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

As a week-long event held in different cities every year, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, known as SC, provides one of the best opportunities for computer scientists, engineers, network experts, and other HPC researchers from academia, government, and industry to gather and assess the state of the field.

The sheer size and depth of the conference means that a trip to SC likely will require some face time with your manager, to explain how and why attending is worth it for you and for your organization.

Now that SC20 has gone virtual, here’s our top five reasons to attend SC20 that you can use in your appeal to your manager.

1. Full Program

Just as past in-person SC Conferences have been the largest annual gathering of high performance computing, networking, storage, and data analytics professionals, the SC20 Planning Committee has worked tirelessly to bring the broad range of content you’ve come to expect from every SC.

2. Reduced Costs

We’re all disappointed that we aren’t able to come together as a community in the beautiful city of Atlanta, but on the bright side, you can still experience the full breadth of SC’s valuable learning experiences without having to pay for travel and housing, and the registrations fees for SC20 have been greatly reduced to boot.

3. Experience More

While it can be exhilarating running from session to session in a vast convention center, the sheer size of SC and breadth of its content sometimes makes it a challenge to attend everything on your list. As long as you register by December 7, you’ll be able to go back and watch the material you might have missed through the virtual event portal – for six months!

4. Virtual Exhibits

The virtual exhibit hall will be full of the top companies showing off their newest technologies and latest discoveries. There will be opportunities for one-on-one chats, giveaways, on-demand booth sessions, a product showcase, and more. And don’t miss the SCavenger Hunt, available through the mobile app – this will be a fun way to connect with participating exhibitors and win prizes.

5. Share Your Knowledge

State of the Practice Talks will offer material for every level of your business or computing center, from Sysadmins and Education & Outreach professionals to Programmers and Cybersecurity practitioners. Invited Talks will cover cutting-edge and diverse topics including the end (or not) of Moore’s Law, trustworthy modeling, biodiversity, AI, machine learning, and more. The knowledge you bring back from your SC experience can help propel your organization to new levels of greatness.

Register for SC20 Today

—

Charity Plata, SC20 Communications Team Writer

Charity Plata provides comprehensive editorial oversight to Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Computational Science Initiative. Her writing and editing career spans diverse industries, including publishing, architecture, civil engineering, and professional sports. Prior to joining Brookhaven Lab in 2018, she worked at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory primarily within the Advanced Computing, Mathematics and Data Division.

The Invited Talks for SC20 represent the breadth, depth and future outlook of technology and its societal and scientific impact. HPC has always played a critical role in advancing breakthroughs in weather and climate research. This year’s invited talks extend this further to data driven approaches, including biodiversity, geoscience, and quantum computing. Our speakers will also touch on responsible application of HPC and new technological developments to highlight the impact of this potent and versatile technology on a wide range of applications.

Hear these illustrious speakers during SC20 Invited Talks, Tuesday–Thursday, November 17–19.

Lorena Barba (George Washington University) will explore the need for trustworthy computational evidence through transparency and reproducibility. With the explosion of new computational models for vital research, including COVID-19, applications that are of such importance to society highlight the requirement of building trustworthy computational models. Emphasizing transparency and reproducibility have helped us build more trust in computational findings. How should we adapt our practices for reproducibility to achieve “unimpeachable provenance”, and reach full accountability of scientific evidence produced via computation?

Shekhar Borkar (Qualcomm Inc.) will speak on the future of computing in the so-called “post Moore’s law era.” While speculations about the end of Moore’s law have created some level of fear in the community, this ending may not be coming as soon as we think. This talk will revisit the historic predictions of ‘the end’, and discuss promising opportunities and innovations that may further Moore’s law and continue to deliver unprecedented performance for years to come.

Dalia A. Conde (University of Southern Denmark) will offer a presentation on fighting the extinction crisis with data. With biodiversity loss identified by the World Economic Forum as one of humanity’s greatest challenges, computational methods are urgently needed to secure a healthier planet. We must design and implement effective species conservation strategies, which rely on vast and disparate volumes of data, from genetics and habitat to legislation and human interaction. This talk will introduce the Species Knowledge Index initiative, which aims to map, quantify, analyze, and disseminate open information on animal species to policy makers and conservationists around the globe.

Tom Conte (Georgia Tech) will examine HPC after Moore’s law. Whether Moore’s law has ended, is about to end, or will never end, the slowing of the semiconductor innovation curve has left the industry looking for alternatives. Different approaches, beyond quantum or neuromorphic computing, may disrupt current algorithms and software development. This talk will preview the road ahead, and suggest some exciting new technologies on the horizon.

