SDSC Showcases Several “Computing for the Common Good” Projects at PEARC23

Published August 17, 2023

By Kimberly Mann Bruch

The 2023 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC23) took place last month in Portland, Oregon. The conference theme was “Computing for the Common Good” and provided an array of engaging events for researchers to share their work with one another. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego was represented by 23 researchers and staff – with paper presentations by several first authors including Amit Majumdar, Igor Sfiligoi and Mary Thomas.

“We were thrilled with how well everything went at PEARC23 as the program offered an outstanding collection of panels, BOFs, workshops, tutorials, posters, visualizations and paper sessions along with an exceptionally strong student program,” said PEARC23 General Chair Robert Sinkovits, SDSC's director of education and training. “We were also able to recruit engaging plenary speakers, including SDSC’s Ilkay Altıntaş,  and a panel featuring nine National Science Foundation (NSF) program officers. To top things off, the Oregon Convention Center was an ideal venue for PEARC23, with welcoming open spaces for the technical program, networking events and exhibitors.”

SDSC Chief Data Science Officer Altıntaş presented “Fighting Fires using Data and Computing.” Altıntaş, who is also a founding fellow of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, focused her talk on the current work being conducted by her team at the Workflows for Data Science (WorDS) Center of Excellence and the WIFIRE Lab at SDSC.

Additional plenary speakers included Al Kuslikis, senior associate for strategic initiatives at the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, who delivered a talk entitled “Tribal Colleges and Community-driven Computing” that discussed ways in which attendees could assist the organization with advocacy, research and program initiatives.

DK Panda, professor and distinguished scholar of computer science at Ohio State University and the director of ICICLE, an NSF-funded project to build intelligent cyberinfrastructure working towards the democratization of AI, presented “Creating Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure for Democratizing AI: Overview of the Activities at the NSF-AI Institute ICICLE.”

Suzanne A. Pierce, a research scientist with the Texas Advanced Computing Center and Environmental Science Institute in the Jackson School of Geosciences, discussed “Decision Pathways Perspectives: Changing the frame on place-based model integration and intelligent decision support services.”

An NSF Program Officer panel presented an overview of funding opportunities within the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) and highlighted programs created to enhance the accessibility, inclusivity and sustainability of research cyberinfrastructure (CI) towards further democratization of the national CI ecosystem. The panel included Katie Antypas, Bill Miller, Robert Beverly, Varun Chandola, Tom Gulbransen, Andrey Kanaev, Amy Apon and Ashok Srinivasan; it was moderated by Sharon Broude Geva.

Additional SDSC participation included Deputy Director Shawn Strande and Events Specialist Cindy Wong serving as leaders for the NSF’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) external advisory group (EAB) meeting.

Other SDSC attendees included Brian Balderston, Gavin Biffar, Yuwu Chen, Julie Christopher, Andrew Ferbert, Mike Gorney, Marty Kandes, Thanh Nguyen, Susan Rathbun, Paul Rodriguez, Shava Smallen, Mahidhar Tatineni, Dmitri Mishin, Patrick Mulrooney, Vishu Nandigam and Claire Stirm.