Working Group on Open Science Cybersecurity Risks Releases First Document Draft for Public Comment

2016-10-312016-10-27 ~ ESnetComms

sean-and-dop — Michael Dopheide (left) and Sean Peisert (right).

Over the past several months, ESnet and the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence collaborated with research and education community leaders to develop a risk profile for open science to formally capture and benchmark this expertise, allowing other organizations to apply these best practices more broadly.

Today, the group is releasing its draft Open Science Cyber Risk Profile (OSCRP) and inviting comment from the research community. The OSCRP is designed to help principal investigators and their supporting information technology professionals assess cybersecurity risks related to open science projects. The draft document, along with information on how to comment, can be found at http://trustedci.github.io/OSCRP/.

Managing the security risks to scientific instruments, data and cyberinfrastructure is a priority for creating a trustworthy environment for science. Assessing, understanding and managing concerns of open science to explicitly capture risks to its integrity and availability, and sometimes also privacy issues, involves making judgments on the likelihood and consequences of risks. Deep experience in understanding cybersecurity and the science being supported is needed to achieve these goals.

The group invites comments on the document prior to final publication in early 2017. Longer-term, the document is intended to be a living, community document, being updated as open science computing evolves, and also as new approaches to security arise.

About the OSCRP Working Group

Organized by Sean Peisert and Michael Dopheide from ESnet, and Von Welch and Andrew Adams from the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, the working group consists of: RuthAnne Bevier (Caltech), Rich LeDuc (Northwestern), Pascal Meunier (HUBzero), Stephen Schwab (USC Information Sciences Institute) and Karen Stocks (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), Ilkay Altintas (San Diego Supercomputer Center), James Cuff (Harvard), Reagan Moore (iRods), and Warren Raquel (NCSA/UIUC). To follow the activities of the working group, please follow http://blog.trustedci.org/.

About the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence • trustedci.org

The Center for Trustworthy Scientific Cyberinfrastructure (CTSC) is funded as the National Science Foundation’s Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. The mission of CTSC is to improve the cybersecurity of NSF science and engineering projects, allowing those projects to focus on their science endeavors. This mission is accomplished through one-on-one engagements with projects to address their specific challenges; education, outreach, and training to raise the state of security practice across the scientific enterprise; and leadership on bringing the best and most relevant cybersecurity research to bear on the NSF cyberinfrastructure research community.

About ESnet • www.es.net

The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is an international, high-performance, unclassified network built to support scientific research. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (SC) and managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ESnet provides services to more than 40 DOE research sites, including the entire National Laboratory system, its supercomputing facilities, and its major scientific instruments. ESnet also connects to over 140 research and commercial networks, permitting DOE-funded scientists to collaborate productively with partners around the world.

National Science Foundation & Department of Energy’s ESnet Launch Innovative Program for Women Engineers

2016-10-262016-11-07 ~ ESnetComms

Women in Networking @SC (WINS) Kicks off this week in Salt Lake City!

WINS Participants — (Left to Right) Julia Locke (LANL), Debbie Fligor (SC15 WINS returning participant, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Jessica Schaffer (Georgia Tech), Indira Kassymkhanova (LBNL), Denise Grayson (Sandia), Kali McLennan (Univ. of Oklahoma), Angie Asmus (CSU). Not in photo: Amber Rasche (N. Dakota State) and Julie Staats (CENIC).

Salt Lake City, UT – October 26, 2016 – The University of Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and The Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER) together with the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Science Network (ESnet) today announce the official launch of the Women in Networking at SC (WINS) program.

Funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and directly from ESnet, the program funds eight early to mid-career women in the research and education (R&E) network community to participate in the 2016 setup, build out and live operation of SCinet, the Supercomputing Conference’s (SC) ultra high performance network. SCinet supports large-scale computing demonstrations at SC, the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, data storage and data analysis and is attended by over 10,000 of the leading minds in these fields.

The SC16 WINS program kicked off this week as the selected participants from across the U.S., headed to Salt Lake City, the site of the 2016 conference to begin laying the groundwork for SCinet inside the Salt Palace Convention Center. The WINS participants join over 250 volunteers that make up the SCinet engineering team and will work side by side with the team and their mentors to put the network into full production service when the conference begins on November 12. The women will return to Salt Lake City a week before the conference to complete the installation of the network.