Marissa Giustina (Google LLC) will share the challenges and recent discoveries in the development of Google’s Quantum computer, from both the hardware and quantum-information perspectives. This prototype hardware holds promise as a platform for tackling problems that have been impossible to address with existing HPC systems. The talk will include recent technological developments, as well as some perspective for the future of quantum computing.

Patrick Heimbach (The University of Texas at Austin) will discuss the need for advanced computing to help solve the global ocean state estimation problem. Because of the challenge of observing the full-depth global ocean circulation in its spatial detail, numerical simulations play an essential role in quantifying patterns of climate variability and change. New methods that are being developed at the interface of predictive data science remain underutilized in ocean climate modeling. These methods face considerable practical hurdles in the context of HPC, but will be indispensable for advancing simulation-based contributions to real world problems.

Simon Knowles (Graphcore) will discuss the reinvention of accelerated computing for artificial intelligence. As HPC changes in response to the needs of the growing user community, AI can harness enormous quantities of processing power – even as we move towards power-limited computing. To balance these needs, the intelligence processor (IPU) architecture is able to capture learning processes and offer massive heterogeneous parallelism. This ground-up reinvention of accelerated computing will show considerable results for real applications.

Ronald P. Luijten (Data Motion Architecture and Consulting GmbH) will offer a presentation on data-centric architecture of a weather and climate accelerator. Using a co-design approach, a non-Von-Neumann accelerator targeting weather and climate situations was developed in tandem with the application code to optimize memory bandwidth. This also led to the filing of a patent for a novel CGRA (Course Grain Reconfigurable Array) layout that reflects grid points in the physical world. The talk will include benchmarks achieved in the project, and a discussion of next steps.

Catherine (Katie) Schuman (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) will introduce us to the future of AI and HPC, in the form of neuromorphic computing and neural accelerators. These two new types of computing technologies offer significant advantages over traditional approaches, including considerably increased energy efficiency and accelerated neural network-style computing. This talk will illustrate the fundamental computing concepts involved in these new hardware developments, and highlight some initial performance results.

Compton Tucker (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) will speak on satellite tree enumeration outside of forests at the Fifty Centimeter Scale. Non-forest trees, which grow isolated outside of forests, and are not well documented, nevertheless play a crucial role for biodiversity, carbon storage, food resources, and shelter for humans & animals. This talk will detail the use of HPC and machine learning to enumerate isolated trees globally, to identify localized areas of degradation, and quantify the role of isolated trees in the global carbon cycle.

Cliff Young (Google LLC) will entertain the question of whether we can build a virtuous cycle between machine learning and HPC. While machine learning draws on many HPC components, the two areas are diverging in precision and programming models. However, it may be possible to construct a positive feedback loop between them. The Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) could provide opportunities to unite these fields to solve common problems through parallelization, mixed precision, and new algorithms.

—

Melyssa Fratkin, SC20 Communications Chair

COVID-19 has transformed life around the globe. In NYC, where I work for the Mount Sinai Health System, we were at the center of the epidemic in the United States in March. At this time, our clinicians and researchers leveraged their domain expertise to focus solely on better understanding and treating this new disease. The spotlight on COVID-19 created new interdisciplinary teams that have already been fruitful: the discovery that the first COVID-19 cases in NYC came from Europe in March¹, the first to use AI to detect COVID-related lung disease in CT scans² and the identification of inflammatory markers to help guide treatment for severe COVID-19 cases³. These advances were made possible through a team science approach that brought together experts in diverse domains, including cancer, computational science and infectious disease. Bridging disciplines is an essential tenet to productive modern science.

We have shared this same interdisciplinary approach for the design of the Computational Approaches for Cancer Workshop, now in its sixth year, at SC20. Experts in the computational, computer, basic and data sciences from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNL), National Science Foundation (NSF), academia and industry have gathered to discuss innovations and best practices on a wide array of topics from drug design, machine learning and data sharing. This workshop has enabled new human connections, facilitated a common language across disciplines, and improved understanding of biomedical opportunities and challenges in the high performance computing community.

With the bridges that have already been built over the last five years, and with the pandemic continuing to rage, this workshop comes at a critical time: never before has the intersection of computational, data and biomedical sciences been more crucial. We look forward to seeing you at the workshop.

¹ https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2020/mount-sinai-study-finds-first-cases-of-covid-19-in-new-york-city-are-primarily-from-european-and-us-sources-pr

² https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2020/mount-sinai-first-in-us-to-use-artificial-intelligence-to-analyze-coronavirus-covid19-patients-pr

³ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32511562/

—

Patricia Kovatch is the Senior Associate Dean for Scientific Computing and Data Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), founding the division in October 2011. She is also an Associate Professor for the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, the Icahn Institute for Data Science and Genomic Technology and Pharmalogical Sciences. Kovatch is on the Organizing Committee for the CAFCW20.

