Guided Interest Groups (GIGs) are community learning experiences designed to help student attendees navigate the SC Technical Program while focusing on key topics in High-Performance Computing (HPC) related to their interests.
Pre-registration for a specific GIG is required to attend the kickoff event. Refreshments will be provided.
Student Networking & Mentoring ChairBill Chen, University of California Santa Cruz
Guided Interest Groups ChairDaniel Barry, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
OCT 18, 2024
Sign-ups Open
NOV 11, 2024
Sign-ups Close
NOV 17, 2024
GIG Kickoff & Social Event
The GIGs this year span topics ranging from the fundamentals of HPC to state-of-the-art developments in machine learning, artificial intelligence, sustainability, and scientific applications. GIGs are open to all students attending the conference, with priority given to those participating in the Students@SC cohorts.
Review the GIGs below and sign up using the form above by November 11, 2024.
Have you ever wondered about the advantages of high performance computing (HPC) and whether it aligns with your goals? Why HPC? What is HPC? What can we do with HPC? This GIG will provide an overview of HPC as one of the most powerful tools in the scientific world, and it will guide you through how hardware, software, and applications are integrated to get the most out of it.
Note: All GIGs are designed to be beginner-friendly, so this GIG is intended only for students with no previous experience with HPC. If you have any prior experience however slight, please choose one of the other GIGs.
Kevin Assogba
Kevin Assogba is a Ph.D. student at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), advised by Dr. M. Mustafa Rafique and Bogdan Nicolae (ANL). His research aims to develop system software that supports scientific reproducibility while optimizing HPC application performance. He enjoys working on simple and complex software projects and advocates for reproducible and open-source software. He also loves playing soccer and cycling.
Vincent Bode
Since the start of his PhD pursuits in early 2020, Vincent instructed subjects like Parallel Programming and Computer Architecture at his home institution, the Chair of Computer Architecture and Parallel Systems at the Technical University of Munich. In his academic research, he specializes in benchmarking of hardware and software systems, with a focus on publish-subscribe communication systems and time synchronization algorithms in the context of distributed systems. Vincent is active in the board game community at his university and has a bit of a reputation in One Night Werewolf. Be sure to hit him up at the students’ board game competition if you want to face off.
Sunday, Nov 17
GIGs Kickoff5:30–7:30 pm EST, Room A404-A405
Monday, Nov 18
Panel – HPC Creates Plenary: High-Performance Computing (HPC) Shaping the Future5:30–6:45 pm EST, Exhibit Hall A3
Tuesday, Nov 19
Invited Talk – Industries Benefiting from HPC1:30–3 pm EST, Exhibit Hall A3
Thursday, Nov 21
BoF – TOP500 Supercomputers5:15–6:45 pm EST, Exhibit Hall A3
As scientific computing tackles ever larger problems at ever finer resolutions, it has grown ever more vital that scientific applications are able to fully leverage available high-performance computing (HPC) resources. This need has fueled the discovery of innovative techniques for designing, scaling, and optimizing scientific applications. Over the course of the conference, we will explore state-of-the-art applications pushing the world’s largest supercomputers to their limits, achieving exceptional performance, scalability, or time-to-solution on engineering or scientific problems from a wide variety of domains.
Bengisu Elis
Bengisu Elis is a PhD student in Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Bengisu received her Bachelors of Science in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at the Middle East Technical University, Turkey. Her research is in GPU communications, performance analysis and performance tools. She is involved in the PlasmaPEPSC project funded by the European Union and she completed two internships at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In her free time Bengisu loves traveling, learning new languages, hiking and running.
Thomas Randall
Thomas Randall is a Graduate Research Assistant and PhD Candidate studying under Dr. Rong Ge at Clemson University in the School of Computing. His research focuses on performance modeling and optimization for High Performance Computing (HPC). He is in the sixth year of his PhD program and hoping to defend his dissertation soon(tm). He has also published research with scientists at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories and regularly volunteers at the Supercomputing conference series. Outside of work, Thomas enjoys card and board games as well as expanding his list of 620+ rated movies on Letterboxd.
Paper – Exploring GPU-to-GPU Communication: Insights into Supercomputer Interconnects4:30–5 pm EST, Room B312-B313A
Wednesday, Nov 20
APaper – Enable 13K-Atom Excited-State GW Calculations via Low-Rank Approximations and HPC on the New Sunway Supercomputer3:30–4 pm EST, Room B311
Paper – Understanding Data Movement Patterns at HPC: A NERSC Case Study9:30–10 am EST, Room B309
Among the computer science disciplines, high-performance computing (HPC) can feel very detached from the humans which use these systems. Many academic conferences and contributions hedge towards the technical: scalability, algorithms, performance optimization and hardware. With this very machine-heavy focus, it is easy to forget the goal of building HPC centers, the source of the data being used, and who is using these systems. So, in the spirit of re-injecting the human element into HPC, this GIG will take you through sessions which balance out the technical discussions with considerations of data sources, accessibility and ethics of how we may use HPC to better serve humanity.
