Please meet our newest Network Operations Center Engineer, John Amerkhanian. John comes to us from Richmond, CA, and grew up locally in Albany, CA. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2015 with a degree in Political Science.

What brought you to ESnet?

As a kid growing up in the Berkeley area, you always heard about how there is exciting research happening in the LBNL buildings up on the hill. When my friend got a job with ESnet in 2016, I knew I’d like to join them there someday. I’m very excited to support some of the best energy researchers in the world and can’t wait to see how they’re improving the ways we produce, consume, and store energy. 

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

Without a doubt it’s the leaps and bounds made in computer processor development, these days you can get a processor that is a fraction of the size of a Pentium 4 with nearly double the processing power and very low energy usage. The computing applications for these processors in my field are very exciting.

What book would you recommend?

Steve Wozniak’s autobiography “iWoz”

Three questions with a new staff member!  Today, Joseph (Joe) Nasal, who has joined our Business Office as a Project Manager.

After graduating from Temple University, Joe began his career designing broadband Radio Frequency-hybrid fiber networks and management software for some of the first residential cable modem deployments in the country.  Early on, he also worked in defense and designed and operated private secure communications networks for federal contractors.  He spent the past two decades supporting higher education through roles in engineering, technical architecture, project management, and leadership. His work helped transform data communication at Pennsylvania State University, preparing the campus for tremendous growth in teaching and research. 

What brought you to ESnet?

I’ve been architecting and managing very large communication network design and implementation projects for most of my career.  After nearly 20 years at Penn State, it was time for a career change.  One of my close colleagues recently came to ESnet in support of Science Engagement, and when I learned through him of an opportunity to help with such exciting and important growth on a national scale I was very happy to find a place in the organization.  I’ll be operating out of my home office in State College, PA.

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

In data communications, it’s about getting more for less—more throughput, more distance, more fidelity, for less cost.  Cost is measured in units like dollars, or time, or energy, or human effort, and those of us who work in this space are always trying to optimize these resources. This is an exciting time because it seems like we’re on the cusp of training machines to give us a magnitude leap forward in efficiencies via automated processes and learning algorithms. But it’s going to take clear human vision to get us to where we want to be, which means as engineers, we will continue to have fun solving big problems. 

What book would you recommend?

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a biography of Paul Erdős.  Paul was one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century whose work has implications for both computer science and information theory.  He was an eccentric genius and his personal story is a fascinating one to follow. As engineers, I think it’s important to be aware of and appreciate the great thinkers who exist at the very base level of abstraction with respect to the technologies we use and build upon. 

In 2017 ESnet, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation, created a series of  bi-weekly talks on network engineering and research engagement topics. These “Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Engineering Lunch & Learn” presentations, held every other  Friday afternoon at 2:00pm ET, have become an important way for engineers from the  research and education community to share technical best practices for deploying and operating laboratory and campus networks. It has also served as a social event for a common community of interest especially during the pandemic. 

On March 12th, ESnet’s  Jason Zurawski  – who developed and still leads the events –  will convene the 100th CI Engineering Lunch and Learn.  A complete set of recordings of past sessions is available on the EPOC YouTube Channel located here. An anniversary is always a chance to look back on what has been accomplished; here are 5 Questions with Jason to get his thoughts on the Lunch and Learn series.

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Thinking back over the past 100 talks, which have particularly stuck in your mind?

The best turn-out and feedback that I receive from the participants comes from either “hot topics” or engaging speakers.  

For instance, we have had a number of popular, well attended talks on the development of the BBR protocol (going as far back as 2017). .  Other sessions  that were well attended focused on topics like perfSONAR, Science DMZ, and Data Transfer; all of these are critical to building an effective and high performing cyberinfrastructure that supports data transfers in service of global science collaborations.

Other critical talks come from innovative and important voices from the R&E community.  Hyojoon Kim from Princeton talking about P4 and how it is used on their campus to facilitate network  research (https://youtu.be/R2UQH4Y8Uec), and the perfSONAR project’s use of new measurement protocols such as TWAMP (https://youtu.be/7wRZbmKmtAY) are great examples of these kind of talks. As of last year, many of these folks would have given a talk ‘in person’ at a conference, but have not been able to do so due to the pandemic.  We have also done a number of tutorials and project updates that remain popular.  For example, tutorials by Fatema Bannat Wala on Zeek Use Cases  and by Alan Whinery with University of Hawaii on IPv6 Deployment, have been especially notable.

Have you seen a change in attendance or role for these CI events from before the pandemic and now?

