PSC Staff Conduct Series of Talks, Workshops, and Discussions at National Academic HPC Conference
Another year, another productive PEARC! PSC staff participated in PEARC25, the national academic high performance computing conference, both by presenting the center’s work in advancing cyberinfrastructure and HPC, and by learning from the latest developments at other academic supercomputing institutions.
- With their colleagues at Indiana University, PSC’s Stephen Deems and Tom Maiden presented their talk on their ongoing work in teaching students and scientists how to best use supercomputers, “National Cyberinfrastructure Resources in the Classroom.” Highlighting the work by the NSF-funded ACCESS collaboration, in which PSC is a leading member, they demonstrated how NSF’s HPC resources, such as PSC’s flagship Bridges-2 system, can support hands-on remote learning that gets people up to speed with supercomputing at whatever level they start — from novices to HPC veterans.
- Ken Hackworth of PSC, with collaborator Lars Koesterke of the Texas Advanced Computing Center, gave attendees the inside scoop on what makes a proposal to acquire time on ACCESS supercomputers a strong one. They focused particularly on the two most persistent problems new users have in ACCESS proposals: selecting the best supercomputer in the ACCESS cyberinfrastructure to support their work, and translating their research projects into competitive proposals.
- PSC’s deputy scientific director, Bruno Abreu, offered a workshop called “Broadly Accessible Quantum Computing.” With colleagues from QuEra Computing Inc., the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Rutgers University, the quantum veteran hosted a series of invited talks, panels, and community contributions. Abreu helped attendees navigate the rapidly developing intersection between quantum computers and HPC, with an eye toward making the technology more accessible.
- PSC Director Barr von Oehsen led a Birds of a Feather session — a kind of open forum of HPC professionals in a given subject of interest — on the Ecosystem for Research Networking Summit Series. With colleagues from the Ecosystem for Research Networking and NJEdge, von Oehsen and attendees discussed challenges and opportunities in research collaborations, resource accessibility, regional and national support communities, the roles of AI and quantum computing, and workforce development supported by the summits.
- Paola Buitrago, PSC’s director of AI and Big Data, and Sergiu Sanielevici, PSC’s director of Support for Scientific Applications, reviewed a successful year in the ongoing ByteBoost cybertraining program. A collaboration of PSC, Stony Brook University, and Texas A&M University, the NSF-funded ByteBoost has promoted adoption of cutting-edge computing platforms into existing and novel HPC workflows. The talk featured work from more than 100 researchers with three computing systems based on next-generation architectures — PSC’s Neocortex, Stony Brook’s Ookami, and Texas A&M’s ACES. The team also announced their successful bid to the NSF to continue the program next year, ByteBoost 2.0.