Conference: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC22)

The Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) Conference series aims to provide a forum for discussing challenges, opportunities, and solutions among HPC center directors and managers, computational scientists, end users, students, facilitators, educators, HPC system administrators and user support staff, as well as industry and government agency representatives from across the United States and around the world. The PEARC22 conference follows the successful ten-year NSF supported Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) conference series.

The conference will be held in Boston, MA from July 10-14, 2022. This is a project to fund students to participate in the conference, especially in the student program activities. Some students will present papers and posters at the conference, and students from underrepresented groups in computing and economically disadvantaged sectors will be specifically recruited to attend.

The project serves the national interest, as stated by NSF's mission, to promote the progress of science as it provides a forum to disseminate research efforts, connect researchers, and train the next generation of scholars.

The student program committee for the conference is recruiting students with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion of underrepresented groups and from a diverse set of institutions. As part of the the student program, students will participate in (1) an orientation and welcome session, (2) a student internship spotlight session that enables students who have participated in internships to share their experiences, (3) a student mentor program that pairs a student with a senior mentor to help guide the student through conference activities, (4) a student volunteer program, to help run and organize the conference, (5), an exhibitor Q&A and networking event, where students can meet 1-on-1 with conference exhibitor representatives, and (6) a series of evening events called “The Village” for students to explore training programs, peer training, and competition strategies focused on a wide range of research computing/data skills.

The funding provided by NSF will have a significant impact on the careers of the future generation of researchers in high performance computing, while encouraging diversity in the field.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.