Nov 10, 2026

Pacific Wave Powering Demonstrations at Upcoming 2026 Supercomputing Conference

USC-ISI’s SPHERE Cybersecurity and Privacy Research Infrastructure to Demonstrate Remote IoT and Water Plant Control, and more

Members of the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) are already familiar with Pacific Wave, the international distributed peering facility along the US West Coast that CENIC manages together with the Pacific Northwest Gigapop. With connection points in Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Los Angeles, Pacific Wave is how many of the world’s research and education networks peer with networks in the US and beyond across regional and national borders.

Pacific Wave has also long been a major network facilitator of the high-performance demonstrations that are a feature of the annual Supercomputing conferences, and this year’s conference in Chicago is no exception. At SC26, taking place from November 15–20, 2026 at the McCormick Place convention center in downtown Chicago, more than 20 Network Research Exhibitions (NRE) will take place over pathways contributed to SCinet by Pacific Wave and its international membership.

One of those NREs, number 131, is a three-part demonstration of the University of Southern California (USC) Information Sciences Institute’s (ISI) Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation (SPHERE) research infrastructure. This NSF-supported (award #2330066) mid-scale research infrastructure is designed for at-scale, realistic and reproducible cybersecurity and privacy experimentation across very diverse hardware.

A Nationally Distributed Research Infrastructure Focused on Cybersecurity and Privacy

SPHERE goes beyond traditional computing resources and virtual machines to offer a diverse range of experimental capabilities, including Internet-of-Things (IoT), industrial control systems (ICS), and programmable networking. Six specialized user portals provide access to these resources, while flexible security policies enable researchers to conduct a wide range of realistic cybersecurity experiments in a safe and controlled environment. As USC-ISI Principal Investigator and Research Associate Professor in Computer Science Jelena Mirkovic states, “SPHERE enables researchers to conduct sophisticated experiments that reflect the complexity of modern cybersecurity and privacy challenges.”

SPHERE operates across three locations in the U.S.:

• The Los Angeles site houses general-purpose computing equipment, GPUs, embedded devices, programmable networking devices, and one of SPHERE’s ICS platforms. It also provides a connection to the national high-performance FABRIC testbed, which SPHERE is integrating to support experimentation across its geographically distributed facilities.
• The University of Utah location features additional ICS platforms—a prime target both of cyberattacks and cybersecurity research—along with another FABRIC connection.
• IoT devices are located at Northeastern University in Massachusetts, which is in the process of implementing its own connection to the FABRIC testbed.

Mirkovic looks forward to this connection and the seamless research opportunities it will enable. “Currently, research that includes the IoT devices at Northeastern must go over the public Internet. FABRIC integration will enable dedicated connections with bandwidth guarantees between SPHERE locations as well as expansion to other FABRIC-connected facilities.”

SPHERE in Action: Cybersecurity Demonstrations at SC26

The SPHERE-powered NRE taking place at SC26 is a three-part demonstration focusing on remote IoT experimentation, ICS experimentation, and what Mirkovic describes as a “bring your own device” (BYOD) demonstration.

The first will provide access to hundreds of IoT devices, including smart speakers, with instrumentation such as voice synthesizers and button actuators enabling precisely timed, repeatable remote interactions.

The second, an ICS demonstration, will consist of a water treatment testbed using two coupled programmable logic controllers (PLCs), one modeling the physical processes of the treatment and the other controlling it. The user interface will provide the viewer with a visualization of the process, such as a water tank overflowing in response to a cyberattack.

The BYOD demonstration will feature a portable SPHERE facility at SC26, showing how users can securely integrate their own devices into distributed SPHERE experiments while maintaining control over access to their resources through project-based access controls.

If you plan to attend the 2026 Supercomputing Conference, please stop by Booth 4029 on Wednesday, 18 November 2026 from 12:40–1:00pm CST to meet ISI’s Christopher Tran and see for yourself how the SPHERE research infrastructure can facilitate experimentation aimed at keeping our networks, critical infrastructure, and society safe from cyberattacks, protecting people's privacy, or both.