Registration open! See the Eventbrite site for more info.
The GPN Annual Meeting 2026 will be held in conjunction with ARE-ON Conference 2026 in Rogers, AR June 22-24.
Location: Embassy Suites Northwest Arkansas – Hotel, Spa & Convention Center.
Hotel
Please reserve your hotel room, the block closes May 23.
Schedule
The GPN & ARE-ON Joint Conference 2026 schedule is live! Sched is ONLY the schedule. All registration must be done on Eventbrite.
https://gpnareonjointconference2026.sched.com
Registration
Register for the conference and select workshop tickets ON EVENTBRITE. Individual workshop registrations must be added on Eventbrite. Adding items to your schedule on Sched doesn’t register you.
Workshop descriptions
We have five workshops this year! If you would like to attend, you must acquire a ticket. Here’s why:
- Workshops have a minimum and maximum number of slots. Workshops that fall below the minimum may be cancelled.
- Instructors may need to contact attendees with pre-workshop instructions or follow-up.
- To have numbers for snack breaks.
Workshops
Monday, June 22: Setting up and Maintaining a Science DMZ taught by Jason Zurawski of ESnet (9:30–11:30 and 12:30–2:30)
Location: NWACC Conference Room 4
Max attendance: 25
Monday, June 22: Designing Secure by Default Learning Environments taught by Shankar Ravi of NorthWest Arkansas Community College (12:30–3:00)
Location: NWACC Conference Room 2
Max attendance: 25
Description: This session presents a framework for implementing segmented, locally managed academic technology environments for cybersecurity, networking, wireless, and advanced computing programs. The proposed architecture uses isolated wired and wireless zones, internal firewalls, localized virtualization, and edge-level administrative control to support hands-on instruction — including red/blue team exercises, wireless security testing, and data-intensive computing — while protecting institutional systems.
Monday, June 22: Tabletop Exercise: CMMC NIST 800-171/GPN Security Committee Meeting Monday taught by Helen Combs of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (12:30–3:00)
Location: NWACC Conference Room 3
Description: 30-minute committee meeting followed by a CMMC NIST 800-171 security tabletop exercise.
Wednesday, June 24: perfSONAR Workshop taught by Mark Feit of Internet2 (12:45–4:30)
Location: Embassy Suites Ambassador Ballroom A
Description: This hands-on tutorial will walk participants through the process of setting up a perfSONAR test point, central archive and dashboard to make measurements and view the results. The tutorial will be led by one of perfSONAR’s core developers and will also be a great chance to ask questions. Participants will need to provide a laptop with a working secure shell (SSH) client. Mac users will have one built in; Windows users can install PuTTY, available at https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html.
Wednesday, June 24: Introduction to Deploying and Scaling Data-Intensive Workloads with Docker and Kubernetes on the National Research Platform taught by Caughlin Bohn (2:45–4:45)
Location: Embassy Suites Ballroom B
Max attendance: 40
Description: Data-intensive workloads are increasingly common in research and education, but the skills to optimize them are often underdeveloped. This hands-on tutorial from the GP-ENGINE team covers containerization, Docker, distributed computing, and Kubernetes using the National Research Platform (NRP). Participants will work directly on the NRP, gaining practical experience building and accelerating their own data-intensive workloads.
Sponsors
Thankyou to our sponsors, we couldn’t host this without you!
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