Connor Scully-Allison
Connor Scully-Allison is a PhD student researching Data Visualization for HPC applications at the University of Utah. He has significant experience in data management, data wrangling, UI design and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) methodologies. Overall, Connor is interested in focusing on the human component in our computer-based disciplines and understanding how we can make all of our systems better for end users.
Sayef Azad Sakin
Sayef Azad Sakin is a final year PhD student at the University of Utah, advised by Professor Dr. Kate Isaacs. He is doing research on analyzing scientific program behavior using data visualization and optimized data management techniques. He is an outdoor kind of person and enjoys hiking, cycling, and running. He also loves playing action and RPG computer games in his spare times.
Session – Challenges and Opportunities for Tools in a Changing HPC Landscape9:05–9:40 am EST, Room B311
Session – Do Large Language Models Reflect Societal Gender Bias? A Comparative Analysis2–2:30 pm EST, Room B309
Paper – LLM-Pilot: Characterize and Optimize Performance of your LLM Inference Services10:30–11 am EST, Room B309
Paper – Revisiting Computation for Research: Practices and TrendsPaper – Understanding Data Movement Patterns at HPC: A NERSC Case Study9–10 am EST, Room B309
As high-performance computing (HPC) clusters grow in computational power, there is an ever-increasing demand for energy. This has monetary implications for HPC research. In addition, this trend entails valuable resources being expended to keep up with the growing energy consumption. This GIG will serve as an exploration of recent contributions in addressing the need for more sustainability in the HPC world.
Breanna Powell
Breanna is pursuing her Master’s degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Washington Bothell. Her passion is to unite sustainability and climate action with technology. She is the Vice President of the UW Bothell ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the Alliance 4 Sustainability. This summer, she worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory with the sea ice climate modeling division, using HPC to run the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) and create visuals of sea ice measurements over time to compare them with data from NASA’s ICESat. Breanna enjoys traveling, sightseeing, arts and cultural activities, photography, and hiking.
Mia Reitz
Mia is a PhD student in her last year at University of Kassel in Germany. Since her bachelor’s, she has been interested in high-performance computing. Her research interests include fault tolerance and load balancing for task-based parallel programs on supercomputers. The past four years she has been participating as a student volunteer at SC, and she is looking forward to SC24 in Atlanta! Mia always enjoys meeting friends from previous years and new interesting people, and of course learning many new exciting things about science.
Paper – Toward Sustainable HPC: In-Production Deployment of Incentive-Based Power Efficiency Mechanism on the Fugaku Supercomputer2:30–3 pm EST, Room B311
BoF – The Green500: Trends in Energy-Efficient Supercomputing5:15–6:45 pm EST, Room B208
Panel – Sustainability, Carbon-Neutrality and HPC1:30–3 pm EST, Room B313B-B314
This GIG has been crafted with the aim of giving you a comprehensive understanding of the wide-reaching realm of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications and scientific computing. High-performance computing (HPC) stands as a pivotal force in pushing the boundaries of scientific inquiry. Applications, in turn, benefit from integrating ML and AI with HPC’s formidable capabilities by accelerating data generation and analysis.
Kristen Hallas
Kristen is a Ph.D. student in the Center for Advanced Manufacturing & Innovations in Cyber Systems (CAMICS) lab at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Her research lies in the middle of smart manufacturing technologies, big data science, and statistical optimization. Kristen uses HPC to create better machine learning models. Over the summer, she built artificial intelligence frameworks to predict the phase maps of equation-of-state tables at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL). Put simply, Kristen likes to develop mathematical models that solve interdisciplinary problems. Her other research interests include exascale data analysis/visualization and inclusive, accessible STEM education. Outside of research, Kristen enjoys creating art, watching documentaries, exploring nature, and catching up with friends.
Ian Lumsden
Ian Lumsden is a PhD student studying Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a Graduate Research Assistant in the Global Computing Lab advised by Dr. Michela Taufer. In collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, his work focuses on the study, characterization, and optimization of I/O and data movement in scientific computing workflows. He is also a developer, contributor, and collaborator on several of LLNL’s tools and projects related to performance monitoring and analysis (i.e., Thicket and Caliper), data movement (i.e., DYAD), resource management and workflow orchestration (i.e., Flux), and scientific computing workflows (i.e., MuMMI). Ian has been involved with the HPC community since joining the Global Computing Lab in 2019, and he has been a regular or lead student volunteer at SC every year since 2019. Outside of research, he enjoys reading, video games, and learning about other cultures.
