(upbeat music) >> Welcome back. We're here at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas. My name's Paul Gill, I'm your host. With me, Dave Nicholson, my co-host. And one thing that struck me about this conference arriving here, was the number of universities that are exhibiting here. I mean, big, big exhibits from universities. Never seen that at a conference before. And one of those universities is Indiana University. Our two guests, Dave Jent, who's the AVP of Networks at Indiana University, Aaron Neal, Deputy CIO at Indiana University. Welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> I've always thought that the CIO job at a university has got to be the toughest CIO job there is, because you're managing this sprawling network, people are doing all kinds of different things on it. You've got to secure it. You've got to make it performant. And it just seems to be a big challenge. Talk about the network at Indiana University and what you have done particularly since the pandemic, how that has affected the architecture of your network. And what you do to maintain the levels of performance and security that you need. >> On the network side one of the things we've done is, kept in close contact with what the incoming students are looking for. It's a different environment than it was then 10 years ago when a student would come, maybe they had a phone, maybe they had one laptop. Today they're coming with multiple phones, multiple laptops, gaming devices. And the expectation that they have to come on a campus and plug all that stuff in causes lots of problems for us, in managing just the security aspect of it, the capacity, the IP space required to manage six, seven devices per student when you have 35,000 students on campus, has always been a challenge. And keeping ahead of that knowing what students are going to come in with, has been interesting. During the pandemic the campus was closed for a bit of time. What we found was our biggest challenge was keeping up with the number of people who wanted to VPN to campus. We had to buy additional VPN licenses so they could do their work, authenticate to the network. We doubled, maybe even tripled our our VPN license count. And that has settled down now that we're back on campus. But again, they came back with a vengeance. More gaming devices, more things to be connected, and into an environment that was a couple years old, that we hadn't done much with. We had gone through a pretty good size network deployment of new hardware to try to get ready for them. And it's worked well, but it's always challenging to keep up with students. >> Aaron, I want to ask you about security because that really is one of your key areas of focus. And you're collaborating with counties, local municipalities, as well as other educational institutions. How's your security strategy evolving in light of some of the vulnerabilities of VPNs that became obvious during the pandemic, and this kind of perfusion of new devices that that Dave was talking about? >> Yeah, so one of the things that we we did several years ago was establish what we call OmniSOC, which is a shared security operations center in collaboration with other institutions as well as research centers across the United States and in Indiana. And really what that is, is we took the lessons that we've learned and the capabilities that we've had within the institution and looked to partner with those key institutions to bring that data in-house, utilize our staff such that we can look for security threats and share that information across the the other institutions so that we can give each of those areas a heads up and work with those institutions to address any kind of vulnerabilities that might be out there. One of the other things that you mentioned is, we're partnering with Purdue in the Indiana Office of Technology on a grant to actually work with municipalities, county governments, to really assess their posture as it relates to security in those areas. It's a great opportunity for us to work together as institutions as well as work with the state in general to increase our posture as it relates to security. >> Dave, what brings IU to Supercomputing 2022? >> We've been here for a long time. And I think one of the things that we're always interested in is, what's next? What's new? There's so many, there's network vendors, software vendors, hardware vendors, high performance computing suppliers. What is out there that we're interested in? IU runs a large Cray system in Indiana called Big Red 200. And with any system you procure it, you get it running, you operate it, and your next goal is to upgrade it. And what's out there that we might be interested? That I think why we come to IU. We also like to showcase what we do at IU. If you come by the booth you'll see the OmniSOC, there's some video on that. The GlobalNOC, which I manage, which supports a lot of the RNE institutions in the country. We talk about that. Being able to have a place for people to come and see us. If you stand by the booth long enough people come and find you, and want to talk about a project they have, or a collaboration they'd like to partner with. We had a guy come by a while ago wanting a job. Those are all good things having a big booth can do for you. >> Well, so on that subject, in each of your areas of expertise and your purview are you kind of interleaved with the academic side of things on campus? Do you include students? I mean, I would think it would be a great source of cheap labor for you at least. Or is there kind of a wall between what you guys are responsible for and what students? >> Absolutely we try to support faculty and students as much as we can. And just to go back a little bit on the OmniSOC discussion. One of the things that we provide is internships for each of the universities that we work with. They have to sponsor at least three students every year and make that financial commitment. We bring them on site for three weeks. They learn us alongside the other analysts, information security analysts and work in a real world environment and gain those skills to be able to go back to their institutions and do an additional work there. So it's a great program for us to work with students. I think the other thing that we do is we provide obviously the infrastructure that enable our faculty members to do the research that they need to do. Whether that's through Big Red 200, our Supercomputer or just kind of the everyday infrastructure that allows them to do what they need to do. We have an environment on premise called our Intelligent Infrastructure, that we provide managed access to hardware and storage resources in a way that we know it's secure and they can utilize that environment to do virtually anything that they need in a server environment. >> Dave, I want to get back to the GigaPOP, which you mentioned earlier you're the managing director of the Indiana GigaPOP. What exactly is it? >> Well, the GigaPOP and there are a number of GigaPOP around the country. It was really the aggregation facility for Indiana and all of the universities in Indiana to connect to outside resources. GigaPOP has connections to internet too, the commodity internet, Esnet, the Big Ten or the BTAA a network in Chicago. It's a way for all universities in Indiana to connect to a single source to allow them to connect nationally to research organizations. >> And what are the benefits of having this collaboration of university. >> If you could think of a researcher at Indiana wants to do something with a researcher in Wisconsin, they both connect to their research networks in Wisconsin and Indiana, and they have essentially direct connection. There's no commodity internet, there's no throttling of of capacity. Both networks and the interconnects because