SC15 General Chair Jackie Kern Previews the Conference and Exhibition

SC15 General Chair Jackie Kern

Following is a brief conversation with Jackie Kern, SC15 General Chair from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Since 2003, she has served as  a member of the SC planning committee and in 2007 she also served as SCinet Chair.  

At the University of Illinois, she is the Director of IT Shared Services where she represents her department on various campus IT initiatives and committees including leading the community in a consolidation of service effort and being the operations chair of the Data Center Shared Services co-location efforts on campus.   

In these efforts she oversees the development of standards, procedures and policies related to data centers, identifies IT resources needed for current and future projects, and markets the services to campus. 
  

Describe how the “HPC Transforms” conference theme came to be this year?
Over the last three decades, HPC has become increasingly important in manufacturing, weather forecasting, medicine, entertainment and many other facets of everyday life. You would be hard pressed to experience a “normal” day for the average citizen without encountering something that wasn’t impacted by HPC. 

Starting last year, the SC conference team launched a program called “HPC Matters” to highlight this impact. The program supports the creation of short videos that explore the use of HPC in improving daily life.

These videos are available at the SC15 video library. The program also supports public talks by industry luminaries, such as the SC HPC Matters Plenary.

For this year, we wanted to dive deeper into why it is important, and to do that we wanted to demonstrate how it transforms lives and the world around us.  We have put together these videos that demonstrate why it matters and how it transforms lives.

SC15 is returning to Austin, Texas for the first time since 2008 – what is it about Austin that makes it a good fit for the SC community?
Austin is fantastic because of the technology-centric community as well as the culture, food, people and music.  We feel this is a really good fit for our attendees and exhibitors. It gives them the right balance of fun and technical aptitude to spark the creativity, and offers a wide variety of opportunities to network and collaborate. And the city itself is also very warm and welcoming to our group.

The SC15 Mobile App.

For someone new to the community, what tips can you offer for tackling the immense Tech Program and the massive exhibition hall?
Plan ahead!  Quite frankly there is too much to see and do at an SC conference so you need to budget your time based on your areas of interests and priorities.  Your best bet is to get plugged into everything now – the website, blog, schedule, conference app, etc.

Start with the conference schedule on the website and go from there. Put a priority on not only learning, but also networking.  Some of the people you meet at an SC conference will impact your career for years to come.  The more people you meet the more opportunities you have to collaborate and get involved.  If you are new, go to one of the Information Booths – they are staffed by veteran attendees who are there to help you.

Also, you will want to download our enhanced mobile app and started getting organized for a very packed week in Austin.

This year's Exhibition is sold out and is expected to draw big crowds.

What are some of the top things you are looking forward to experiencing/attending at SC15? 
Very difficult question since there are so many great things to experience or participate in at an SC conference!  Some of the things that I’m looking forward to are the rich and dynamic Invited Talks, the HPC Matters Plenary with Intel’s Diane Bryant, and the Alan Alda Keynote. In addition we have an international Student Cluster Competition that is sure to be exciting.

Plus the show floor has more than 300 cutting-edge exhibitors and I love checking in with SCinet – the world’s fastest, custom-built computer network.  Then there is the incredibly robust Technical Program. Quite honestly, there is too much to list here.

SC student volunteers with Jeanine Cook, SC15 Student Programs Chair.

The student program went thru some modifications this year.  Can you explain what those were and how the changes have been received?
This year we merged every student program under one umbrella called Students@SC. This is an effort to make sure that we are encouraging the next generation of HPC professionals to be engaged in the community. It provides more opportunities for all the students that apply to be a part of SC. We encourage them to participate in many of the events, such as the Mentor-Protégé Program and Experiencing HPC for Undergraduates. 

We have arranged to bring in key people from across the community to speak about their experiences and encouraged the use of the community to continue to move HPC forward into a new and exciting era.  We are also focusing on diversity and making certain that all students are treated equal and offered the same opportunities for success. 

True success won’t be measured until after the conference once we see how it goes, but we are encouraged by those students who have applied to the program and their engagement thus far.  We are also working with an evaluation team to measure our success and will have those data points after SC15 is over.

Anything else knew this year that people should know about?
This year we have added an all-day track for Birds-of-a-Feather sessions.  There is so much demand for them and with the high volume of submissions, we are excited to introduce this all-day track.  Other exciting things are a much more robust mobile app and networking opportunities like the addition of Duckling – a new networking tool for conference attendees.

