SC23 was my 14th SC Conference!

In honor of the conference’s 35th anniversary, SC handed out buttons marking major attendance milestones with markers at 5 year increments. It was disappointing to be so close to 15 years and unable to have truly earned the button!

This trip to Denver for SC marks my fourth time in the city for the conference (‘13, ‘17, ‘19) - the most SCs I’ve been to in a single city and I believe it’s the most frequented city for the confernce as well.

My volunteer role this year was the SC23 Exeuctive Director. The best way to describe this is possibly as a “Chief of Staff” to the conference’s General Chair. In this role, I worked closely with Dorian Arnold and the executive committee to coordinate across the various roles and functions of the conference. My work started very early for this planning cycle, about two years in advance of the conference. The overall goal is to help the General Chair track everything - which is no small task for a confernce with 10K+ attendees and hundreds of committee members. I coordinated agendas for the planning meetings, attendance lists, tracked conference operations, and compiled the overall minute-by-minute schedule for the conference.

This role was time-consuming and definitely a challenge to coordiante across the various groups, but I really enjoyed the opportunity to get to know the broader conference on a detailed level.

SC23 was my final conference as a member of the SC Steering committee. Learning how SC works including the policies and long-term vision for the conference was rewarding. So much planning, discussion, and deep consideration goes into every decision made by the steering committee.

While I was kept busy with my SC responsibilities, I still made time to fit in my responsibilities as SIGHPC Chair. SC is home to our annual member meeting which is hosted during the lunchtime BoF slot on Tuesday. As with last year, I tried to liven up the meeting with trivia, a rotating host of presenters, and prizes. Additionally, we have an on-site executive committee meeting, which is a great opportunity to get our whole team together in-person after a year of virtual calls. I was invited to participate in an addiitonal BoF on the role of professional socieities in the community which was and exciting opportunity to engage with leaders from the SIAM SIAG and IEEE-CS TCs engaged in HPC. Finally, we continued to expand our engagement with SIGHPC awardees at SC with two community breakfasts. We invited members from the HPC Immersion Program, the SIGHPC Fellows, Travel Grant winners, the EWLTC winner, and Dissertation winner to join members of the SIGHPC EC and some mentors for breakfast across two mornings. This was a great opportunity to engage with the participants that we bring to SC and check in on their expereience at the confrerence!