we use internet too, are essentially UNT throttled access for the researchers to do anything they need to do. It's secure, it's fast, easy to use, in fact, so easy they don't even know that they're using it. It just we manage the networks and organize the networks in a way configure them that's the path of least resistance and that's the path traffic will take. And that's nationally. There are lots of these that are interconnected in various ways. I do want to get back to the labor point, just for a moment. (laughs) Because... >> You're here to claim you're not violating any labor laws. Is that what you're going to be? >> I'm here to hopefully hire, get more people to be interested to coming to IU. >> Stop by the booth. >> It's a great place to work. >> Exactly. >> We hire lots of interns and in the network space hiring really experienced network engineers, really hard to do, hard to attract people. And these days when you can work from anywhere, you don't have to be any place to work for anybody. We try to attract as many students as we can. And really we're exposing 'em to an environment that exists in very few places. Tens of thousands of wireless access points, big fast networks, interconnections and national international networks. We support the Noah network which supports satellite systems and secure traffic. It really is a very unique experience and you can come to IU, spend lots of years there and never see the same thing twice. We think we have an environment that's really a good way for people to come out of college, graduate school, work for some number of years and hopefully stay at IU, but if not, leave and get a good job and talk well about IU. In fact, the wireless network today here at SC was installed and is managed by a person who manages our campus network wireless, James Dickerson. That's the kind of opportunity we can provide people at IU. >> Aaron, I'd like to ask, you hear a lot about everything moving to the cloud these days, but in the HPC world I don't think that move is happening as quickly as it is in some areas. In fact, there's a good argument some workloads should never move to the cloud. You're having to balance these decisions. Where are you on the thinking of what belongs in the data center and what belongs in the cloud? >> I think our approach has really been specific to what the needs are. As an institution, we've not pushed all our chips in on the cloud, whether it be for high performance computing or otherwise. It's really looking at what the specific need is and addressing it with the proper solution. We made an investment several years ago in a data center internally, and we're leveraging that through the intelligent infrastructure that I spoke about. But really it's addressing what the specific need is and finding the specific solution, rather than going all in in one direction or another. I dunno if Jet Stream is something that you would like to bring up as well. >> By having our own data center and having our own facilities we're able to compete for NSF grants and work on projects that provide shared resources for the research community. Just dream is a project that does that. Without a data center and without the ability to work on large projects, we don't have any of that. If you don't have that then you're dependent on someone else. We like to say that, what we are proud of is the people come to IU and ask us if they can partner on our projects. Without a data center and those resources we are the ones who have to go out and say can we partner on your project? We'd like to be the leaders of that in that space. >> I wanted to kind of double click on something you mentioned. Couple of things. Historically IU has been I'm sure closely associated with Chicago. You think of what are students thinking of doing when they graduate? Maybe they're going to go home, but the sort of center of gravity it's like Chicago. You mentioned talking about, especially post pandemic, the idea that you can live anywhere. Not everybody wants to live in Manhattan or Santa Clara. And of course, technology over decades has given us the ability to do things remotely and IU is plugged into the globe, doesn't matter where you are. But have you seen either during or post pandemic 'cause we're really in the early stages of this. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing people say, Hey, thinking about their family, where do I want to live? Where do I want to raise my family? I'm in academia and no, I don't want to live in Manhattan. Hey, we can go to IU and we're plugged into the globe. And then students in California we see this, there's some schools on the central coast where people loved living there when they were in college but there was no economic opportunity there. Are you seeing a shift, are basically houses in Bloomington becoming unaffordable because people are saying, you know what, I'm going to stay here. What does that look like? >> I mean, for our group there are a lot of people who do work from home, have chosen to stay in Bloomington. We have had some people who for various reasons want to leave. We want to retain them, so we allow them to work remotely. And that has turned into a tool for recruiting. The kid that graduates from Caltech. Doesn't want to stay in Caltech in California, we have an opportunity now he can move to wherever between here and there and we can hire him do work. We love to have people come to Indiana. We think it is a unique experience, Bloomington, Indianapolis are great places. But I think the reality is, we're not going to get everybody to come live, be a Hoosier, how do we get them to come and work at IU? In some ways disappointing when we don't have buildings full of people, but 40 paying Zoom or teams window, not kind the same thing. But I think this is what we're going to have to figure out, how do we make this kind of environment work. >> Last question here, give you a chance to put in a plug for Indiana University. For those those data scientists those researchers who may be open to working somewhere else, why would they come to Indiana University? What's different about what you do from what every other academic institution does, Aaron? >> Yeah, I think a lot of what we just talked about today in terms of from a network's perspective, that were plugged in globally. I think if you look beyond the networks I think there are tremendous opportunities for folks to come to Bloomington and experience some bleeding edge technology and to work with some very talented people. I've been amazed, I've been at IU for 20 years and as I look at our peers across higher ed, well, I don't want to say they're not doing as well I do want brag at how well we're doing in terms of organizationally addressing things like security in a centralized way that really puts us in a better position. We're just doing a lot of things that I think some of our peers are catching up to and have been catching up to over the last 10, 12 years. >> And I think to sure scale of IU goes unnoticed at times. IU has the largest medical school in the country. One of the largest nursing schools in the country. And people just kind of overlook some of that. Maybe we need to do a better job of talking about it. But for those who are aware there are a lot of opportunities in life sciences, healthcare, the social sciences. IU has the largest logistics program in the world. We teach more languages than anybody else in the world. The varying kinds of things you can get involved with at IU including networks, I think pretty unparalleled. >> Well, making the case for high performance computing in the Hoosier State. Aaron, Dave, thanks very much for joining you making a great case. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back right after this short message. This is theCUBE. (upbeat music)