More than HPC. The SC20 Planning Committee chose that theme in early 2019 to emphasize that as a community, we are more than just the bits and bytes that we work with to solve the problems facing us today. Little did we know how important that would become. And when it became apparent that, with everyone’s safety as our first concern, we would have to take SC20 online – I chose to change our location not to “virtual,” but to “Everywhere We Are.” That’s because it’s true in any year, and any place.

Conference Program

As I’ve written here before, we were far enough into the submissions and acceptance process for a number of conference activities that we were faced with a difficult decision about how far to take SC20, regardless of where or how it was held: either reduce acceptances for major components of the conference…or go big, and put on the conference with its customary breadth and depth.

We chose the latter and were the better for it. As a committee, 742 of us worked harder than ever planning for various scenarios, stretching ourselves to the limits of our agility while we learned more about our virtual platform’s capabilities even just a few days out from the event as the platform itself evolved in response to lessons learned from earlier virtual conferences. We were able to loosen pre-recording requirements for our tutorials and workshops which allowed them to be much more interactive than we had initially thought possible. We facilitated live Q&A sessions for most of our events, delivered an abundant Technical Program – 30 Tutorials, 40 Workshops, 95 Papers, 16 Birds of a Feather sessions, 106 Posters, an additional COVID-focused Gordon Bell component, 12 Invited Talks, 10 Panels, 18 State of the Practice Talks , a vibrant Early Career program, and even an Awards Ceremony – and had a full complement of Exhibitor Forum sessions and 285 interactive Exhibits to encourage the kind of discussions we knew many exhibitors and attendees would long for.

Our SCinet team put on an engaging SCinet program despite there being no buildout of the world’s fastest temporary network. It’s a great look at the people behind SCinet, and the future of it as well.

With the Students@SC program, we kept students involved as volunteers, content creators, cluster challenge competitors from a record 19 teams, and as a key component of what makes SC the well-rounded conference it is, thanks to our extraordinarily enthusiastic Students@SC committee.

And we’re able to keep this vast trove of technical, exhibits, Students@SC, and SCinet content online for the next six months – over 600 hours of content created by you, for each other.

Speaking of you – over 7,440 of you attended SC20 from over 115 countries.

Inclusivity and Diversity

We had great inclusivity and diversity activities planned for Atlanta, which would have been a new city for the SC Conference Series – and one of the most diverse destinations yet for the conference, home to a significant number of local historically black colleges and universities. Those plans were curtailed in March but we were still able to grant 41 inclusivity registration scholarships to students, faculty, and staff from minority serving institutions in the United States, Turkey, and Indonesia. Twenty-five of those recipients were new to SC.

Our new HPC in the City hackathon featured 43 student participants and 21 mentors who used HPC resources and methodologies to analyze a wide range of important Atlanta-specific topics, including K-12 broadband access in underserved areas in Atlanta, human trafficking, voter fraud, and COVID-19 impact on the economy of Fulton County, GA.

And Computing4Change returned, sponsored by ACM SIGHPC – allowing 19 undergraduates the chance to use XSEDE resources Jetstream and Stampede2 to work on student-chosen problems including the environment, overall health, violence, and COVID-19 disease spread, mobility, and its impacts upon healthcare.

Keynote and Plenary: Climate Science and Pandemic Response

Climate science was an important, early choice for our keynote topic before the COVID-19 situation heightened, and our Keynote Chair and I felt it was important to keep that focus as the world turned its attention to all things pandemic. Dr. Bjorn Stevens hit exactly the right note – lighthearted, while setting the climate issues we are racing to solve in sharp relief. It’s definitely worth a view or three.

Watch the Keynote

Our More Than HPC Plenary Chairs put together a brilliant panel of experts to discuss how we are using HPC to fight COVID-19 today, and how we might combine it with data science and data collection in the future in such a way that we’re prepared to instantly take action for the next calamity.

Watch the More Than HPC Plenary

A Community, and a Conference, Endures

Delivering SC20 was an incredible challenge for all of us; volunteers, authors, exhibitors, participants, and organizers alike, in a year that devastated us like no other. There will never be enough words to express the appreciation I have for all of you, and for our sponsoring societies, IEEE-CS and ACM, for their continued support.

I hope you’ll take the time to look back upon what we accomplished as a community and realize that congratulations are in order for all of us – to everyone who donated hours, days, weeks, and months of time and effort to prove that anywhere we are, and everywhere we are, we are more than HPC.

