhibits from IBM Quantum and an update in the SCinet arena from Joe Mambretti, Director, International Center for Advanced Internet Research, Northwestern University, on a quantum testbed specifically for computational science showcasing the co-existence of classical channels and quantum channels on the same fiber. The SC24 exhibitor floor with its 494 exhibitor booths even featured a quantum-specific area that exclusively showcased emerging products, tools, services, and demos are shaping the quantum future. 

Following the recent CyberAccelerate Workshop at Penn State University, the KeystoneREN team met with Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) leadership and staff as well as several representatives from ACCESS-CI at SC24. The ACCESS-CI exhibit booth was staffed by many different members of the ACCESS-CI resource providers and project teams across participating organizations and promoted awareness of ACCESS-CI resources, trainings, and support.

Demonstrations and updates from Delta AI, a new resource that targets the computational needs of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) workloads, that is newly available through the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Delta AI offers roughly 2x the performance of Delta: 21 FP64 PF and 633 PF from 320 NVIDIA Grace Hopper GPUs with 96GB per GPU (384GB GPU mem per node), supported by 14 PB of storage at up to 1TB/sec and interconnected with a highly scalable fabric. For researchers with AI/ML workloads this new system will amplify and expedite workflows and is available now for researchers and student needs.

Participation in the The Future of NSF-Supported Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Birds of a Feather Session led by Katie Antypas, Director of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC), National Science Foundation and featuring ~12 NSF program officers. This session highlighted the National Science Foundation’s vision and investment plans for cyberinfrastructure (CI) designed to address the evolving needs of the science and engineering research community. Senior leadership and program staff including 12 program officers from NSF discussed OAC’s vision, strategic and national priorities, as well as the latest funding opportunities across all aspects of the research cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.

The KeystoneREN team is already looking forward to and planning ahead for participating in SC25. If you are interested in how to get involved in SC and/or assisting with SCinet including volunteer opportunities for researchers, staff, and students or nominating a member of your team (or yourself) for the WINS Scholarship opportunity please contact us at [email protected] and we’ll get you in touch with the right contacts who organize this incredible effort and annual international HPC event.