Graduate and undergraduate students from around the world are convening at SC16 to exchange ideas and make connections that impact much more than supercomputing. Here’s a glimpse of some of their interests and observations.
SC16 is Michal Naskret’s fourth year of student volunteering. Naskret, from University of Wroclaw in Poland, is pursuing a Ph.D. in physics. “I’ve made a lot of friends here from all over the world. That also helps to develop new solutions in physics. Interesting things come up on the border of different sciences, so if you try to combine physics and HPC there might be something amazing coming out of it.”
Hensley Omorodion with the University of Benin in Nigeria is also in his fourth year of volunteering for SC events. “High performance computing is still very much in its embryonic stage back home. My mentor told me to start a special interest group and then build it up. So we started a special interest group in 2015 and, with SCinet on top of that, it makes me like a pro. So now I’m taking [this knowledge] back home.”
Jeremy Musser who is starting his Ph.D. program in intelligent systems engineering at Indiana University says he appreciates the varied experience SCinet provides. “I came here last year and had a ton of fun. I’m a Ph.D. student in this field because I love doing the work. I also think it is genuinely important, and contributing my time to SCinet is something worth doing.”
Erik Kooistra of Universtiteit van Amsterdam appreciates the detailed choreography. “It’s almost a dance how the whole setup goes, and it’s really impressive how everything fits together like pieces of a puzzle. So we start with laying fiber and after that the booth builders come in, and we were doing the wireless deployment, so it is amazing to see how quick everything is put together.”
“What each person contributes is a little piece in what makes everything work and it is almost magical how in a time period of three weeks, including staging, we can go from just having the equipment to setting it up, deploying it, tearing it down and packing everything up,” said Will Killian, graduate student at the University of Delaware.
Sjur Fredriksen, of the University of Oslo in Norway, is getting a master’s degree in programming and networks. “I really enjoyed being a part of the massive project of getting the network set up before this conference. The most surprising thing is that this network is built on equipment from many vendors, which creates a much bigger administrative overhead in administering but we make it work. I also enjoy the social part of our group with people from all over the world learning and working together.”
Julian Hammer, a doctoral researcher at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, has returned for the fifth time to SCinet. Apart from having had the chance to present his research three times in the Technical Program of SC, one of his interests is in networking, which he can dive into for two weeks with SCinet. “As a long-time returnee, I am always looking forward to meet this great group of people again, that are highly professional, but always open to new perspectives and ideas.”
Daniela Novac is a Romanian earning her Ph.D. in Germany at the University of Erlangen. “For the past two years, I have been a member of the network security team. Being a student volunteer has been such a great opportunity to learn so many new things, meet such interesting people, and share their knowledge. I want to come back each year for the great people I get to work with, the friends I have made over the years, and the opportunity to connect with new and interesting people, and face new challenges.”
Abel Souza from Brazil is with Umea University in Sweden. “I’m learning teamwork, how to connect everything together to make such a big conference happen. This is very valuable to me as a Ph.D. student doing resource management in data centers and learning how to make applications run faster. I’m learning so much here to take back home. It’s fun to see the scalability and how this happens in real life in an international community.”
Nathan Hanford is a Ph.D. student from the University of California at Davis. “We’re creating a proof that this is possible. We believe in big science and we want to get this kind of high-speed networking done. There’s a can-do attitude that just pervades SCinet. From carpenters, to people who run fiber and power, everyone has an attitude of let’s do it, let’s build it. That kind of motivation is really exciting.”
A record number of 21 student volunteers from across the world are lending their expertise to SCinet. They’re from Africa, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, as well as California, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Texas and Virginia in the United States. The students are working with each of the SCinet teams including fiber, network security, wide area network, wireless, power, logistics and measurement, according to Laura Pettit, SCinet student volunteers co-chair. This year’s SCinet students include:
- Uday Ananth, Virginia Tech University
- Xinchen Guo, Purdue University
- Julian Hammer, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
- Nathan Hanford, University of California at Davis
- Umar Kalim, Virginia Tech University
- William Killian, University of Delaware
- Erik Kooistra, Universtiteit van Amsterdam
- Stefan Kosnac, University of Heidelberg
- Steffen Lammel, University of Heidelberg
- Henry Moncada, University of Texas at El Paso
- Jeremy Musser, Indiana University
- Michal Naskret, University of Wroclaw
- Daniela Novac, University of Erlangen
- Hensley Omorodion, University of Benin, Africa HPC chair
- Gonzalo Rodrigo Alvarez, Umea University
- Dominik Thoennes, University of Erlangen
- Martin Wenzel, University of Heidelberg
- Felix Zahn, University of Heidelberg
- Eduardo Berrocal, Illinois Institute of Technology
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