2022 Technology Exchange Call for Proposals

Convening again: We have missed seeing you in person during the past two years and we are anticipating seeing you at the in-person TechEX in December in Denver. We invite you to submit a proposal to the Advanced Networking track of TechEX.

What have you missed sharing with the community during the past two years? We would love to hear your “lessons learned” about your latest project. Do you have a ‘story to tell’ about a problem you solved over the past 18 months? Do you have a new solution that your peers need to be thinking about? Tell your story about connecting to the cloud, implementing software-enabled infrastructure, automation and orchestration, using shared telemetry, operations, security, or other timely topics.

Knowledge sharing: accepted proposals should include links to resources used or developed as part of your story. These may include GitHub repositories, code snippets, or other materials that the community might use to jump-start their journey.

In addition to the usual mix of presentations, panel discussions, and lightning talks, the 2022 program includes time for “unconference” gathering (i.e., addressing late-breaking issues and topics raised at working meetings that merit attention by the full audience).

In an effort to support conversations among different technical audiences – many of whom are working on different facets of a shared challenge – we are strongly encouraging topics that bring multiple audiences together (i.e., RPKI, use of telemetry, etc.).

Other topic areas to consider include (but are not limited to):

• Plans to leverage broadband grants in your region, infrastructure upgrades, implementation of eduroam, and collaboration with minority-serving institutions
• Use of infrastructure and services to support cloud, research, teaching, and learning
• Moving to a software-enabled infrastructure with use of automation, orchestration, and telemetry
• Maintaining routing integrity by implementing new and updated routing security protocols including MANRS, IRR, RPKI, and ROV, or new security paradigms such as zero trust security model
• Global collaborations to enable science, technology, and learning
• Implementing identity management to support role-based authentication in software-enabled infrastructure

Submit Your Proposal

Hyper-scale computing, or “cloud technology,” represents near-limitless, scalable, disposable computing power on demand with ubiquitous access. Its uses range from backups to bursting, from stateless, event-driven enterprise applications to compute-intensive research workloads, and from Big Data to AI/ML. It has been widely used in government, the private sector and higher education for years, yet it remains poorly understood and underutilized.

Questions persist about cost, appropriate use cases, security, platform choice, networking and when/how much it is wise to rely on it. If there were easy answers, we’d all have them. What we do have is a wide community taking a serious, professional go at using the cloud and the unique tooling it provides. This track invites the community to share its hard work, its painful lessons, and its game-changing successes on the path to making cloud technology an essential part of any institution’s IT toolkit.

Below are some suggested themes to help you get started, but we welcome all related topic.

Theme #1: Cloud as a team sport: development, identity, networking, ops, and security’s essential roles in cloud success

• Linking campus to the cloud: networking and routing
• Securing cloud workloads and environments including monitoring, reporting, logging, and responding
• Building resilience with cloud-based core infrastructure
• Lift-and-shift migration followed by optimization vs. re-architecting
• Dynamically scaling workloads
• Building compliant environments
• Developing and implementing integrations across key services

Theme #2: DevOps, infrastructure as code, and building cloud native applications

• Zero-trust identity, network, and security models
• Moving away from the hardware: server-less computing
• Just-in-time provisioning of cloud resources
• Building repeatable secure infrastructure as code with peer reviews
• Containerization and automation best practices and lessons learned
• Building with cloud native tools and practices
• Financial engineering in development

Theme #3: Architecting and running research workflows in the cloud

• Building/running/deploying genomics other *omics analytics pipelines
• Implementing machine learning models
• Options for cloud-enabled Notebooks
• Using the cloud to expand your research toolkit
• Bursting from on-prem HPC jobs
• Containerizing research workloads
• Building a cloud-native Big Data pipeline

Submit Your Proposal

We invite you to submit an idea for a session and collaborate with peers who are just as passionate as you are about sharing their expertise through the Identity and Access Management (IAM) track, also known as CAMP Week! The world is changing, and how we approach IAM is evolving with it. We are actively seeking folks with IAM experience to deliver thought-provoking, informative presentations to our community during the Campus Architecture and Middleware Planning (CAMP) track. To put it simply, we want your insight and participation as forward-thinking leaders who push the IAM envelope!

