AmLight supporting Network Research Exhibition (NRE) demonstrations at the Supercomputing Conference(SC26)

This year at the SuperComputing 2026 (SC26) conference, taking place November 15–20 in Chicago, IL, the AmLight team is playing a significant role in supporting Network Research Exhibitions (NREs) that showcase cutting-edge advancements in global networking for data-intensive sciences. These demonstrations highlight innovative methods to accelerate scientific discovery, enable international collaboration, and streamline the handling of massive data flows.

As the scale of scientific data continues to expand, so do the complexities of managing network infrastructures, scientific workflows, and globally distributed resources. The NREs at SC26 aim to address these challenges by demonstrating next-generation technologies, dynamic provisioning systems, and high-performance networking solutions designed to meet the needs of disciplines ranging from astrophysics to genomics. With contributions from research organizations across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania, SC26’s NREs pave the way for smarter, faster, and more efficient global research and education networks.

This year the AmLight team is supporting several Network Research Exhibition (NREs):

SC26-NRE-119: Network-Enabled Transcontinental CryoEM Over AmLight and FABRIC
TBD

Abstract: Over the past decade, cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) has emerged as an important technique in structural biology, dramatically expanding our capacity to visualize biological macromolecules at near-atomic resolution. This advancement has been particularly impactful in biomedical research, enabling scientists to determine the detailed structures of critical targets such as the HIV vaccine research and SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Insights obtained from Cryo-EM have directly accelerated vaccine and therapeutic development, demonstrating its potential to transform our approach to tackling infectious diseases, many of which disproportionately burden the Global South. Despite these advances, researchers in resource-constrained settings, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and other Global South locations, face significant barriers in accessing Cryo-EM infrastructure due to the high cost, sophisticated instrumentation, and specialized technical expertise required. 

To address these access and infrastructure constraints, we extend FABRIC to South Africa, introducing a transcontinental testbed that brings advanced networking capabilities closer to under-resourced regions while exposing the practical limits of latency, data movement, and distributed coordination at intercontinental scale. We then apply FABRIC Loom AI to explore network-embedded single-particle (SPA) Cryo-EM processing through selective in-network placement of Cryo-EM data preprocessing stages, reducing reliance on centralized facilities and enabling more accessible, distributed analysis workflows.