SC19 June Need to Know: Food Production & HPC, Free Proceedings, SC22 Chair Nominations, Major June Announcements, SCinet Spring Cleaning, Submissions & Nominations Deadlines
June’s Theme: Food Production and HPC
When you imagine where your food comes from, I’m willing to bet that data centers and high performance computing are not in your immediate stockpile of images about how what you eat gets from the field to the table. Increasingly, though, these technologies ensure that you are able to eat more healthily and sustainably.
High performance computing is being utilized to solve problems throughout all aspects of our food production system, from helping farmers decide what crops to plant or livestock to raise all the way to planning the most efficient, secure, and non-perishable routes for food delivery.
This month, we’ll interview two HPC experts who regularly spend their time thinking about issues related to food production: Kate Evans is the Acting Division Director for the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is also an active researcher in Earth System Model (ESM) evaluation, and Kaiyu Guan of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign focuses his research on ecohydrology and remote sensing. Tune in to our blog during the month of June to hear their insights.
SC19 Tech Paper Proceedings to Be Permanently Free
The SC Conference Series strives to promote more open and reproducible science. Continuing in that vein, ACM and IEEE-CS – with the endorsement of SIGHPC – have agreed to create a permanent Open Table of Contents (OpenTOC) for proceedings of SC Technical Papers. Starting with SC19, Tech Papers will remain permanently accessible to anyone without requiring an IEEE or ACM DL subscription or membership.
We are excited to help make HPC research more accessible to the community. From ACM statistics, other conferences that utilize OpenTOC receive higher citations per article (6.42 per article versus 2.53 behind paywalls) and more article downloads (371 per article versus 104 behind paywalls). It is our hope that the trends toward open access and reproducibility will allow science to solve today’s societal issues more quickly and more efficiently.
Looking for the Next SC Leaders
I’ve often written on this blog about the SC volunteer community and how vital it is to the success of the conference. For those of you who have been participating in the SC community for some time and know just the right person to set the direction of future conferences (maybe even you!), now is the time to submit your nomination for SC22 General Chair and for two Steering Committee positions opening January 2020. Nominations for SC22 General Chair close June 30 and nominations for Steering Committee positions close September 15.
For those of you newer to the SC community, it’s never too soon to start volunteering. It can take time to find your favorite SC niche and to learn the ins and outs that may allow you to move into a leadership position. Members of most SC committees are in place 12-18 months before any given conference year, so if you think you are interested in joining the SC volunteer community, reach out today!
Something is Coming…. Something Big….
May has been a seemingly calm month, but many volunteers have been working behind the scenes to create the next big SC19 splash. Committees are almost done finalizing their choices about invited speakers and panels, selected tutorials, winners of the Test of Time Award, the Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) winner, and selected papers.
To kick start our wave of fun announcements, here’s one many of you have been waiting for – the location of the SC19 Exhibitor Reception on Sunday night. We’ll look forward to greeting exhibitors at Wynkoop Brewery, a three-decades-old Denver institution. There are many more exciting announcements to come in the near future, so stay tuned to SC19 social media and the blog during the month of June!
Spring Cleaning and SCinet Spring Inventory Achieve Similar Goals
If you perform a spring cleaning – tidy up, find your best summer stuff, dump the rest – you’re accomplishing similar goals to SCinet’s annual spring inventory event.
More than two dozen SCinet volunteers from as far away as the Netherlands met in Mohave Valley, Arizona for the late-May event at the Freeman Regional Distribution Center. They sorted, organized, labeled, kept, and recycled thousands of items that support SCinet, the high performance network that will support the SC19 Conference in November.
Learn more with this one minute time lapse video:
SC19 Opportunities Still Open
- ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award (EWL/TC) nominations close June 30
- Research Posters; ACM Student Research Posters for Undergraduate and Graduate Students; Doctoral Showcase; Scientific Visualization; Birds of a Feather submissions close June 30
- IEEE-CS TCHPC Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in HPC nominations close August 15
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Michela Taufer, PhD, General Chair, SC19
Michela Taufer is the Dongarra Professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Tickle College of Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.