Keynote – DOE’s Integrated Research Infrastructure in the AI Era 9:10–10 am EST, Room B305
Panel – How the Convergence of HPC and AI is Accelerating Innovation Panel10:30 am–12 pm EST, Room B313B-B314
ACM Gordon Bell Finalist – MProt-DPO: Breaking the ExaFLOPS Barrier for Multimodal Protein Design Workflows with Direct Preference Optimization10:30–11 am, Room B312-B313A
Panel – Computing is Eating the World – Will Saving the Planet Destroy It?10:30 am–12 pm, Room B310
As we continue our relentless pursuit of the frontiers of science, it is crucial to understand how high-performance computing resources can be leveraged to accelerate discoveries in various scientific domains. In this GIG, we focus on scientific challenges facing humanity, with emphasis on this year’s contenders for the esteemed Gordon Bell Prize. This prize is awarded to a team which develops an application which achieves exceptional performance, scalability, or time-to-solution on an important engineering or scientific problem from a wide variety of domains.
Mazahir Hussain
Mazahir’s research interests include high-performance computing, networking, and machine learning. He is currently working on a network telemetry system utilizing P4 programmable switches, eBPF, and OpenMP. Additionally, he is actively involved in the development and demonstration of projects such as AutoGOLE/SENSE, P4Global Lab, and the SCION internet architecture at the annual Supercomputing (SC) Conference. Outside of his research, Mazahir enjoys reading books on philosophy, psychology, and personal development. He is also an active member of his institute’s soccer club and delights in cooking spicy and delicious Pakistani cuisine.
Lindsey Gordon
Lindsey Gordon is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at the University of Minnesota and a GRA at Los Alamos National Lab. Her work focuses on using HPC systems to run high resolution simulations of the jets from active galactic nuclei and their interactions with the background intracluster medium. She also writes for the science communication platform astrobites. Outside of work she enjoys doing community theater, thrifting, and reading sci-fi and fantasy novels thick enough to act as doorstops.
ACM Gordon Bell Finalist – Democratizing AI: Open-Source Scalable LLM Training on GPU-Based Supercomputers10:30–11 am EST, Room 312–313A
Gordon Bell Climate Finalist – A Performance-Portable Kilometer-Scale Global Ocean Model on ORISE and New Sunway Heterogeneous Supercomputers2:30–3 pm EST, Room B313B-B314
BoF – HPC and Cancer: Creating Opportunities for Improving Lives5:15–6:45 pm EST, Room B207
Paper – Scientific Data Processing and Visualization10:30 am–12 pm EST, Room B311
Friday, Nov 22
Panel – Computing at the Edge: HPC and AI Supporting Recent U.S. Space Missions10:30 am–12 pm EST, Room B313B-B314
Are you interested in learning about what “performance” means in “high-performance computing”? Are you interested in state-of-the-art research in this area? This GIG will provide an overview of different notions of performance, such as execution time and benchmarking. These sessions will give nuanced insight into the various aspects of performance and optimization. They will cover major areas of interest, such as GPU computing and leveraging tools to gauge performance.
Joy Kitson
Joy Kitson is a PhD student at the University of Maryland, where she is advised by Ahbinav Bhatele. She is also a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow, and interned at Los Alamos National Laboratory over Summer 2024, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Summer 2022 through that program. She was a virtual intern at Argonne National Laboratory over the Summer of 2020 and graduated from the University of Delaware that Spring with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. She worked on the Caliper project at LLNL Summer 2019, and co-presented work done by her team at LANL over Summer 2018 on Effective Performance Portability during SC18. Her current work revolves around optimizing HPC applications, with a focus on computational epidemiology, and understanding the performance portability of HPC codes. When not doing research, she loves swing dancing, reading, and playing a variety of games with friends – including D&D, board games, and video games.
Jessica Dagostini
Jessica is a 3rd PhD Student in the Computer Science and Engineering department at UC Santa Cruz and 2024 ACM SIGHPC Fellow. She is co-advised by Dr. Scott Beamer and Dr. Tyler Sorensen. Her research interest relies on optimizing scientific computing and graph-related problems linked to HPC. Working towards the computational acceleration of a pangenome/DNA mapping tool, she believes that her research can help enable even faster solutions for different types of scientific creations and advancements. She also actively engaged with initiatives to create welcoming environments for women and underrepresented groups in HPC.
P3HPC: Welcome, Featured Speaker, and Paper – Optimizing MILC-Dslash Performance on NVIDIA A100 GPU: Parallel Strategies using SYCL9–10 am EST, Room B306
Paper – HiRace: Accurate and Fast Data-Race Checking for GPU Programs4:30–5 pm EST, Room B309
Panel – Extreme-Scale Performance Evaluation Tools8:30–10 am EST, Room B313B-B314
Contact us if you have questions about student GIGs. We’d be happy to help.