In deepest gratitude,
Christine E. Cuicchi
SC20 General Chair

SC20 Is Everywhere We Are

You may have noticed a change in our logo—after months of hard work by the SC20 Planning Committee, we are thrilled to announce that SC20 will be a fully virtual conference. As we began exploring how to bring our conference to life in a digital environment, we had the option to go big or go home. We’ve chosen to go big. The vast majority of our usual conference content will be shared during our virtual event in November.

The SC20 Committee set out to shape the virtual experience with these goals in mind:

Recognition

Honor all accepted content by making it available in the virtual conference. 

Opportunity

Make the conference as accessible as possible to the broadest audience of attendees.

Quality

Provide a virtual platform that allows for high-quality delivery of Technical Program and Exhibits content, with interactive access to presenters where possible.

Consideration and Continuity

Preserve as much of the normal conference schedule as possible while being cognizant of attendees’ locations, schedules, and restructured working environments.

We know the wait for information has been long, and we are eager to share our plans with you, while navigating the uncharted waters of event planning during a global pandemic. We thank you for your patience and support, and look forward to an exciting conference for our attendees and exhibitors. No matter where you are…everywhere, we are more than HPC.

Warmest Regards,
Christine E. Cuicchi
SC20 General Chair

Virtual Event FAQ

Visit the Virtual Event FAQ with information regarding hotel cancellations, conference schedule and fees, content submission and publication, and much, much more.

View Virtual Event FAQ

Planning each SC conference is a three-year journey. By the time we are in the final year of planning, the shape of the conference is well-determined, as are the known unknowns. The events of 2020 have upended all of that, and have made for the most challenging final year for any SC planning committee yet.

The vast majority of the more than 700 people on the SC planning committee are volunteers from the HPC community. All of us share your concerns regarding the challenges of remaining healthy and safe while continuing with our daily routines. Many of us are also subject to institutional and governmental travel guidance and restrictions — as are our attendees and participants — and much like everything else today, they change frequently.

Over my twenty years of involvement on the SC committee many of our team members have become lifelong friends and family to me; I hold their safety, and yours, as the utmost concern for the conference.

Still, there is the business of ensuring the HPC community can continue to exchange ideas and achievements on a broad scale in a normal rhythm. The SC20 committee began planning for both in-person and virtual attendance — a first for SC — within a month of the United States COVID-related shutdowns. We are fortunate in that we have a longer runway with which to plan than did most conferences this spring and summer. That allows us to not only draw from lessons learned across a wide range of experiences in many fields, but also to carefully plan for the most robust conference experience possible for our participants and attendees.

In a normal year, the most-often heard characterization of our conference is that there is too much content from which to choose. It’s a good problem to have, and we’re working to provide abundant content again this year.

We recently held the first ever completely virtual SC paper review meeting, and it was a tremendous success due to the planning of many, most of all that of our Technical Papers Chair Franck Cappello and Co-Chair Rudolf Eigenmann. The SC20 committee is continually finding ways to accomplish the usual planning tasks from all corners of the earth. The events of this year have us re-examining nearly every aspect of the conference, and while we can and are addressing some of those this year, others require steady, longer-term approaches from the SC conference series, the SC Steering Committee and the HPC community as a whole.

Every day brings new information that more sharply hones the shape of SC20 and the conferences that follow. Every day there are more decisions to be made with that brand new information. We know that this ever-changing professional and personal environment is the case for many of you and your employers, and as such we have made adjustments in numerous areas of the SC20 experience:

• We will open registration for the conference on August 14, 2020.
• We are working with our exhibitors, attendees, and content authors to provide as much flexibility as possible for in-person and virtual attendance and participation.
• We will provide flexible cancellation and rebate policies where possible.

More information regarding all of that, and the SC20 program itself, will come in the next several weeks. Please continue to check the SC20 website’s Coronavirus & SC page for conference status.

SC20 won’t be the same as SC conferences of the past. But it will be an event that brings the HPC community together to further our field, our connections to each other and the world around us, and our desire to be more than HPC.

Warm Regards,
Christine E. Cuicchi
SC20 General Chair

HPC has been a tremendous enabler of advances in healthcare and medical research for many years. And as you’d expect, HPC is helping scientists get a lead on the coronavirus and its impacts on human health.

