I am just back from SC15, definitely the most stressful week of my year. It was much worse than usual, I slept an average of 4.5 hours last week because I had a full schedule each day and had to prepare over night. Fortunately, I have my device measuring my sleep so I could understand why I felt so miserable :-).
But it was absolutely amazing! I really love SC, the community, the excitement, the science at the conference. As usual, I learned a lot and SPCL communicated a lot. This year, I brought two students with me: Maciej and Tobias. Here is what we did at SC15:
- Sunday morning: International Workshop on Heterogeneous High-performance Reconfigurable Computing
I co-organized this workshop together with a great team! My special thanks go to Michela and Jason! The workshop was wildly successful. The room was packed for the two keynotes by Doug Burger and Jason Cong. We can start an interesting discussion about the role of reconfigurable logic in HPC.
- Sunday afternoon: Tutorial on Insightful Automatic Performance Modeling
Together with Alex Calotoiu (main presenter), Felix Wolf, and Martin Schulz. The tutorial discussed our previous work in automatic performance modeling and was well attended (~30)! I’d like to change some things but we’ll see if I can be convincing enough for my co-presenters.
- Monday: Full-day tutorial on Advanced MPI Programming
Was as usual very well attended (~50) and a lot of fun to teach! I had to sneak out in the morning to speak at the panel “Research Panel: A Best Practices Guide to (HPC) Research” which was also a lot of fun (especially with Bart Miller).
If you couldn’t make it then I’d suggest the book on the same topic (has very similar, actually slightly more, content).
- Tobias prepared his poster for the ACM student research competition
He even made it into the finals and presented his work to the jury!
- SIGHPC Annual Meeting
As an elected officer, I attended the SIGHPC BoF at SC15. Many exciting news, especially Intel’s fellowship program!
- Graph500 BoF
As each year, released the Green Graph500 list. My slides.
- BoF Performance Reproducibility in HPC – Challenges and State-of-the-Art
I presented my disruptive view at this BoF. Basically saying that we may want to give up and care about interpretability first! Similar in vein to my talk later in the week.
- Tobias presented the STELLA paper
- Georgios presented the diameter-two topologies paper
A collaboration with IBM Research Zurich. Here’s the paper.
- Maciej received the George Michael HPC fellowship
During the SC15 awards ceremony. Well done Mac!
- I presented our paper “Scientific Benchmarking of Parallel Computing Systems“
The room was nicely filled. The talk was rather provocative but I put cuddly vegetables on the slides. Thus, must be fine ;-). Here are slides and paper!
Finally done! I arrived home and accepted the Latsis prize today. Now ready to get a lot of sleep …