GPN 2024 Annual Meeting

Welcome and opening. Introduction from Breakfast sponsor TBD.

Pierrette Renée Dagg will present our keynote morning session.

serves as the Director of Research MERIT Network, a leading Research and Education network. MERIT Network, as a member of the Northern Tier Network Consortium, collaborates with other regional networks to address the digital divide and support educational institutions.

Pierrette's leadership has been pivotal in fostering collaboration between educational institutions, industry partners, and government entities to address the digital divide faced by rural communities. Through her strategic initiatives, she has facilitated the connection of educational institutions within Michigan and the Northern Tier Network Consortium, enabling access to resources, research opportunities, and educational programs previously unavailable in underserved areas.

Recently, under Pierrette's guidance, MERIT Network secured a significant grant from the USDA to further their mission of bridging the digital gap in agricultural regions. Her expertise in managing and implementing grants underscores her commitment to leveraging technology to support educational institutions and rural communities alike.
She looks forward to sharing her insights at the Great Plains Network (GPN) Annual Meeting, where she will provide valuable perspectives on the intersection of technology, education, and agriculture.

This is a short break between sessions where you can stretch, get a snack or drink, visit with other attendees, or make a quick phone call.  Also, take the opportunity to visit with our sponsors and exhibitors at their booths.

Representatives from NSF will be onsite with overviews of their agencies’ resources, insights to past funded projects, and opportunities for small group and one-on-one meetings to brainstorm your institution's grant ideas.

The GPN and NTNC region includes more than 100 federally recognized tribes that are in our combined service footprints. Although our member campuses may have developed specific relationships with tribal colleges, less has been accomplished in the fields of digital networking and research technologies. Join this session to explore possibilities for new tribal partnerships. 

The Australian government, along with its academic and commercial organizations, has positioned itself to be a leader in quantum technologies. With the University of Missouri, GPN sponsored a team to attend Quantum Australia 24, themed around the commercialization of quantum technologies. While highlighting many research and speculative topics, the conference provided some grounded insights into near-term practical considerations for QT, including some that can be informative to GPN and its member institutions.

Concurrently, GPN's Executive Director participated in QB23, Practical Quantum Computing, conducted in California's Silicon Valley, with a focus on "rack-mounted" quantum computers, quantum networks, and quantum workforce initiatives. Findings from the conference that are evolving into a GPN-Quantum Initiative will be discussed. 

NTAC will be meeting with Juniper Networks during this time. Not open to members.

Tour of the Greenhouse Innovation Center on the Nebraska Innovation Campus, with digitized environmental controls, LED lights, and a “LemnaTec High-Throughput Plant Phenotyping system.” The twenty foot-plus tiered ceilings add for optimal air circulation, with heat and cooling supplied through sustainable energy.

The GPN 2023 Annual Meeting's Platinum Level Sponsors are offered this opportunity to give lightning talks during this session. 

This is a break.

Lunch for participants will be served buffet style. Attendees are invited to take their meals and enjoy in general session room.

Tour of the Eastern Nebraska Research Extension Education Center (ENREEC) with a focus on precision plant monitoring, irrigation, and fertilization. Attendees will load a bus and travel to the ENREEC.

TBD

NTAC will be meeting with Cisco Systems during this time. Not open to members.

This is a short break between sessions where you can stretch, get a snack or drink, visit with other attendees, or make a quick phone call.  Also, take the opportunity to visit with our sponsors and exhibitors at their booths.

Representatives from NSF will be onsite with overviews of their agencies’ resources, insights to past funded projects, and opportunities for small group and one-on-one meetings to brainstorm ideas.

TBD

In this tutorial, researchers and practitioners will learn to leverage Kubernetes to scale and parallelize AI/ML and advanced analytics workloads, such that they can run their Big Data workloads on any size of cluster, ranging from local to commercial clouds to publicly-funded research platforms.

This tutorial will cover building reproducible and portable containers for software using Docker and deploying them to Kubernetes clusters. Each step of the deployment from local development to Kubernetes cluster deployment will be covered, including building and pushing custom containers to image registries, building Kubernetes pod and job YAML files, and deploying pods and jobs to the cluster. Hands on examples including running ML jobs in the NSF National Research Platform.

The Sponsors Showcase Break is a half-hour break featuring sweet and savory treats along with an opportunity to visit with our amazing sponsors at their booths and network with your peers.

A number of projects related to Quantum physics, chemistry, and technology are occurring within the GPN footprint of which most of us are unaware. Funding varies from state governments, the National Science Foundation, and others. Learn about catalyst projects in the Dakotas, Montana, Arkansas, Nebraska, and more from the researchers involved.

TBD

NTAC will be meeting with Nokia during this time. Not open to members.

Join us for a tour of the Lincoln facility of the Holland Computing Center under UNL's iconic Memorial Stadium. Led by research computing experts, participants will explore the facilities and support tailored for researchers looking to reduce the time-to-science of their research, explore supercomputer architecture, and gaining an insight into the operations of a supercomputing facility supporting a network of Nebraska universities and national projects like USCMS and the National Research Platform.

Welcome and opening. Introduction from Breakfast sponsor TBD.

Create a Radio Broadcast/Podcast on your research while touring the studios of the Nebraska Rural Radio Network.
You must sign up on Eventbrite HERE to go on this tour.