Japanese Researchers Use Fugaku, the World’s Fastest Supercomputer, to Simulate Air Particle Movement Resulting in Recommended Procedures for Reducing COVID-19 Spread

Via DailyMail.com

World’s fastest supercomputer that has been running simulations to determine how best to reduce the spread of COVID-19 recommends open train windows and limiting passengers as well we using floor-to-ceiling curtains around hospital beds. Read full article

Fighting COVID with Computing: Fermilab, Brookhaven, and Open Science Grid Dedicate Computational Power to COVID-19 Research

Via Brookhaven National Laboratory

During the times that select Fermilab and Brookhaven computers get a break from particle collision analysis, they’re free to crunch data outside particle physics. That’s where the Open Science Grid comes in. Among other tasks, the OSG evaluates research proposals to determine which are a good fit for its networks. In offering its resources to COVID-19 proposals, it provided the kind of vetting that the labs wouldn’t have been able to assume on their own. Read full article

ORNL Team Enlists World’s Fastest Supercomputer to Combat the Coronavirus

Via Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Simulations of more than 8000 small-molecule drug compounds to screen for those that could bind to a protein in coronaviruses and disable it from infecting host cells have been performed on the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The S-protein spike is present in both the virus responsible for the SARS epidemic of 2003 and the COVID-19 disease. The systematic screening of compounds reduced the original set of 8000 down to a more reasonable 77 small-molecule drug compounds that can potentially undergo experimental testing. Thanks to Summit, the simulations took only a day or two, saving valuable time that can be used by experimental researchers to focus on a manageable number of options for stopping the coronavirus. Read full article

Supercomputers Playing a Significant Role in COVID-19 Research

Via TechRepublic

Initiatives are underway to predict where the virus will spread and analyze how effective preventive measures are, according to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Read full article

Researchers Tackle the Flu with Breakthrough Virus Simulations

Via UC San Diego News Center

Supercomputing power applied to records of historical pandemics, such as the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic which killed more than 200,000 people, can help us fight new diseases. A team from the University of California at San Diego built an all-atom, solvated, and experimentally based integrative model of pH1N1 (the H1N1 flu virus) on the Blue Waters supercomputer hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Using this model of the entire viral envelope, which consisted of more than 160 million atoms, they examined two binding sites on the flu’s viral proteins. For the first time they were able to understand how flu proteins on the surface of the virus interact with each other. From this research, new anti-influenza therapeutics may be developed. Read full article

How Supercomputers Are Getting Us Closer to a COVID-19 Vaccine

Via The Hill

The global scientific community has joined forces in an unprecedented effort to understand, track, forecast, test for, and find a cure for the current coronavirus pandemic. But in a crisis where every second lost means more loss of lives, solidarity alone isn’t enough. Supercomputers are enabling a vastly accelerated pace by which scientists can conduct research and collect and analyze data. Never have they proven their value to society more than during this COVID-19 pandemic. Read full article

Researcher Say Spread of Coronavirus Extends Far Beyond China’s Quarantine Zone

Via Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)

Epidemiologists have been using the Wrangler supercomputer at UT Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center to model the spread of the coronavirus. The team used historical travel data for the busy Spring Festival season to chart movements between 371 Chinese cities, yielding a more accurate model than could be created on a desktop computer. Read full article

Share Your Research News

If you or your organization is involved in virus- or pandemic-related research, please share your news with the SC20 Communications Team so we can highlight how HPC is making a positive impact in the world. 

—

Christine E. Cuicchi, SC20 General Chair

One of the novelties of this year’s conference is that it is being hosted for the first time in Atlanta, Georgia. As the city may be new to the SC community, prepare to encounter this location with a deep history and a vibrant present – like a stately southern oak, flourishing and flowering still.

This is a particularly apropos metaphor as Atlanta is known as the most heavily forested urban area in the country. Tree canopy covers more than half the city, cooling it in the summer and protecting its inhabitants from the harsh sun. Many Atlanta streets are named for trees. Look around and you’ll see oaks, magnolias, dogwoods, and more.

The acorn of Atlanta was planted in the 1840s, when it was founded as a railroad terminus. By the time of the American Civil War in the 1860s, Atlanta had become a strategic hub for distribution of military supplies, and was the focus of General Sherman’s destruction before the Union’s March to the Sea. The seedling Atlanta was cut to the ground but would grow again.

