The Future of Robotics Meets SC

As SC grows every year, so do our opportunities for outreach to the community. During SC25 in St. Louis, SCinet provided an opportunity for local student organizations to visit the conference and explore SC. One of the groups that took advantage of the occasion was the FIRST Robotics Competition team from Wentzville, Mo., Ratchet Rocker Robotics. FIRST is a leading youth STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education organization with different programs for kindergarten through high school. They provide hands-on projects to schools and communities, having reached more than four million participants since 1989.

“We knew reaching out to FIRST would be a home run,” said Vennela Gajjala, SCinet project manager and FIRST alumni. “These are students who are already interested in STEM, and we knew that they would have a great time.”

The team of five high school students and their two mentors started their day at the conference as soon as the exhibitor hall opened. They were given a tour of the SCinet stage and an overview of the equipment that makes SC work by Gajjala and Brian Smith, the SCinet Contributor Relations team lead and a FIRST mentor. During this part of the visit, the students received an overview about all of SCinet’s moving parts. They learned about Wide Area Networks (WAN), patching, firewalls, and routing protocols. Following exploration of the SCinet stage, the students were given a hands-on demo of fusion fiber splicing from Angela Diahkah and Corey Yepa of JNET (Jemez Pueblo Tribal Network). Fusion splicing fiber is an intricate process that involves cutting, cleaning, and fusion splicing millimeter-wide glass cables. During this demonstration, the students were able to field splice their own fiber optic cables.

Following this interactive lesson, the students went to see an exhibit known as Art of HPC, a showcase of the intersection between artistic creativity and high performance computing. The students also were able to observe and interact with the SC Student Cluster Competition, an event some of them might participate in in the future. 

FIRST team demo in SCinet during SC25.

We got to see the teamwork it took to make this whole convention possible, and how the corporations and institutions involved were able to use this supercomputer. We also learned about the frameworks and APIS. We also got to learn how to splice fiber cable, which was really hard to do! We visited the student cluster competition, where they looked really locked in, which is similar to FRC, so we understand how that feels.

— Izzy Hufty and Trey Utley, Ratchet Rocker Robotics FIRST Team

Following the SCinet guided tour, the robotics team took a break from all the activities for lunch, which gave them time to explore the show floor and see new technologies from all across the HPC landscape. 

After the break, it was Ratchet Rocker Robotics time to shine. The team brought their own robot and put on a display of its capabilities in the center of the SCinet booth. The student explained their FIRST challenge goals and why they had made certain design decisions to members of SCinet. 

The Ratchet Rocker Robotics team’s visit to the SC Conference and tours with SCinet was a rewarding and engaging experience for both the students and the SCinet team. This year’s theme, HPC Unites, has made it a key goal to bring in the community to experience SC and HPC. If you are a local educator or mentor in the Chicago area and would like to bring your students to SC26, please contact the Community Engagement committee, or email Jennifer Kim, Community Engagement Liaison for SCinet. SCinet also would like to thank Hester Menier, one of the team mentors; Laura Roth, Missouri FIRST Director; and SCinet for making this possible. 

“It was fascinating seeing the miles of cables and other infrastructure required to make a single supercomputer work,” added Menier, a National Board Certified Teacher and Ratchet Rocker Robotics Team Sponsor. “I loved getting time to interact with the team that maintains all of the fiber optic cables throughout the convention center. They shared with us a glimpse into the skills they have learned and used to better their community.” 

“To fully understand the actual computing power that was accessible to researchers and corporations to solve some of the world’s biggest problems was mind blowing,” she concluded. “I was so excited to have my students see all the possibilities of career pathways in the technology community and be able to ask the professionals questions about what they do and how they came to be part of the tech world.”