Travel Support: Student Program for Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing Conference (PEARC20)

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) Conference series is to provide a forum for discussing challenges, opportunities, and solutions among High Performance Computing (HPC) center directors and managers, computational scientists, end users, students, facilitators, educators, HPC system administrators and user support staff, as well as industry and government agency representatives from across the United States and around the world. The conference follows the successful five-year conference series that was hosted by the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program. Building on the success of XSEDE conference series, PEARC aims to broaden the community by including additional campus, national, and international cyberinfrastructure and research computing partners. The conference will be held online from July 26-30, 2020. The project will fund students to participate in the conference, especially in the student program activities, and also fund a small number of junior faculty and researchers to participate in the conference. Some students are presenting papers and posters at the conference, will be given priority for funding The project serves the national interest, as stated by NSF's mission, to promote the progress of science as it provides a forum to disseminate research efforts, connect researchers, and train the next generation of scholars. Due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, the conference will be fully virtual. The student program committee for the conference is recruiting students with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion of underrepresented groups and from a diverse set of institutions. For the student program, students will participate in (1) a student mentor program, which pairs a student with a senior mentor to help guide the student through conference activities, (2) a student volunteer program, to help run and organize the virtual conference, (3), a speed networking session, where students can meet 1-on-1 with conference exhibitors, and (4) a panel discussion, where students will attend a panel conversation about careers in HPC and career paths into HPC. The funding provided by NSF will have a significant impact on the careers of the future generation of researchers in high performance computing, while encouraging diversity in the field. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.