The city is shaped by its ever-branching history. Its location at the terminus of many rail trunk lines enabled many industries to flourish, and creativity to bloom. Coca-Cola was invented in Atlanta, and a visit to the World of Coca-Cola gives you the chance to taste nearly every flavor of the beverage that’s been sold all around the world. It’s also where budding novelist Margaret Mitchell grew up and eventually wrote “Gone with the Wind”. Visit her house at the Atlanta History Center.

With the founding of Georgia Tech and the Atlanta University Center, the city grew into a center for higher education. Not everyone flourished equally, though, due to racism and segregation. After World War II, Atlanta became a major organizing center in the American Civil Rights movement. Learn more about Atlanta’s central role at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, and its influence on a global leader at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.

In more recent history, Atlanta has continued to grow from a slender tree. CNN’s headquarters is there. It hosted the Olympics in 1996, and the Super Bowl last year (meaning our hotels have been recently renovated). Atlanta is now the ninth largest metropolitan area in the United States, with a broadly branched economy supporting nearly six million residents. It’s the home of a strong theater community and diverse music scene. Its world-class restaurants serve stellar food – an epicurean dream with a dash of southern yum. And nearby is the Computer Museum of America, which houses the largest vintage supercomputing collection in the entire world.

I think you’re going to enjoy this year’s host city a lot. Great oaks grow from little acorns – and Atlanta is no exception.

—

Christine E. Cuicchi, SC20 General Chair

Monitoring the Situation

As the impact of COVID-19 and the worldwide response to the virus grows, I want to express the SC20 team’s heartfelt concern for our friends, colleagues, and families around the world. So, you may be wondering: is SC20 still on? The short answer is, yes.

Because there is extreme fluidity with this situation, we are continuing to plan to hold SC20 as scheduled in November while monitoring the situation.  We encourage you to continue to submit to our various Technical Program, Students@SC Program, and SCinet Program events.

Call for Participation

Submission Deadlines

Out of concern for the health and well-being of stakeholders, many employers have implemented travel restrictions; NVIDIA transformed GTC into an online-only format; and the American Physical Society and SXSW have canceled their March events. As of this writing, other conferences and large gatherings, like ISC in Frankfurt and the 2020 Olympics, are in wait-and-see mode.

Coronavirus & SC Guidelines & Policy

HPC & Coronavirus

HPC has been a tremendous enabler of advances in healthcare and medical research for many years. And as you’d expect, HPC is helping scientists get a lead on the coronavirus and its impacts on human health.

• Epidemiologists have been using the Wrangler supercomputer at UT Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center to model the spread of the coronavirus. The team used historical travel data for the busy Spring Festival season to chart movements between 371 Chinese cities, yielding a more accurate model than could be created on a desktop computer. Learn more
• Supercomputing power applied to records of historical pandemics, such as the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic which killed more than 200,000 people, can help us fight new diseases. A team from the University of California at San Diego built an all-atom, solvated, and experimentally based integrative model of pH1N1 (the H1N1 flu virus) on the Blue Waters supercomputer hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Using this model of the entire viral envelope, which consisted of more than 160 million atoms, they examined two binding sites on the flu’s viral proteins. For the first time they were able to understand how flu proteins on the surface of the virus interact with each other. From this research, new anti-influenza therapeutics may be developed. Learn more
• Simulations of more than 8000 small-molecule drug compounds to screen for those that could bind to a protein in coronaviruses and disable it from infecting host cells have been performed on the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The S-protein spike is present in both the virus responsible for the SARS epidemic of 2003 and the COVID-19 disease. The systematic screening of compounds reduced the original set of 8000 down to a more reasonable 77 small-molecule drug compounds that can potentially undergo experimental testing. Thanks to Summit, the simulations took only a day or two, saving valuable time that can be used by experimental researchers to focus on a manageable number of options for stopping the coronavirus. Learn more

Share Your Research News

If you or your organization is involved in virus- or pandemic-related research, please share your news with the SC20 Communications Team so we can highlight how HPC is making a positive impact in the world.

We hope to see all of you in Atlanta in November, and wish you all the best in these trying times.

—

Christine E. Cuicchi, SC20 General Chair

SC20 marks the first time that SC will take place in Atlanta, Georgia, a vibrant city that – home to the busiest airport in the world – will be an easily reached destination for many of our national and international attendees and exhibitors.

