Kapil Agrawal comes to us from National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he worked as a Network Engineer focusing on HPC data center networking and all things automation. Before that, Kapil worked as a Network Engineer at GlobalNOC focusing on service provider networking for regional R&E networks. He is passionate about learning and tinkering with new open source technologies in his home lab, intense hackathons, and infrastructure-as-code. In his downtime, Kapil enjoys high intensity interval training, traveling and exploring new places, competitive gaming, and playing with Juniper (his cat).

What brought you to ESnet?

ESnet’s mission to innovate, build, and support a bleeding edge network infrastructure for scientific computing, empowers researchers to focus on what’s core to them—the science. This is very exciting but it also comes with challenges in terms of security. We want to be open to share the science with our collaborators, but not too open to the point where bad actors take advantage of us. Where does one draw the line? That is the challenge and that’s what makes cyber security in scientific computing so interesting! I am also familiar with the innovative work that ESnet security does for the R&E community and I am excited about the opportunity to learn and grow with the team and to give back to the community in every way possible. 

What is the most exciting thing going on in your field right now?

Coming from a networking background, I find MANRS (Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security) very exciting. It’s a herculean effort by the larger networking community to secure the global internet routing infrastructure. 

What book would you recommend?

Books in the order from non-technical to most technical : Atomic Habits, The Phoenix project, Where Wizards stay up late (The origins of the internet), and Internet routing architectures.