Intel's Diane Bryant - HPC Matters Plenary Speaker

What can people expect this year from the HPC Matters Plenary?
It will be amazing.  This year will feature Diane Bryant of Intel who was recently named by Fortune as one of the 51 most powerful women.   She will describe how next generation supercomputers are not only transforming HPC and the future of computing, but also society.  Plus, there is no fee to attend the session although a badge is required.  It is shaping up to be an entertaining session that is a must attend event for everyone - from novice to expert.

Describe the process and time involved for putting on such a big event.
Planning a conference of this quality and magnitude couldn't happen without a fantastic team behind me. Three years ago I was selected to be the SC15 General Chair and at that time I made a conscious choice to select the best of breed to make sure this event was spectacular.

Over the course of the last three years we have spent many phone calls, face-to-face meetings, site visits, and countless hours working towards providing the best possible experience for our attendees. One group in particular spends a considerable amount of time working towards providing the best and fastest computer network in the world for one week in November.

The SCinet team spends an enormous amount of volunteer time designing the custom network, gathering equipment donations from vendors, connecting equipment, working with providers to get connected to the right networks, and then sustaining the network for everyone at the conference.

In addition, our Technical Program team has worked diligently to evaluate the submissions and create a program that is second to none.  Truly it has been the most exciting, challenging, and rewarding three-year project of my career. I am honored to be a part of it.

What advice would you give someone looking to get involved in the SC volunteer community?
The SC community is always looking for dedicated volunteers. The best way to get involved is to come to one of the Information Booths at SC15.  We strive to have new faces as volunteers who are able to provide new perspectives and ideas to keep SC fresh and diverse. 

What needs to happen for you to judge SC15 as a successful event?
To me, the most important thing would be walking around the Austin Convention Center and witnessing the engagement in the collaboration that we expect to see at an SC Conference.  I hope attendees leave feeling that there is simply nowhere else on the planet that offers as much education, collaboration and networking as an SC Conference.  After all, we are attendees ourselves and that remains the ultimate goal!

10 Questions with SC15 Student Programs Chair Jeanine Cook

In the months leading up to SC15, the conference communications team will be highlighting various aspects of the conference by asking questions of the volunteers leading those areas. 

In this first installment, SC15 Student Programs Chair, Jeanine Cook, talks about plans to broaden the size and scope of student activities at the conference.

Jeanine Cook, SC15 Student Programs Chair

Cook is a principal member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, where she works on several projects aimed at paving the way to exascale computing. Prior to joining Sandia, she was an associate professor in the Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Mexico State University.

She earned her B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, in 1987, an M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1996, and her Ph.D. from New Mexico State University in 2002.

In 2008, she was recognized with the 2008 Presidential Early Career Award for her research in computer processor performance modeling. Another distinction not on her CV is her being “awarded” a ticket for speeding…in her wheelchair…in the Austin Convention Center at the SC08 conference. She clearly takes the idea of high performance seriously, no matter what she is pursuing. And when she wants to get away from it all, she’ll saddle up her horse and ride out into the New Mexico desert or wilderness. She enjoys reading about the history of the west as much as she likes exploring it. 

At SC15, most of the programs developed for students will be under a new umbrella – Student Programs. Can you tell us what that’s about? 
Essentially what we want to do is build a bigger student community at the SC conference, rather than having the students pocketed here and there, like in Student Volunteers and Experiencing HPC for Undergraduates. So we captured the pieces of the conference that students have been a part of to create a general student community. Then we plan to take that whole student community and plant it into the larger community. We’d like to make the student community more visible and encourage all attendees to mingle with each other. Ideally, at some session, a big group of students would show up and other attendees would wonder, “Who is that giant group?” We think if the students are more noticeable, they will become more engaged. 

What prompted this realignment?
A couple of things. Among the SC planning committee, we felt we weren’t doing a good enough job of integrating the students into the larger community. One of our concerns was about the next generation of HPC researchers – were there enough replacements coming up and how can we help them succeed? Another concern is that we want to make sure that students who attend SC remain engaged, that they submit posters and tech papers, as they continue in school and begin their careers.  

Students take on a variety of important roles at SC conferences

How will you know if this new approach is successful?   
We will submit a proposal to do a formal evaluation, hopefully over several years so we can continue to make improvements. We will also look for anecdotal data, such as asking students about their experiences. We also want to hear from other attendees about their experiences with the students, whether they served as a mentor, worked with a Student Volunteer, or whatever. 