Like you, I am passionate about all aspects of HPC: the operation of supercomputers themselves, the education of students and future leaders about the opportunities available to them in the field of HPC, and the transformation of algorithms, mathematics, programs, and computational power into once-impossible scientific discoveries.

By bringing that passion to my role as SC20 General Chair, my goal is to ensure that SC focuses on the entire world of HPC: applications, systems, storage, networks, and the people who bring it all to life.

As a community we broaden the impact of HPC by increasingly collaborating with researchers, scientists, and influencers who have a major impact on our industry, but who are not operating directly in the HPC sphere. Together, we’re more than HPC.

SC20 Focus

SC attendees interpret the annual conference tagline each year according to their own experiences in the world. Here’s what “More Than HPC” means to me, as we continue to prepare for next year’s conference.

“More Than HPC” is meant to evoke our view of the expanding impact of HPC on our daily lives, and the increasing degree to which scientific advances are the result of deep partnerships between HPC providers and science teams. From targeting disease mechanisms leading to more effective treatment, to creating the neural networks for driverless cars, to refining the vehicles that will take the general public into space, our impact is growing daily.

It’s “More Than HPC” when we use machine learning and data analytics to improve the forecasting and tracking of natural disasters, bringing together previously unrelated disciplines to help keep natural disasters from becoming humanitarian catastrophes.

It’s “More Than HPC” when we target disease mechanisms for more effective treatment by blending molecular dynamics, the latest advances in microbiology, and new approaches to scientific software.

When we apply artificial intelligence to address socially relevant issues like poverty and homelessness, and learn how to grow more crops in a smaller space with less resources, we’re employing “More Than HPC” to find those answers.

The Details

HPC Immersion

I’m especially excited about the tremendous potential of our new HPC Immersion program. Designed to create a pathway to conference engagement and HPC community involvement for undergraduate students traditionally underrepresented in HPC and HPC-related fields, the program will specifically target students majoring in electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science.

Participants will be fully involved in the existing Students@SC program, and will be guided by experienced HPC leaders and mentors through technical program sessions, including post-session discussions to further illuminate the session topics and how the participants can become involved in those specialties.

State of the Practice

SC20 also features a renewed focus on the state of the practice. Those who work tirelessly behind the scenes to design, install, house, secure, network, and operate supercomputers and the supporting infrastructure have a wealth of knowledge to share, but few opportunities to reach fellow practitioners directly and relate their experiences.

To bridge that gap, SC20 will feature three full days of dedicated State of the Practice Talks as a venue to deliver practical, up-to-the-minute improvements in all areas of interest to SC attendees. Presentations will cover best practices across a broad range of topics at the forefront of HPC including system management, networking, education, and data management.

HPC in the City

We are also launching HPC in the City, an initiative to engage leaders, decision-makers, educators, and students in the greater Atlanta area to work together and combine our collective talents to address problems that are both relevant to the local community and suitable for HPC. One notable such issue is environmental justice, which aims to address complex issues such as adequate access to healthy food, clean air and water, transportation, and safe living areas.

HPC in the City will also tackle health disparities to provide potential solutions to eliminate preventable differences in the burdens of disease, injury, violence, and access to care, offering all people the ability to achieve optimal health. We hope this collaborative experience will engage all voices to bring the power of HPC to make a lasting impact in these issues.

Technical Program & More

And as always, SC20 will feature an extensive Technical Program featuring those who know HPC best – you. Add to that a dynamic Students@SC program and Exhibits featuring the freshest technologies and capabilities developed all over the world, and you’ll find just about everything you need to enhance your HPC involvement.

Spread the Word

In his SC15 keynote address in Austin, Alan Alda – author and six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner – asked us to try harder to communicate our scientific discoveries clearly with the public. Our community thrives when we bring people together and share what we’re learning, and when we work together to change the world.

I encourage you to watch for exciting developments about the conference throughout the year as we prepare to help you get the best out of Atlanta, SC20, and everything about HPC. Get involved – sign up to receive the SC20 newsletter and read articles in the blog, consider submitting a paper, speaking, or volunteering. It will be a rewarding experience no matter how you choose to engage.

Bring your passion and energy for HPC to Atlanta, where together we can be more than HPC.

Watch the preview video

—

Christine E. Cuicchi, SC20 General Chair