This is How You Visualize the World's Fastest Temporary Network | SCinet | Grafana Labs

Andy and Katrina from ESnet volunteer every year to build SCinet — the research network powering the SuperComputing conference. Last year it ran at 13.72 terabits per second, built by 200+ volunteers in under a month, on $70 million in donated hardware, and torn down in a day. This talk is about how they used Grafana to make that invisible infrastructure visible to 15,000 conference attendees.

Working with a MetrANOVA telemetry pipeline feeding into ClickHouse, they had six days before the conference opened to build and connect dashboards from scratch — with no pre-existing data connections, an inventory system that had just been swapped out, and a visualization concept with no floor-plan coordinates to work from. They describe the design approach for kiosk-mode dashboards displayed on TVs around the show floor: one question per dashboard, built to draw in non-technical passersby and spark conversation about the network.

Katrina walks through how they hand-typed hundreds of booth coordinates onto a grid screenshot of the show floor to create a live traffic map using the Terranova topology tool and a custom Grafana network map panel plugin she developed (available in the official Grafana plugin catalog). Data connected to ClickHouse on Day 6. By Day 7 — the conference opening — dashboards were live, and attendees were stopping to talk about what they were seeing.

0:00 Introduction
0:43 What Is SCinet? The World's Fastest Temporary Network
2:07 Scale: 13.72 Tbps, 200 Volunteers, $70M in Hardware
3:27 The Build Timeline: One Year to Design, One Week to Operate
5:17 Why Volunteer? Science Networking at Scale
10:23 The Demos: What Happens on SCinet
11:33 Why Network Engineers Need Better Storytelling
13:03 What Is MetrANOVA?
15:47 Designing Dashboards for Kiosk Mode
17:19 Building the Floor Map From Scratch
20:04 Day Six: Data Finally Flows Into ClickHouse
21:12 Day Seven: Showtime
22:27 What's Next for SCinet Visualization

Links/resources:
Learn about ESnet: https://www.es.net/
Check out the SuperComputing conference: https://supercomputing.org/
Get started with the Grafana Cloud forever-free tier: https://grafana.com/g/cloud
Have a question? Ask Grot, your AI helper: https://grafana.com/grot/
Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf

---
Thanks for watching!

👍 Was this video helpful? Like and subscribe to our channel for more videos.

Connect with Grafana Labs:
X: (https://www.twitter.com/grafana)
LinkedIn: (https://www.linkedin.com/company/grafana-labs/)
Facebook: (https://www.facebook.com/grafana)

#Grafana #Observability #SCinet #SuperComputing #ESnet