May 2024
HPC Days 2024
Following a very successful HPC Days in 2023, this will return to Durham in early May 2024 with the theme of challenges for the compute centre of the future – Finding talent, green supercomputing, serving the diverse HPC community.
As we continue to progress further into the exascale era, HPC compute centres and research groups are facing several, multifaceted, challenges. Key issues typically faced across the community today include a skills shortage due to the permanent lack of talent, the fact that supercomputers consume a lot of energy, and the permanent tension between the ML/AI community and the traditional users of computational simulations. As we move to a position where decarbonising HPC is gaining significant importance, and the line between machines built for ML/AI and HPC continues to blur, indeed there is a strong argument to be made for porting codes so that they effectively leverage supercomputers (delivering scaling and efficiency) but this requires people with the right skills. During the essential discussion of these issues, it is important that we foster a diverse and inclusive HPC community to encompass all voices. Many of these issues are reaching a head and hence we hope for HPC Days 2024 to explore them.
We currently have open a call for presentation, with deadline the 19th of February AoE and notification 4th of April. We request submission of an abstract, approximate length 300 words which will be peer reviewed, via the EasyChair system at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=hpcdays24
More details can be found at https://tinyurl.com/2vtu7e3t , and talks will typically be between 15-25 minutes long, which will be embedded into a wider programme hosting invited speakers and vendor presentations.
Suggested topics of interest for this conference include (but are not limited to):
* Optimisation of HPC, AI and ML workloads to deliver increased efficiency and scaling on HPC machines
* Use of novel technologies, techniques and architectures to deliver improved energy efficiency
* Software, programming, and algorithmic approaches for reducing power consumption by codes
* The convergence of AI/ML and HPC applications and algorithms
* Success stories around efforts to encourage Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the HPC workforce
* Approaches to user training
* How we are able to share hardware designed for AI/ML with HPC and vica-versa
* Going beyond the batch system, for instance the use of interactive computing such as Jupyter notebooks, on traditional HPC machines
* HPC centre policy to enable non-traditional workloads
* Lessons learnt from energy efficient HPC centre operation
As HPC is a large community that encompasses many different roles, we welcome both technical and non-technical contributors at all career levels to submit their work in order to broaden the knowledge of all those who attend our event. We particularly encourage software and hardware development projects from the UK’s ExCALIBUR project and DiRAC to present their project insights and outcomes.