SC24 was my 15th SC Conference!

For those of you closely following this blog - I did get my 15 year pin from the info booth!

Although this is the conference’s first showing in Atlanta, I’ve been involved in planning a SC Conference in Atlanta since 2018! SC20 was the first event slated for Atlanta and I engaged in over a year of planning as the Students@SC Chair before the confernce pivoted to a fully virtual event in 2020.

Following an extremely broad role for SC23, I transitioned into a far more structured volunteer position in SC24 as the Infrastructure Chair. Infrastructure is one of the core conference volunteer committees and includes many behind-the-scenes components including Space, Security, Signage, Wayfinding, the Committee Office, Electrical, and AV. Each of those areas has a chair that took full responsibility for their own functions. It was a nice change to work with a dedicated team who all had clear roles and responsibilities. This role was extremely operational and I was fortunate to have a fantastic team to work with on planning and executing the conference. Our group was responsible for all the little hidden details at SC from handing out wristbands and drink tickets at networking events to placing the all of the AV, Chairs, Tables Power, Signs, and sessions across the convention center.

SC24 was my first conference as an NVIDIAN - which is a massive change, but with only 4 weeks in the new role under my belt, I don’t have any clear take-aways on the differences in attending SC as a member of industry quite yet. I was new enough at the company to have limited formal professional responsibilites (meetings, booth duty, etc.), but I am looking forward to hopefully brining more members from our team in the future!

In another exciting first, I was co-instructor for a Tutorial this year! Our tutorial Delivering HPC: Procurement, Cost Models, Metrics, Value and More was a shortened version of a three-day course that I’ve been offering with Andrew Jones from Microsoft with TACC as the HPC Leadership Institute. We were jointed by two additional presenters for a busy and engaging session to a packed room of around 100 attendees consistently present.

SC24 marked my final SC during my term as SIGHPC Chair (I will be running for a second term!). I conducted the usual responsibilites of running the annual member meeting, supporting the SIGHPC booth, and hosting the in-person exeuctive committee meeting. The annual member meeting had our highest attendance yet and we had great numbers to report on membership, engagement, and our two new conferences.

We had another joint BoF this year with SIAM SIAG and the IEEE-CS TCs engaged in HPC. This year’s session had a great attendnace showing and it was excitign to hear how each community is finding new ways to bring benefit to the community.

One of our overall goals for the SIGHPC Exeucitive Committee is to improve how we connect with members and honorees during SC. SIGHPC is directly responsible for sponsoring many people to come to SC including the HPC Immersion Program, Studend and Early Career Travel Grant winners, the EWLTC awardee, Dissertation awardee, Education Chapter awardee, and the SIGHPC Fellows. We hosted two breakfasts again this year at the convention center for our honored guests and invited members of the SIGHPC EC and mentors to connect. These were great additonal networking and community sessions and it was wonderful to see our participants from differnet groups meeting and sharing their conference expereiences.