We have seen moderate (10-15%) increases for both the live and recorded sessions  during the week of a talk. We have also seen a similar increase in subscription to our membership list since its inception in 2017. .  Some of the “tutorial” content has increased viewership over time – perhaps as the pandemic lets our audience review content from home, that they were not able to previously study due to a lack of time. This is a net positive, as it points to a general trend that it is easier/more desirable to watch a video on a topic (e.g. deploying software) versus reading documentation/following instructions.  

What makes for a successful CI talk?

Passion from the speaker is very important. We want to hear from community members that are excited about what they are presenting: a research project, a new operational component, or a problem they want to solve (or have solved). Speaking from experience is also valuable, as the audience wants to know deep technical details for most of the talks. 

What do you think has been the biggest challenge keeping this series going?

We’ve  always had  willing presenters, and to date, we are always able to schedule between 20 and 30 talks over the course of the year. The primary challenge is making sure we can continue to find fresh perspectives that hit on some core values:

• Supporting the diversity of voices (gender, ethnicity, institutional background). When reflecting on the prior 100 talks, we unfortunately skewed strongly away from these diverse categories; this is a trend that must be reversed. Recruitment to address this is already underway for 2021 and beyond.  
• Focusing on talks that address the needs of modern CI: operational best practices, policy choices, translation of research to production, etc.  
• Ensuring our audience is growing. These talks assist in bringing new contributors up to speed vis a vis retirements and other attrition where knowledge may not be passed down to newcomers.

What do you think will be major themes in the next 100 hundred CI sessions?

A theme we have encouraged from the start is to share what we know, and acknowledge what we don’t know. We want to see the major institutions and facilities pass on the lessons they have fought hard to learn and implement so that campuses of  smaller size with limited CI  knowledge level can benefit. Similarly, we want those individuals that are not as experienced  to be vocal and ask (potentially hard) questions to the community to drive what needs to be presented and discussed.  

I believe that policy (e.g. long term care, maintenance, upgrades, sustainability) of CI will be an ongoing concern as we approach 10 or more years of operations for some facilities. Security is always a hot area, as the threats continue and adapt over time. Technology continues to evolve and upgrade rapidly, so hearing about the ‘latest and greatest’ will also drive content and speakers for the talks.

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Jason, thank you for running the CI series, and all the hard work associated with keeping a regular technical exchange going like clockwork during a pandemic. I look forward to the next 100 CI Lunch & Learn!

Three questions with a new staff member on our Software Engineering – Orchestration and Core Data Team!

Karim comes to us from Carnegie Mellon University, where he served as a Software Engineer in the Network Services group. In that role, he designed, implemented, deployed, and maintained numerous applications to provide support to the campus network infrastructure. He has worked on a diverse set of network computing problems with a focus on automation and self-service utilities. Karim is proficient in a multitude of application development stacks but has a special place in his heart for those that put Python in the mix.

What brought you to ESnet?

I’ve always had a profound curiosity for the intersection of mathematics, science, and technology. Starting with a strong foundation in mathematics, I learned how to better apply my problem-solving  skills by pursuing graduate work in computational biology. It was there that I discovered how next-generation computing technologies could radically transform and elevate entire scientific fields. I’ve been seeking to utilize the skills I’ve built up over my 15 years of industry experience to help build tools for scientists, to empower them, and help them achieve discoveries in a world that is becoming ever increasingly more complex. The work being done at ESnet lines up perfectly with this goal in mind.

What is the most exciting thing going on in software engineering right now?

I would say the rapid proliferation of containerization technologies and the use of cloud infrastructure for distributed computing problems, as well as advancements in machine learning libraries and toolkits that let scientists more easily simplify the manipulation and analysis of large datasets. Many of these concepts were in their infancy or early stages only a decade ago, and now they’re everywhere and I’m happy to see how fast they’ve been adopted.

What book would you recommend?

Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe by J. Richard Gott. An accessible read for laymen like me, about how one would — given some ridiculous assumptions — go about creating various time machines.

You may have noticed that the masthead has changed.  After almost a decade, we have finally decided that the “ESnet Blog” deserves a less literal name. “Light Bytes” was selected to better embody two things about which we at ESnet are especially proud.  

First, getting to build the world’s greatest research and education network, and to support global science is a great honor and a technical challenge.  Through ESnet6 and our continuing research, we are advancing our mission of making scientific data free of geographical constraints, to “make bytes light” in terms of fast transport, and to deploy state of the art optical network for “bytes being transported by light.”

Second, while ESnet is officially a DOE User Facility, it is most importantly a remarkable group of people. We hope that this website will show a bit about the great people who make our mission happen and the interesting problems we get to work on.  In that sense, “Light Bytes” is a small written offering, a collection of features about things that are happening while the cause of “networking for science” and “science of networking” progresses.