Meet State of the Practice Chair Brett M. Bode and get ready to submit your work to this new venue at SC20. Submissions for State of the Practice Talks open February 17, 2020.

Brett M. Bode
State of the Practice Chair

Brett is an Assistant Director at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and a co-Principal Investigator on the Blue Waters project. Prior to the current operational role with Blue Waters, Brett was the lead of the Advanced Digital Services division at NCSA, and managed the system software development projects for the Blue Waters project. Before joining NCSA in 2008, Brett spent nearly ten years as a scientist with the Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University, researching ways to deliver better performance to scientific applications from HPC clusters. Brett holds a BS in chemistry and physics from Illinois State University and a PhD in physical chemistry from Iowa State University.

Why focus on state of the practice at SC20?

BB: The State of the Practice theme spans the entire range of SC topics and is already a sub-area under Papers, accounting for three papers at SC19. However, there are many more potential state of the practice advances than can be accommodated under the currently available offerings.

The goal of State of the Practice Talks is to provide a venue within the SC technical program for reporting of advances and best practices of interest to the SC community. State of the Practice Talks allow for submissions of late-developing advances and improvements that do not necessarily meet the high bar of a full SC paper.

What topical areas will State of the Practice Talks cover, and who should submit?

BB: Submissions are encouraged from any area of interest to the SC attendee. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) systems, storage and facility management, HPC project management, networking and cybersecurity, and HPC training and education. We expect submissions particularly from operations-focused staff such as system administrators, operations managers, cybersecurity specialists, and training and outreach coordinators.

State of the Practice Talks, like Papers, require an Artifact Description. What kind of artifacts do you foresee from submissions to this area?

BB: The State of the Practice Talks will include the extended abstract, presentation, and optionally additional artifacts in the digital library. The artifacts will be as varied as the topical areas, and may range from scripts and code snippets to risk management templates to sample materials for demonstrating best practices in education. We encourage the submission of artifacts that, combined with the abstract and presentation, make the submission complete and reproducible.

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Rebecca Hartman-Baker
SC20 Communications Team