SCinet Diversity Program

Call for Participation - Open until July 10, 2015

I.  SUMMARY

SCinet, the Supercomputing Conference’s (SC) dedicated high-performance research network and backbone of information and communication is seeking qualified female U.S. candidates in their early to mid-career to join the SCinet volunteer workforce for SC15. Selected candidates will receive full travel support and mentoring by well-known engineering experts in the research and education community.

The proposal team is:  Marla Meehl - NCAR/UCAR (PI), Mary Hester (ESnet), Wendy Huntoon (KINBER), Lauren Rotman (ESnet), Jason Zurawski (ESnet).

SCinet provides an ideal "apprenticeship" opportunity for engineers and technologists looking for direct access to the most cutting-edge network hardware and software, while working side by side with the world’s leading network and software engineers, and the top network technology vendors.  

There are more than 15 teams that comprise SCinet, all focused on specific areas of expertise involved in setting up and operating a research network. Selected candidates will be matched with a mentor in one of these areas based on interest and background. Some learning and training opportunities include (but are not limited to):

• Operating and maintaining traditional “IT” services for SCinet;

• Installing fiber optic network connections;

• Installing and configuring wireless access points;

• Installing and configuring wired network devices for conference meeting rooms;

• Managing internet routing protocols;

• Configuring wide-area network connections to national telecom providers;

• Supporting conference attendees,  high-performance computing (HPC) and high-performing network demonstrations;

• Participating in cybersecurity activities focused on prevention, detection, and countermeasures to protect the resources of the conference.

II. BACKGROUND

SC is an annual conference co-sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The conference focuses on the science and application of HPC and communication technologies. Since 1988, volunteers funded from academic, government and corporate organizations in the HPC industry have worked together to produce the SC Conference series.  

The conference attracts over 10,000 technical program attendees, exhibitors and exhibit visitors. SC has been the breeding ground for the technologies that now underpin services ranging from cloud computing, high speed Internet services, and current ubiquitous computing architectures.

Attendees are primarily computer engineers, computer scientists, computational scientists and managers/executives of computing facilities who use high-speed and high-performance computers for research and other technical applications. Executives, sales and engineering managers from companies involved in producing and selling HPC products and services also attend and participate.   

SCinet provides the essential advanced and commodity networking the conference needs to support large-scale HPC demos.  In recent years, SCinet has delivered bandwidths exceeding 1 terabit per second and has had the opportunity to utilize new services. And for SC15, SCinet will be implementing production software-defined networking on the exhibit show-floor.

III. Project Measurement

After completion of the conference, participants will be asked to report on their experiences and touch on topics such as: what part of the training was new or useful, which learning experiences were not effective or valuable, and other targeted questions that will help drive the future of gender diversity outreach efforts. This reflection will be shared with their home institution, SCinet leadership, project PIs, and the National Science Foundation.

IV. Selection Criteria

Candidates will be reviewed by a panel of experts from the research and education community for current job relevance, stated support from applicant’s employer, ability to attend the conference (we will take care of the travel costs but you must be able to set aside time to attend), areas of interest (see application form), and desire to participate in SCinet!

The review committee will select up to five candidates to receive funding to set up SCinet at the SC conference in Austin, Texas from November 8-20, 2015. Final candidates will be notified by August 14, 2015.

V. Proposal Submission:

Please review and fill out the application at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwuiWtHaa8YWRVFVd09GemdMd0U/view?usp=sharing

Email the completed application form with accompanying documentation to sc-women@ucar.edu.