“We are estimating that SCinet will be outfitted with a massive 3.5 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth for the conference and will be built from the ground up with leading edge network equipment and services (even pre-commercial in some instances) and will be considered the fastest network in the world during its operation,” said Corby Schmitz, SC16 SCinet Chair.

The WINS participants will support a wide range of technical areas that comprise SCinet’s incredible operation, including wide area networking, network security, wireless networking, routing, network architecture and other specialties.

20161024_112607 — Several WINS participants hard at work with their mentors configuring routers & switches

“While demand for jobs in IT continues to increase, the number of women joining the IT workforce has been on the decline for many years,” said Marla Meehl, Network Director from UCAR and co-PI of the NSF grant. “WINS aims to help close this gap and help to build and diversify the IT workforce giving women professionals a truly unique opportunity to gain hands-on expertise in a variety of networking roles while also developing mentoring relationships with recognized technical leaders.”

Funds are being provided by the NSF through a $135,000 grant and via direct funding from ESnet supported by Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) in DOE Office of Science. Funding covers all travel expenses related to participating in the setup and operation of SCinet and will also provide travel funds for the participants to share their experiences at events like The Quilt Member Meetings, Regional Networking Member meetings, and the DOE National Lab Information Technology Annual Meeting.

“Not only is WINS providing hands-on engineering training to the participants but also the opportunity to present their experiences with the broader networking community throughout the year. This experience helps to expand important leadership and presentations skills and grow their professional connections with peers and executives alike,” said Wendy Huntoon, president and CEO of KINBER and co-PI of the NSF grant.

The program also represents a unique cross-agency collaboration between the NSF and DOE. Both agencies recognize that the pursuit of knowledge and science discovery that these funding organizations support depends on bringing the best ideas from people of various backgrounds to the table.

“Bringing together diverse voices and perspectives to any team in any field has been proven to lead to more creative solutions to achieve a common goal,” says Lauren Rotman, Science Engagement Group Lead, ESnet. “It is vital to our future that we bring every expert voice, every new idea to bear if our community is to tackle some of our society’s grandest challenges from understanding climate change to revolutionizing cancer treatment.”

2016 WINS Participants are:

Denise Grayson, Sandia National Labs (Network Security Team), DOE-funded
Julia Locke, Los Alamos National Lab (Fiber and Edge Network Teams), DOE-funded
Angie Asmus, Colorado State (Edge Network Team), NSF-funded
Kali McLennan, University of Oklahoma (WAN Transport Team), NSF-funded
Amber Rasche, North Dakota State University (Communications Team), NSF-funded
Jessica Shaffer, Georgia Institute of Tech (Routing Team), NSF-funded
Julia Staats, CENIC (DevOps Team), NSF-funded
Indira Kassymkhanova, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (DevOps and Routing Teams), DOE-funded

The WINS Supporting Organizations:
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)
http://www2.ucar.edu/

The Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER)
http:www.kinber.org

THe Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
http://www.es.net

ESnet Talks Science Cyberinfrastructure with NSF and Tweet the Quilt

2016-10-182016-10-27 ~ ESnetComms

Th ESnet_Final_Logos_All_Blue_Circle_Stamp_RGB is month, the Department of Energy’s ESnet co-located its bi-annual Site Coordinators Committee (ESCC) meeting with The Quilt’s Fall Meeting, as well as the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Campus CyberInfrastructure and Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure P.I. Workshops at the Marriott Downtown in Philadelphia, Penn. Holding all four meetings in one location allowed engineers and researchers to have fruitful discussions that highlight areas of science and related cyberinfrastructure that are important to the combined communities.

The co-located agenda included panel discussions on topics such as:

“National Cybersecurity,” facilitated by Berkeley Lab’s Sean Peisert. ESnet’s Michael Sinatra was a panelist.
“Science Engagement – Bridging the Gaps,” facilitated by ESnet’s Lauren Rotman. Berkeley Lab’s Craig Tull was a panelist.
“Climate Science Infrastructure Support,” facilitated by Colorado State University’s Christos Papadopoulos. Travis O’Brian from Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Area was a panelist.

The meeting was held October 18-21, 2016.