You joined Sandia National Labs after 11 years as a professor at New Mexico State University. Based on that experience, how are you looking to make SC a richer experience for students? 
Well, I started out in industry as a rocket scientist, working for a division of McDonnell Douglas, so I come from a variety of different professional places. I hope we can let students know about the good parts and the not so good parts of various careers, so they can develop an idea of what to expect in each of those areas. We want to give them a balanced perspective. 

Jeanine Cook

You also received a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering in 2008. What do you see as key factors for succeeding in those critical early years of a person’s career in HPC? 
My answer is that networking is very important. I kind of hate to say that, but I think it’s a big reason why I was successful. When you agree to give a talk here, attend a meeting there and serve on a committee over there, you meet a heck of a lot of people. So networking is super-important, just as being good at what you do is very important.

When I agreed to serve on panels, it wasn’t because I wanted to review a lot of proposals. You want to get people to know who you are and what you do. Then when they are putting together a proposal and wonder “Who does performance analysis, they think ‘Jeanine Cook does that.’”

But growing a network can be a painful process for students and people just starting out in their careers. That’s why it’s important for us to integrate them into the larger community. 

Looking back, was there one person who played a crucial role in your success? 
I don’t think there is just one person I can point to. It was a lot of people, which goes back to my networking comments. I met a lot of program managers and academics. Early in my career, because I made an effort to get to know a lot of other academics, they would tell me what to do and what not to do. Other women were often my biggest advocates, especially in academia. 

Now back to the present…what are you working on now? 
Holy-scamoley guacamole. I’ve got too many projects! My big project now is to define a beyond-exascale architecture. We’re looking at a processor in memory and storage type of solution. It’s not cmos-based. The goal is to define both the architecture and the programming model. We think it will have applications in areas other than scientific computing, such as neuromorphic systems.

Another big thing is understanding performance tool requirements for next-generation systems, like exascale. There are currently no tools to adequately measure performance at the exascale, so we’re looking at existing tools, then determining what tools we’ll need for next-generation systems and how we’ll build them. I love architecture, but I really love performance modeling and analysis. I like having lots of data, plotting it and figuring out what’s happening.

My other big project is Sandia’s Structure Simulation Toolkit. We have a team of amazing people and we’re trying to develop a framework for large-scale simulation of next-gen systems. At New Mexico State, I worked with a lot of grad students to create models of processors and we developed pretty accurate techniques. Now we are re-engineering them for large-scale modeling. 
Finally, I’m working with CAL, the Computer Architecture Lab project for DOE that’s developing abstract machine models. And I’m working on a resilience project, looking at what fails on current machines so we can try to get a handle on what will fail on next-generation systems. 

Jeanine on her horse "Ringo Star".

Some of your colleagues have commented on your intense focus once you get rolling on a project. What do you do to get away from it all? 
Eat chocolate and drink Pinot Grigio. Actually, riding my horse is my number one thing to do for fun. He’s the most beautiful, cutest horse on the face of the Earth. You will find no cuter horse. He’s a Tennessee Walker and his name is Star’s Red Ringo, but we call him Ringo Star. The beautiful thing is that from our house, you can ride for 100 miles on public lands. If you stand in our driveway and do a 360, every mountain you can see, I’ve been to the top of. Riding in the desert is fun, but the mountains are even funner.

Sometimes we come across old graves or graveyards. One time we were at Fort Mason, which was a fort on the old Butterfield Trail, and my husband plopped me down near the old trash pit. I found some old nails and pieces of old plates, but I’d really like to find an old relic, like the 132-year-old Winchester rifle someone recently found resting against a tree in Utah. That would be so cool to find something like that.

One of Jeanine's favorite activities.

With SC15, the conference returns to Austin. When you were there for SC08, you got a speeding ticket inside the convention center. Would you care to explain that? 
No comment.

One final question. You’ve been known to ask people “Who’s your momma and where’d you come from?” How would you answer that? 
I’m a Michigan State University baby, born in Lansing where my dad was earning his Ph.D. in physics. He then got a job with the National Bureau of Standards and we moved to Maryland. He then got a job as a government contractor and we moved to Colorado. I loved Colorado until it got too crowded, so I ran away to New Mexico in 1996 and finished my Ph.D. I got a job here, my husband got a job here, and here we are.

