By: Kasandra Pillay (Principal Engineer at South African National Research Network (SANReN), National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System (NICIS), Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa)
Hi everyone! My name is Kasandra Pillay. I am an engineer at the South African National Research Network (SANReN) in South Africa.
Last year I was unable to attend the Supercomputing Conference in-person due to financial constraints within my organization. We were facing similar challenges this year, but the day was saved by Elizabeth Leake and her super STEM-Trek team, as I was provided funding to attend not only the SC24 conference in-person, but also the pre-workshops and tutorials. This resulted in my organization only having to fund my flight and daily allowance.
I thus headed off to Atlanta, Georgia from Johannesburg, South Africa from 13th to 24th November 2024, on what turned out to be a much longer than expected round trip (airport hiccups!) – but boy was it worth it!
When I first heard about SC24 and the ART@SC24 workshop, I was a bit unsure if this was the right conference for me – I do not work directly at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in South Africa, but I soon learnt that this is far more than “just a High-Performance Computing conference.” The topics addressed and information presented can be relevant to many people in related (and maybe even not so related) fields. The theme of the STEM-Trek pre-conference workshop was ART: Artificial intelligence (AI), Research computing and Training for advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) professionals. These themes are rapidly extending to all fields of work so all are relevant.
The STEM-Trek pre-conference days were wonderfully organized. I met many like-minded enthusiastic individuals, who are now good friends. We spent our first day at Georgia Tech University – I was in awe of the amazing facilities available, especially the HIVE which is a technical lab with everything that an inspiring engineer or any DIY enthusiast could dream of – 3D printers, engraving machines and hyped-up sewing machines, to name a few.
The next day was the main day of the STEM-Trek workshop. The STEM-Trek sponsors this year included Dell, Intel, Google, National Science Foundation, Airlink and Texas A&M University. This year’s STEK-Trek group consisted of 41 attendees representing 16 nations and 13 US States – the workshop hosted amazing speakers who talked about a range of interesting topics – but it was clear that everyone had a passion for solving unique and challenging problems.
It was not all hard work as the day ended with a group visit to Medieval Times – It was a one-of-a-kind show – great entertainment with knights in shining armor on horseback, flying eagles and a medieval-themed feast.
Above: Pictures from our Medieval Times experience
At the conference itself, which was hosted at the Georgia World Congress Centre (a truly impressive venue, in which I got lost a few times), I coordinated the SANReN large data transfer team’s participation. I presented the team’s paper at the Innovating the Network for Data-Intensive Science (INDIS 2024) workshop which took place as a pre-conference workshop and at the SCinet theatre on the exhibition floor. I also exhibited and presented at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) booth and participated in the “Flood the gates” demo, through SANReN’s Global Network Architecture workgroup affiliation – Thank you to Professor Harvey Newman for inviting SANReN to participate. In this demo, we aimed to showcase the capacity of the AmLight-SACS 100Gbps international network link by “flooding the gates” to the Caltech booth on the conference floor. The data was successfully sent and received (using iperf3) from Brazil, US and South Africa, flooding the link by more than 80 percent. The demo utilized SANReN’s new 100Gbps Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs) at the Cape Town and Johannesburg Teraco Data Centers. The demo highlighted the potential to support data-intensive scientific research across the continents, between the US, Brazil and South Africa (and Africa) and validates South Africa’s National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System’s (NICIS’s) expertise and infrastructure readiness for global-scale collaborations.
Below: Pictures from the Caltech booth of me presenting my work and the graphs showing data flows during the “flood the gates” demo:
The conference hosted a diverse range of people, from different backgrounds and skill sets, with more than 17,000 attendees this year – I was never short of finding someone to learn from or someone who was interested in my work. The inclusivity efforts at this conference are par none – I manned the HPC Around the World Booth, where participants were able to tag where they were born as well as where they are working now by placing stickers on the world map. There was always a buzz of activity on the massive exhibit floor, and a wealth of knowledge to gain from all the exhibits and technical talks. The conference organizers thought of absolutely everything – there was even a quiet room (which I used on occasion) to sit in and decompress and recharge between activities!
Below: Picture of me at the HPC Around the World booth:
With regards to progressing South Africa’s research infrastructure, I learnt about Open Science Data Foundation (OSDF) caches. This is something that I can assist to implement back in South Africa – my next steps are to determine a suitable hardware platform to deploy the cache service. Access will be provided to the OSDF cache team who will deploy and manage the service using Kubernetes (an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications). This service will enable researchers to access required datasets more readily without having to large data sets over long distances each time.
Something that was surprising to see was how “cool” this (mostly) technical community could be – A Game of Thrones celebrity attempted and succeed at a world record lift challenge at the VDURA Booth! And there were many vendor after-parties – more than I could attend in one day or even a week!
Fortunately, I also got to see many highlights of Atlanta. There were various evening receptions and events hosted at landmarks throughout the city such as the Aquarium and College Football Hall of Fame. At my own expense, I was also able to visit the World of Coca-Cola and the botanical gardens.
On a personal note – this was my first trip away from my two-year old, but I am so glad that I had this experience both personally and professionally. I came back reenergized (not only because I reached all my exercise goals with the amount of walking done that week) and my family was more than happy to have me back along with some freebies from the conference exhibitors.
Thanks again to Elizabeth and her team. A highlight of the week was to see STEM-Trek win the 2024 HPC Wire Award for Workforce Diversity and Inclusion Leadership award and my colleague, Bryan Johnston, won the Outstanding Leadership in HPC award – in my opinion these were most well-deserved (I voted!)– please keep up the great work!
