By Strahinja Trecakov, New Mexico State University
This year I had a chance to attend an amazing ART@SC24 workshop organized by STEM-Trek and Elizabeth Leake. This workshop took place at the World Congress Convention Center on Saturday, November 16 before the International Conference on High-Performance Computing (HPC), Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC24. This was a great start to the busy week in Atlanta where we heard from different HPC center leaders about outreach, training, artificial intelligence (AI), networking and related initiatives. After a busy day, we enjoyed dinner and live entertainment at Medieval Times, thanks to sponsors Dell and Intel.
On Sunday, SC24 officially opened and over the first two days I attended tutorials. The first was Delivering HPC: Procurement, Cost Models, Metrics, Value and More where I learned about stakeholder management, capturing requirements, market engagement, hardware procurement, benchmarking, bid scoring, acceptance testing, total cost of ownership, cost recovery models, metrics, and value. This was an informative tutorial and an eye-opener on the procedures of buying a large HPC and all the bits and pieces that go with it. After the lunch break, I joined the tutorial: Connecting the HPC and the Quantum Community: A Tutorial on High-Performance Software for Quantum Computing by Technical University of Munich. This tutorial familiarized attendees with quantum computing and enabled them to perform a hands-on exercise using Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT).
On Monday, I attended the Performance, Modeling, Benchmarking, and Simulation (PMBS) of HPC workshop and briefly visited a few other tutorial sessions. In the evening the HPC Creates Plenary and the Exhibition Hall opening.
The rest of the week, I attended paper and poster presentations, birds of a feather sessions, panels and booths in the exhibition hall. I learned of future plans of some open-source projects: OpenHPC, Slurm, Spack, Open OnDemand, and XDMoD. I caught up with collogues from other institutions and met some new ones. The SC conference is great for expanding your knowledge and networking.
On Friday, I attended the HPCSYSPROS24 workshop. Even though it was Friday and most had already left Atlanta, the room was about 70 percent full (100-150 people) and I was delighted that so many stayed. This workshop brings together systems administrators, systems architects, and systems analysts to share cutting-edge technologies, and state-of-the-practice for HPC systems. I was fortunate to present the work of the NMSU HPC team titled, “SStack: Software Stacks for easier and cleaner software builds on HPC.”
With the conference concluding at noon, I got to spend time exploring Atlanta’s downtown area and visited museums, World of Coca-Cola and the Georgia Aquarium.
I would like to thank STEM-Trek, Elizabeth Leake and all the sponsors for supporting people from underrepresented institutions to attend the ART@SC24 pre-conference workshop and the SC24 conference.
