SCinet’s Helpful ‘Heartbeat’: Help Desk Team

Putting together the world’s fastest temporary network is no small feat. Much of the organizing required to pull it off begins with the SCinet Team Leads. SCinet’s Team Leads are “the people behind the power,” who keep all the activities focused and volunteers working in step. Of the nearly 22 teams that make up SCinet, the Help Desk Team might be considered  “the heartbeat,” the conduit between building the SCinet infrastructure and supporting the thousands of attendees and exhibitors who use the network during the conference. For SC26, the Help Desk Team leads are Jan Laukemann, a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) Erlangen who also works at the National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU), and Remy Scott, an Engineering Scientist Associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). 

High-Impact Volunteers

Before they roll into Chicago for SC26, Remy and Jan shared what inspired them to become Team Leads, including what SC means to them and the tremendous impact SC has on their home organizations as a result of their volunteer roles in SCinet. 

Q: How long have you been part of SC and SCInet? 

Jan: I started in SCinet as a student volunteer in 2017, though I actually attended SC as part of a student team for the Student Cluster Competition in 2016. I spent three years as a student volunteer. Then, everyone of course had to skip a year or two due to COVID (in 2020 and 2021), but I was back in 2022 as a Help Desk volunteer and have been a Team Lead in the last several years, working with Remy.  

Remy: I started with SC in 2012 when I volunteered to manage the TACC booth, which is one of  the largest booths on the show floor. Being a Help Desk Team Lead at TACC and then also having the experience of managing the TACC SC booth gives me two important perspectives that serve me well as Team Lead on the SCinet Help Desk since I’ve really been on both sides of the experience. It can get stressful, and there is a lot of pressure to ensure things go smoothly for all exhibitors and attendees. I want everyone to be happy – whether it is a new smaller booth that just is relying on the SCinet WiFi or a large 400 GB booth.  

Q: Tell us a little about the Help Desk Team. What are the team’s main functions?  

Jan and Remy: The Help Desk Team serves as the first point of contact for exhibitors regarding all SCinet services. The team provides tier-one support to exhibitors and escalates requests to other teams as necessary for resolution. The SCinet Help Desk operates year round but is most busy during the conference. The SCinet Help Desk gets incredibly busy once the show actually starts obviously. In July, after the exhibitor connection requests go in the Help Desk, activities pick up a little leading up to staging, but the real crux of activity is during the show itself. During SC, the student volunteers are absolutely essential to the Help Desk. The Help Desk student volunteer team allows for the number of humans required to support an event as large as SC with a network as complex as SCinet at scale for hundreds of exhibitors in a way that everyone is happy and proud  of the show. 

Q: What motivates you to keep volunteering for SCinet? 

Jan: SC, and in particular for me SCinet, really is a super fun and cool community – more like a family to me and to so many other volunteers. Making connections with people in the SCinet  community and on the other SCinet teams as part of our work putting on the conference, but even  through things like the SCinet 5Ks, are really rewarding and keep me volunteering each year. 

Remy: Working with the student volunteers on the Help Desk team is extremely rewarding and  gratifying for me. I love the diversity of students coming from all corners of the Earth. It actually  gives me hope for the future to see how they can interact and work with each other. Just like at  TACC, when you take the big iron away, it is the people that are our most valuable resource. This is  true for SCinet and SC as well. The tools have a finite lifespan, but guiding the students on the “soft  skills” of Help Desk and having this impact on student volunteers at this early stage in their careers  is really what motivates me to keep doing it. Any school rivalries go out the window, and the entire  community simply gets down to world changing science. The legacy of being involved in advancing  HPC at this level and contributing to this global community and advancement of science collectively  is really what motivates me.  

Q: What do your home institutions (i.e., your employers) get out of your volunteering? Why do organizations around the world continue to send their top talent to SC each year to volunteer with SCinet?  

Remy: When you volunteer with SCinet, you are working with the crème de la crème of networking. But not just networking, also devops, security, routing, and all the other functions and SCinet teams that make the behind the scenes infrastructure, which is literally the best and fastest in the world, possible. Being able to positively represent TACC in this community and have TACC so well represented among these global experts is essential to TACC’s visibility, reputation, and brand. We’ve also been able to bring resources and expertise to TACC through new hires and other ways that would not have been possible without the connection of SC and volunteering on SCinet. 

Jan: For my institution, it is an investment in personnel, in keeping people happy and satisfied  because they get to have these other incredible experiences and build their professional networks. It is also global visibility for my home institution, which enhances our organization’s visibility and  prominence among the most talented network engineers, researchers, and technical community in  the world. And many of the volunteers across the other SCinet teams get hands-on experience with  new, leading-edge hardware, which they might not get otherwise. That experience and knowledge  then gets brought back and disseminated to others in the volunteer’s home organization. This is not  insignificant and provides a great opportunity for volunteers and first-hand experience and  knowledge back to the home institutions.  

Learn More

To learn more about SC26 SCinet’s Help Desk Team Leads follow Remy and Jan on LinkedIn and swing by the Help Desk and say “Hello” to them in Chicago this November!  

Remy Scott

Engineering Scientist Associate at Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)

TACC on LinkedIn

Jan Laukemann

PhD Student, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) Erlangen

National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU)

FAU on Linkedin