All are invited to a Networked Systems Tech Talk by Beau Nuanes, systems engineer at ThunderCat Technology, on Thursday, September 17, 2026. The talk, titled “Securing the World’s Fastest Temporary Network,” will be held at 11:25 a.m. – 12:40 p.m. in the Stuart Building, room 113.

More info: http://www.cs.iit.edu/~nsultana1/techtalks/

Abstract

Every November, roughly 215 volunteers from over 100 organizations build SCinet — the fastest temporary network in the world — SCinet takes a year to plan, a month to build, a week to operate, and a day to tear down. At SC25, that network carried 13.72 Tbps of peak traffic for 16,499 attendees on nearly $70M in donated gear. Because the Network is built from scratch every year, the SCinet Network Security Team has: no baseline traffic history to lean on, no endpoint agents on attendee devices, and borrowed IP space whose reputation is ours to protect. This talk walks through how a volunteer team uses network telemetry, real-time threat hunting, and automated response — with tools donated by industry vendors— to secure a deliberately open, multi-organization, multi-terabit research network under a hard, unforgiving deadline.

Biography

Beau Nuanes spends his days navigating the intersection of federal missions and enterprise networks. As a Field Sales Engineer at ThunderCat Technology, a federal SDVOSB reseller, he supports federal agencies and Fortune 500 accounts alike, drawing on a background that includes Network Team Lead and red team work at Sandia National Labs and SCADA/EMS operations at PNM Energy. He also volunteers for and co-leads the Network Security team for SCinet at the annual ACM/IEEE Supercomputing conference.