What does it take to move scientific data at nearly unimaginable speeds — fast enough to support particle physics, genomics, climate modeling, and space science? At SC25, UMass Amherst IT helped show the world exactly what that looks like.
UMass Amherst Information Technology played a significant role in collaborations and demonstrations at SC25, the world’s largest supercomputing conference, held November 16–21. As a Silver Level sponsor, the university helped demonstrate how next-generation research networks are accelerating scientific discovery across institutions and disciplines.
One of the featured demonstrations was NET2, led by Rafael Coelho Lopes de Sá, a principal investigator in the Department of Physics. The live demo highlighted how researchers can move extremely large datasets between institutions at unprecedented speeds — an increasingly critical capability for data-intensive fields such as physics, genomics, climate science, and astronomy.
UMass Amherst also contributed to a showcase of the SENSE orchestrator, a tool that automates the creation of secure, high-bandwidth network paths for researchers. Developed and tested through collaborations at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), SENSE functions like “traffic control” for scientific data — ensuring massive information flows move quickly, reliably, and with minimal manual configuration.
Supporting these demonstrations required substantial infrastructure. Together, UMass Amherst and MGHPCC contributed nearly $1 million in hardware and resources to SC25, including:
- More than $375,000 in Juniper networking equipment for the SCinet show floor
- Over $500,000 in shared optical networking gear, in collaboration with Caltech and other partners
- Access to UMass’s cutting-edge 800 Gbps networking capabilities through MGHPCC
“UMass is committed to building the kind of research infrastructure that enables discovery,” said Christopher Misra, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer. “SC25 gave us a chance to put that work into a national context, alongside partners who are trying to solve similar problems at scale.”
Key contributors to this year’s effort included UMass network engineer Jessa Westclark, who served on the SCinet team responsible for designing and operating the high-performance network that powered the conference; Josiah Erikson, associate director of research and high performance computing at UMass; Georgia Stuart, research scientist and lead high performance computing facilitator; and Tom Bernardin, UMass IT's senior director of research computing and emerging technology executive.
“Much of what happens at SC25 comes down to people who are willing to do the detailed work and keep things moving,” said Misra. “We’re thankful for the entire team’s technical ability and leadership, which strengthen both UMass IT and the broader research networking community.”
SC25 brought together researchers, technologists, engineers, and industry leaders from around the world to explore innovations in supercomputing, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and high-performance networking. For UMass Amherst, it was an opportunity to contribute to that work and to continue building the networks that make advanced research possible.
Learn more:
SC25 Conference: https://sc25.supercomputing.org/
UMass Research Computing: https://www.umass.edu/research-computing/