All registered conference attendees and sponsors are invited to the Tuesday night Reception, Scavenger Hunt and Hack-a-thon at the newly renovated University of Nebraska Museum of Natural History, for a night of gaming, socializing, meeting new people, and reconnecting with others whom you may have not seen for some time. Light snacks and drinks will be served. Registered attendees may bring a guest by purchasing a guest ticket during registration or at the Night Reception check-in table. Dress during the reception will be business casual. Only ages 21 and up please.

A favorite from past Annual Meetings is Building Energy Efficient Research Networks (a.k.a. BeerNet), a social gathering. Attendees are invited (but not required) to bring a favorite beverage that is only made in their hometown and join us TBD location for informal discussion while enjoying beverages from around the GPN region.

Breakfast is served buffet style for all registered participants and sponsors (location TBD). Then find a seat to enjoy your breakfast before opening session begins.

Registration and check-in is available at the Registration Table in the main entryway/hallway.

Data Parallelism from Nvidia, taught by Michael Keith.

This workshop teaches you techniques for data-parallel deep learning training on multiple GPUs to shorten the training time required for data-intensive applications. Working with deep learning tools, frameworks, and workflows to perform neural network training, you’ll learn how to decrease model training time by distributing data to multiple GPUs, while retaining the accuracy of training on a single GPU. Prerequisites: Experience with deep learning training using Python.
Max 45 attendees

Growing data volumes, new computing paradigms, and increasing hardware heterogeneity are driving the need to distribute computational tasks across a continuum of computing resources. The Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm pioneered by cloud providers offers a potential solution. FaaS exposes an intuitive and simple interface and provides the ability to break monolithic applications into small schedulable units (functions) that can be executed in different locations and therefore more efficiently.

The session starts with an overview of Globus Compute, a federated FaaS platform designed for research computing use cases and cyberinfrastructure. Over the past three years, the service has been used by thousands of researchers around the world to execute millions of functions across 10,000 distributed computing endpoints deployed on supercomputers, HPC/HTC systems at research computing centers, and on cloud and Kubernetes platforms. Covering the benefits to researchers (e.g., accessibility, scalability, and administration (e.g., reduced support burden, energy efficiency) enabled by distributed execution, the session will also review a number of common use cases that make this service relevant to GPN institutions and their extended communities.

This session is a panel made up of representatives from the various state networks that comprise the Great Plains Network.  The panel will consider and comment on questions regarding how current networking technology, broadband expansion efforts, and security services are impacting their individual state networks and members.

This is a short break between sessions where you can stretch, get a snack or drink, visit with other attendees, or make a quick phone call.  

Learn about opportunities for higher ED's to leverage Universal Service Administrative Company's Rural Healthcare Connect reimbursement program for Research Education Network (REN) fees, managed services, network equipment life-cycle-replacement, and warranties.

University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), e-Link consortia will present the processes for universities and colleges with medical and health accredited programs to receive up to 65% of FCC USAC Rural Healthcare eligible expenses.

UAMS has e-Link consortia members in Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida, and Michigan.

Session talking about KAREN's recent experience and the Nebraska networks upcoming installation of Ciena navigator.

The Engagement and Performance Operations Center (EPOC) helps address barriers to fast and reliable end-to-end data transfers across all levels of the cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. It offers support to the R&E community through the NetSage measurement and monitoring tool kit, through intensive one-on-one work with sites using the Deep Dive approach, through offering baseline testing, and through extensive training workshops. However, the component of EPOC that most members of the R&E community take advantage of is our Roadside Assistance and Consulting.

Roadside Assistance (RA) gives end users a way to ask questions to an experienced team on almost any topic in the R&E networking and the cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. EPOC staff work with all staff and faculty to ensure a positive outcome, including engineers, researchers, operators, and managers. Questions have covered everything from basics (what’s a Science DMZ?) to complex (We need to move 2.5 PB of data to an as-of-yet unknown storage facility as quickly as possible, how do we do this?), to the most common (Can you look at my network design and tell me if it will work for these science workflows?).

This talk will provide an in-depth analysis of the over 350 Roadside Assistance Cases that EPOC has worked on during the last five years. We will walk through some of the most common questions we get, and give the audience pointers to our best practice documents to support common approaches to solve these issues. We’ll also analyze some of our most complex cases, talk in depth about how to balance technical problems with political realities, and give advice regarding how to move forward in situations where you have little or no control of the core components, but still need to make sure you’re supporting scientific outcomes.

New functionality has been added to the Services section of the GlobalNOC Database, the Network Impact Tool, and integrations built within the GlobalNOC instance of ServiceNOW. These enhancements aim to allow users of the system to model redundancy built into Services documented in the GlobalNOC Database. This model can be leveraged in conjunction with GlobalNOC Monitoring systems and the Network Impact Tool to perform impact analysis of the service. This analysis indicates whether a service is fully available, available with a loss of redundancy, or fully impacted. This information is then interpreted by the GlobalNOC ServiceNOW system when sending notifications. These integrations not only allow notifications to be sent that indicate what customer facing services are impacted given an alarm set, but also how impacted those services are; whether it be fully impacted or available with a loss of redundancy.

TBD