SCinet Student Volunteer Program

Student volunteers from Erlangen have a tradition of supporting the Supercomputing conference (SC) and the SCinet networking team. The Students@SC volunteer program allows undergraduate and graduate students to attend SC and gives them an insight into the inner workings of a scientific conference. Since 2011 students from FAU have attended SC every year in a variety of volunteer roles: supporting fiber deployment, network performance measurements, network architecture design, network security, as assistant to the student cluster competition, technical help desk and many more tasks. Throughout those years, the HPC group and the department of computer science has supported more than 15 student trips as part of the Students@SC volunteer program.

Volunteers are either supporting the conference program or SCinet. When embedded in SCinet they arrive a week before the conference starts and help setup “the most powerful and advanced network on Earth”. During the setup week fiber cable deployment, customer relations and help desk duties are the focus. Transiting to the show week, students in support of the conference program arrive as well, and joined networking events and participation in the conference and trade show is encouraged.

The last day is dominated by tearing down the network infrastructure and concludes with a wrap-up dinner to celebrate another successful year.