Using Grafana to demonstrate the scale, impact, and awe of the world’s fastest temporary network

Every year at the Supercomputing Conference, more than 16,000 attendees from industry, academia, and government gather to see the future of high-performance computing – AI at scale, quantum experiments, and bleeding-edge research. Powering it all is SCinet, the world’s fastest temporary network: a one-of-a-kind system that takes a year to design, a month to build, a week to operate, and a day to tear down.

In 2025, SCinet delivered an astonishing 13.72 Tbps of bandwidth, creating a network whose scale and complexity are hard to grasp, even for seasoned network engineers. A network that impressive deserves more than raw metrics and CLI outputs. It needs a way to be seen.

In this talk, ESNet Software Engineer Andrew Lake and ESNet Data Viz Developer Katrina Turner discuss how Grafana became the storytelling engine for SCinet, transforming massive volumes of network telemetry into intuitive, compelling visualizations that made sense to everyone, from network operators and researchers, to first-time conference attendees, and even government officials. With little time to build bespoke tools, the team used the new MetrANOVA pipeline, a Clickhouse database, and Grafana’s flexible dashboards with custom plugins to visualize network flows, performance, and behavior – all in less than a week.

Andrew and Katrina dive into the unique challenges of visualizing a massive, short-lived network, the design decisions behind dashboards that had to work on a bustling conference floor, and how observability can be used not just to monitor systems, but to communicate scale, impact, and awe. From our traffic map of the show room floor to the bumpchart booth race, they put a fun twist on the way people usually look at network metrics, and it paid off.

This talk is a story-driven look at observability under extreme constraints, packed with lessons for anyone using Grafana to explain complex systems to both experts and novices alike.