Supercomputing (SC) conference, which takes place yearly in November, is considered the main event in High-Performance Computing (HPC). It is specially booked in the agenda of HPC researchers around the world and it is one of the most important events for many researchers at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The conference is promoted and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society and has been held since 1988 in the USA. This year, for the first time, it is taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic from November 9 to 19.
This year the Keynote speaker is Bjorn Stevens of the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology (Germany) who discusses the importance of exascale computing and how it “will break a scale barrier, bringing about a fundamentally new way of computing the climate system“. In addition, the Plenary will be focused in the pandemic with the title “More Than HPC Plenary: Advanced Computing and COVID-19: It’s More Than HPC” with David Abramson from University of Queensland, Australia as moderator and the panelists Ilkay Altintas (University of California, San Diego), Rommie E Amaro (University of California, San Diego), Rick Stevens (Argonne National Laboratory) and Alessandro Vespignani (Northeastern University).
The SC conference names the winner of the ACM – IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award, which is among the most prestigious awards in the field of HPC. In 2017, during SC17, the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society awarded it to Jesús Labarta from BSC who thus became the first European researcher to receive it. This year’s Ken Kennedy award has been granted to Vivek Sarkar of Georgia Institute of Technology “For foundational technical contributions to the area of programmability and productivity in parallel computing, as well as leadership contributions to professional service, mentoring, and teaching“.
Among the other awards published at the event, we are pleased to mention that Mateo Valero, Director of BSC, has been recognized with the Outstanding Leadership in HPC award in the HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards. Please see more details of his award here.
The BSC Fusion group has joined the SC20 conference, in particular, the SC tutorials sessions on many relevant trending topics in the field of supercomputing, including deep learning for HPC, supercomputing on the cloud, programming quantum computers, or containers for HPC. Many research centers and companies are offering training, online workshops and meetings to keep the conference activities ongoing even though the special circumstances. Moreover, virtual exhibits from hundreds of companies will be held online where there will be product showcases, a listing of exhibitors offering giveaways, and more. Exhibitors include DELL, Google Cloud, HP, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA, Oracle, Penguin Computing, Red Hat and Samtec.