SC15 to Strengthen, Enhance Programs for Students, Early Career Researchers

Student volunteers play a variety of important roles before and during the conference.

Revamped programs aimed at increasing diversity and supporting younger researchers at various career stages

For the past 15 years, the annual SC conference has welcomed hundreds of students to the week-long conference held every November, providing an entry into the community of high performance computing and networking. For SC15 in Austin, the student programs will be coordinated as a broader program to recruit a diverse group of students, ranging from undergrads to graduate students, as well as researchers who are in the early stages of their careers after graduating.

Through various programs, students can get their first introduction to supercomputing, compete in a grueling contest to assemble and run a computing cluster, learn about career options from mentors, present their research through posters and presentations, and participate in professional development sessions. For the first time, a focused program is also planned for early career scientists.

“The SC conference has a strong track record of supporting students and striving to increase the number of students from under-represented groups, which is critical for our community,” said SC15 General Chair Jackie Kern, leader of an IT department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “To build on our past successes and create a more cohesive student program, I am very happy to say that Jeanine Cook of Sandia National Laboratories has agreed to chair our student programs.”

Cook’s experience gives her strong qualifications for the tasks ahead. She was an associate professor at the Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Mexico State University for 11 years. In 2008, she was a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The award was presented to Cook by President George W. Bush during a White House ceremony. In 2013, Cook accepted an offer to join the staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. She has also helped organize student programs at SC conferences since 2008.

“The SC15 theme is ‘HPC Transforms’ and we’re looking to do as much as we can so that our student attendees’ ideas about school and careers are also transformed,” Cook said. “In my 10 years as a professor, I saw many times how just the right opportunity or word of encouragement could have a powerful effect on a student’s career choice and development. At SC15, we want to provide that kind of inspiration to as many students as possible.”

Here is a look at the various components of the SC15 Student Program:

Student Volunteers: Launched at SC99, Student Volunteers often serves as a way to introduce computer science students to the field of high performance computing. In exchange for helping with administrative tasks, students can attend technical sessions and learn from leading vendors and research organizations. New for SC15: Student Volunteers program will be significantly increased in size and scope with the goal of attracting a broader, more diverse group, helping them come together as a community and spend more time experiencing the conference technical and interacting with other attendees. Applications for Student Volunteers open March 16, close June 1.

Student Cluster Competition: The Student Cluster Competition was created in 2007 to introduce the next generation of students to the high performance computing community and gives teams of students hands-on experience. In this real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge, teams of undergraduate and/or high school students will assemble a small cluster on the SC15 exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest sustained performance across a series of applications. Over the last couple of years, the competition has drawn teams from around the world, including Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Russia, Taiwan and the USA. Applications are now open, but close April 17.

HPC for Undergraduates: HPC for Undergraduates was launched at SC12 and then extended for three more years. The idea of providing a focused program integrated with the main technical program has proven successful. New for SC15: The program plans to introduce a focused Mentor/Protégé component. The HPC for Undergraduates program will form the basis for a new HPC for Early Career Researchers program Applications open March 16, close June 1.

The Mentor/Protégé Program also started at SC09 as part of the Broader Engagement program, matching students with volunteer mentors prior to the conference. The program, which aims to match protégés and mentors with similar technical backgrounds, will continue at SC15.

The ACM Student Research Competition Posters: This technical poster program provides an introductory route for students to begin presenting their research to the broader community. The student poster competition will again be part of the Technical Program at SC15. Participants in the SC15 Student Programs will be encouraged to attend the poster presentations to begin thinking about their own participation at future conferences. Submissions open Feb. 16, close July 31.

The Student-Postdoc Job & Opportunity Fair was first held during SC09 and has continued to grow. Interested students can meet with leading exhibitors and have the opportunity to submit their resumes in advance to introduce themselves. The job fair will be part of the Student Programs at SC15.

The Doctoral Showcase debuted at SC07 as a venue to showcase research by students earning Ph.D.s in fields related to high performance computing. At SC15, It will be part of the Technical Program with active support from Student Programs and participants will be encouraged to network with Student Program attendees. Submissions open Feb. 16, close July 31.

“By slightly adapting some of the programs, we aim to give students a better foundation for making the most of their week at the conference,” Cook said. “By having more focused interactions with their peers, with mentors and potential employers and members of the global HPC community, we believe we will also provide them with experiences and knowledge that they can use in planning their own career paths.”