By Horst Severini, University of Oklahoma (OU)
I was very happy to be back at SC24 with STEM-Trek. It had been a while since I was able to attend an SC conference, since travel funding for that is difficult to acquire for me as a research computing facilitator and high energy physicist. The last SC I was able to attend was SC18 in Dallas, and before that at SC17 in Denver, both also with STEM-Trek. So, I’m very grateful for the support I have gotten from STEM-Trek to attend these conferences.
I very much enjoyed Saturday’s ART@SC24 workshop. It was great catching up with several of the African colleagues again, some of whom I hadn’t seen in 6 years! I was happy to be one of the 40 or so attendees, and from a US EPSCoR state no less. All presentations were really interesting, and I learned a lot about the latest advances in AI and networks. I heard that there will be another conference in Gqeberha, South Africa, next month: the next Centre for High Performance Computing 2024 National Conference, December 1-4, 2024. And I’m very sorry I won’t be able to go to that one, since I had a wonderful time there at the African School of Physics in December of 2022. I was also there for the planning of this ASP 2022 school back in July of 2022, and I was very impressed with the facilities at Nelson Mandela University, both in Gqeberha and at the George campus, which I was fortunate to be able to visit for the African Conference of Physics in September 2023.
The dinner at Medieval Times Saturday night was phenomenal, with great food and even greater entertainment! It was unfortunate that our knight didn’t win the tournament, but that didn’t take away from the great experience we had there, and the interesting discussions I had with other ART@SC24 attendees whom I met for the first time at this year’s SC conference.
On Sunday I attended the Digital Twins Workshop, which was also quite fascinating. There was a presentation about Covid-19 research in the morning, on how digital twin simulations can help model pandemic behavior and responses. Some of that research was done at the ARCHER supercomputer at EPCC in Edinburgh, Scotland. I had been at a workshop at EPCC more than 15 years ago, and very much enjoyed both the tutorial and the facilities — and of course Edinburgh as well! And in the afternoon, there was a talk about Data Center Digital Twins (DCDT), on how to predict data center failures and prevent them, and how to extend data center lifetimes with that information. It was great that three from EPCC joined us for the Medieval Times outing.
On Monday, I split my time between the Eleventh SC Workshop on Best Practices for HPC Training and Education and the 19th Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science (WORKS24). The training workshop was very useful for me because of my role as research computing facilitator at the Oklahoma University (OU) Supercomputing Center for Education and Research (OSCER), and the large-scale science workshop benefited me as well, since I run the OU part of the US ATLAS Southwest Tier2 Computing Center at OU-OSCER. ATLAS is a very large-scale experiment, and I learned a lot about how other large-scale experiments deal with their extensive computing and data requirements.
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I spent a lot of time walking around the exhibit hall to visit many booths and find out more about the latest HPC advancements. I also attended several HPC Education events. I went to the Campus Champions meet and greet at the NCSA booth on Tuesday morning, an HPC Education, Training, and Certification Panel a the SDSC booth on Tuesday afternoon, and the Campus Research Computing Council (CaRCC) coffee meet up at the Internet2 booth on Wednesday morning. I also stopped by the Great Plains Network (GPN) booth on Wednesday afternoon and met some of the GPN folks there. Some I had met before, but others I had only ever seen on Zoom, so it was really nice to finally meet them in person!
I also made it to the SC Reception at the Aquarium on Thursday night, and even though I couldn’t stay very long, I was still able to walk through all the areas and at least briefly enjoy all the phenomenal aquatic life exhibits. It is a great aquarium, comparable with the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, which I was able to visit when I attended the CHEP conference in Okinawa in 2015.
Unfortunately, I came down with a cold during the middle of the week, most likely because of the excessive and much too cold air conditioning in the workshop rooms and exhibit halls. So I had to spend some time resting in my hotel room rather than walking around the floor and see more new things. But that notwithstanding, I still had a really great time spending this entire week at SC in Atlanta. This was also my first time in Atlanta, so I got to walk around the city center and take in some of the building high lights, as well, and the Olympic Park.
