Andrew Crighton
Staff Writer
Nov. 15 marks the beginning of the twenty-seventh Annual Supercomputing Convention (SC) in Austin, Texas, and it will run until Nov. 20. The conference is where all sectors of the High Performance Computing business, including industry, academia and government, display their newest technology and discoveries as well as provide lectures, research papers and workshops for those attending.
Megan Sorensen is a network administrator for IT networking and communications systems, specializing in wireless for ISU, but is also part of the wireless network team at the SC convention. Sorensen is part of the team that designs and maintains the wireless connections all across campus, troubleshooting as problems arise. Her experience in this field is one of the reasons she was selected as one of five women across the nation to receive funding to be a part of the SC conference.
“From what I can gather in talking to my team leads, that’s essentially what I’ll be down there,” said Sorensen. “It’s just much bigger scale and for a shorter time period.”
The scale Sorensen mentioned is much, much bigger as she will be working with SCinet, the dedicated network providing wireless connectivity to attendees of the convention, as well as the network for exhibitors and researches around the world to demonstrate their latest high performance applications and discoveries.
SCinet is expected to provide over one terabit per second of bandwidth. To put that in perspective, the average home internet connection is around 10 to 13 megabits per second, which means that SCinet is over 100,000 times faster.
At last year’s SC conference, SCinet wireless connected almost 4,000 clients at the same time on the same network around the clock.
Sorensen and the wireless network team will be designing, maintaining and troubleshooting this colossal network.
Sorensen will be leaving to begin setup of the network on Nov. 8 and will return Nov. 22, a substantial amount of time for someone to be gone from work, but the department of information technology services has been very understanding about the prestigious opportunity Sorensen has been given.
“ISU and Mark Norviel, my manager, and Randy Gains, the [chief information officer] for ITS, wrote me a note basically telling me I still would have a job when I got back,” said Sorensen, adding, “so just the support from here is tremendous.”
The technology industry is largely male dominated, which is another reason Sorensen was selected by the conventions collaboration, Women in IT Networking at Super Computing Conference (WINS), whose goal is to expand diversity within the conventions volunteer group.
“I’m excited to meet other women in my field, other people that I can bond with and relate to,” said Sorensen.
Being a part of this team is being part of the team that provides the backbone for the entire SC convention, which is sure to provide a lot of experience.
“This is a great opportunity for me to bring back new knowledge to our campus and try to implement it,” said Sorensen.
For more information about Super Computing Convention 2015, go to http://sc15.supercomputing.org