Think creatively about your perspective and the happenings at your institution as well as current trends and hot topics. Then, develop a proposal! Submissions can be for presentations, demonstrations, storytelling, and/or panel discussions.

Below are some suggested themes to help you get started, but we welcome all related topics – especially those that address what differentiates us from other communities. For example, perhaps you can suggest subject matter based around the “usual topics”, while adding a twist or unique interpretation to educate, enlighten, and encourage the people who help make research and education tick.

We look forward to reviewing your submission. Thank you!

Theme: Business Drivers with Managing Identities

• Unique challenges of operating in a research and education environment, such as anonymous or pseudonymous identity and multilateral federation
• Management of service providers (by academia, research, or industry) in the InCommon Federation
• Other areas of interest in regulatory issues, accessing

Theme: Community & Collaboration

• Establishing or supporting research collaborations or virtual organizations
• Sharing best practices for solving an IAM problem at your organization by telling your story
• Supporting international collaborations

Theme: Hybrid IAM Environments

• Using commercial and InCommon Trusted Access Platform components to support the academic mission
• Implementing Identity and Access management, integration, and migration in on-prem and cloud environments
• Managing permissions, group management, and service provisioning

Theme: IAM’s Role in Managing Cyber Security Risk

• Understanding REFEDS MFA Profile, SIRTFI, Assurance Framework
• Sharing REFEDS implementation experiences
• Identifying and solving challenges related to privacy as it relates to access control and user consent
• Exploring Zero Trust and IAM

Submit Your Proposal

The last three years have presented a unique challenge for businesses and campuses. While the sudden switch to working from home justified the purchase of security upgrades, the supply chain issues that arose as the pandemic persisted returned us to the more familiar scenario of making do with what you have.

We are seeking proposals for sessions telling the community how your organization has improved its security posture, both inside and outside your network. “Lessons Learned” presentations have historically been very successful, as have presentations on somewhat unusual topics.

The Information Security area focuses on both network and system security topics, including (but not limited to):

• Implementing Zero Trust architecture and perimeter-less security
• Promote leadership in security for the global Internet through projects to strengthen the security posture of key infrastructure
  • Advocating for MANRS adoption and working to ensure routing integrity
  • Experience with threat modeling of infrastructure

• Learning from major security incidents recently experienced by the community – particularly incidents yielding significant “lessons learned”
• Addressing the research community’s unique IT security needs
  • Understanding and addressing the challenges of network security at 100Gbps and higher speeds
  • Identifying and/or developing new and promising network security tools, particularly tools for collaboratively sharing data about security incidents at scale
  • Balancing “enterprise-like” security on open networks.

• Leveraging Trust and Identity tools in the context of community infrastructure
• Handling common security issues in the unique research and education environments
  • Measuring success with security metrics and benchmarks
  • Threat hunting techniques and remediation strategies
  • Assessing the security posture of cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
  • Dealing with actual or looming ransomware threats

Submit Your Proposal

Research computing and data, including networking and cloud services, play a key role in scientific discovery and scholarship across all disciplines. The accelerating pace of change presents both challenges and opportunities, not only to providers of these services, but also to researchers eager to keep up with the evolving technology landscape. TechEX22 provides a forum for those who support and/or conduct research to showcase the ways in which their efforts have enabled research and/or accelerated innovative technology or software-based solutions through collaborative efforts to address these challenges.

Submissions should highlight experiences, opportunities, and some of the challenges relating to enabling or conducting research via digital resources and services, including, but not limited to, advanced networking, information security, InCommon, and cloud. We also encourage submissions related to the people and organizations that enable research, including consortia or collaborations in support of research computing and data professionals, training and professional development, engagement with researchers, as well as any other relevant areas of interest.

Submit Your Proposal

The Call for Tutorials is open until May 6. To provide the valuable community expertise shared via tutorials at past events, submissions for half- and full-day tutorials will be considered by the Program Committee. In addition to looking for representative offerings in the topic areas listed above, the Program Committee will consider hands-on instruction in any relevant technical area.

All Tutorials are offered on Monday, December 5.

Submit Your Proposal