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

Eric Stahlberg, PhD

Director, Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research

Looking ahead to the sixth Computational Approaches for Cancer Workshop (CAFCW) at SC20, I am extremely excited about how the HPC community has embraced cancer research and how far we’ve progressed in such a short time. Five years ago, when the first CAFCW was being planned, the U.S. national initiative for precision medicine was less than 6 months old; the National Strategic Computing Initiative had not yet been signed; exascale systems were still in development; and the collaboration between two world leaders in computing and cancer research, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Cancer Institute, had yet to be established.

Today, due to the immediate benefit to researchers, clinicians and patients alike, high performance computing is now driving innovation across cancer research and clinical care. Previously unimaginable exascale technology systems are coming online and are being used increasingly for cancer research. Collaborative team science is becoming the new norm—motivated by biomedical science and forward-looking public policy across the globe. This includes support for computational biomedicine across the European Union, Asia and North America; access to increasing amounts of open data; and U.S. public policy such as the Precision Medicine Initiative, the National Strategic Computing Initiative, the 21st Century Cures Act and related Cancer Moonshot℠ efforts and the DOE Exascale Initiative.

Most recently, the phenomenal growth in the use of artificial intelligence across biomedicine is transforming and revolutionizing the role of high performance computing in cancer research and clinical care.

While HPC has enabled biomedical research for years, the work highlighted at last year’s SC19 conference in Denver was noteworthy in several ways. Across SC19, cancer and biomedical computing workshops, presentations, birds of a feather sessions and panels infused the program and captivated new audiences across all generations.

The 5th Computational Approaches for Cancer Workshop was again filled, with the largest number of submissions ever shaping the workshop. A breakthrough multidisciplinary team of DOE and NCI-supported scientists at the national laboratories received the SC19 Best Paper award! And leaders from across the cancer and computing research communities attended, eager to share how the collaborative work by biomedical and HPC scientists made new insights possible. It was clear not only that HPC is vital to cancer research, but that SC is “more than HPC.”

As innovative computational approaches for cancer continue to grow and expand, exciting new frontiers come into focus. Insights from data are being transformed to become predictions; predictions are joined with real-world outcomes; and a data-driven eco-system for learning about cancer is emerging. New levels of analytics are now being used to characterize and diagnose cancer precisely and accurately. Like other fields that already utilize digital twins, growing amounts of cancer data, interdisciplinary collaborations and computational approaches are opening the door to amazing predictive models for this complex and challenging array of diseases.

This year finds us all looking at SC20 differently, amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic and again being challenged to innovate. High performance computing is being used to search for new avenues of innovation to help reduce the impact of this pernicious disease that affects all of us across the planet. Computational solutions inspired by cancer challenges are being employed in this battle. This year’s Computational Approaches for Cancer Workshop will again highlight innovations and advances in the use of computing and AI to make progress in cancer, bring together global communities and disciplines and take a glimpse into the future of cancer research in a post-COVID-19 world.

—

Eric Stahlberg, PhD, is the director of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (BIDS) at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. Dr. Stahlberg is a founding co-organizer of the Computational Approaches for Cancer Research Workshop (CAFCW), held in conjunction with the SC conference since 2015. He has been instrumental in establishing the Frederick National Laboratory’s high-performance computing initiative and in assembling scientific teams across multiple, complex organizations to advance predictive oncology. In 2017, he was recognized as one of FCW‘s Federal 100.

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

Zoo Atlanta

Zoo Atlanta inspires value and preservation of wildlife through a unique mix of education and outdoor family fun. From well-known native wildlife to critically endangered species on the brink of extinction, the zoo offers memorable close encounters with more than 1,000 animals from around the world. The zoo’s highlights include one of the largest populations of great apes in the U.S. and a global center of excellence for the care and study of vanishing reptiles and amphibians. Zoo Atlanta is also proud to be one of only four zoos in the U.S. that giant pandas call home. Eat, shop, and play at Zoo Atlanta! Kids and families will love the Zoo Train, a handcrafted replica of an 1863 locomotive!

Learn more about this attraction

Don’t miss the Panda Cam

Atlanta Here We Come

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.

Each month, we’ll feature an extraordinary aspect of this city with southern charm and world-class sophistication. By the time November rolls around you’ll be in love with our beautiful host city, if you aren’t already.

More host city features

—

Brian Ban
SC20 Communications Team

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