The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) annual conference is transforming into an independent entity designed to unite the high-performance computing and advanced digital research community. The new Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing conference (PEARC) will welcome all who care about using advanced digital services for research. The PEARC17 Conference will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, July 9-13, 2017.
The goal in spinning off the PEARC (pronounced “perk”) conference is to form a hub to address the many challenges in the field of advanced research computing. The operation and use of campus and national advanced research computing resources and services affects vastly different communities in a variety of ways, including: directors and managers, system administrators, user support staff, and facilitators, computational scientists, government agencies, students, and educators. To support this, PEARC participants will be comprised of academic campus, national and international cyberinfrastructure and research computing enablers to encompass a broad set of communities.
PEARC’s inaugural year will feature support from a number of community organizations and will continue building on prior conferences’ success and core audiences. Organizations who are supporting the new conference include the Advancing Research Computing on Campuses: Best Practices Workshop (ARCC), XSEDE, the Science Gateways Community Institute. the Campus Research Computing (CaRC) Consortium, the ACI-REF consortium, the Blue Waters Project, ESnet, Open Science Grid,
Compute Canada, the EGI Foundation, the Coalition for Advanced Scientific Computation (CASC), and Internet2. Organizations interested in joining the PEARC community can submit their interest here.
In perhaps the most visible sign of support, ACI-REF and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) are co-locating the 2017 ARCC best practices workshop with PEARC17. Last year’s XSEDE16 conference attracted more than 525 attendees from 44 states, and the 2016 ARCC workshop drew more than 100 attendees from universities across the country. PEARC17 will continue to support the community’s interest in co-locating smaller meetings in this collective effort to build a self-sustaining, independent conference for the advanced research computing community.
PEARC will create a forum owned by the community to foster exchanges around the ‘state of the practice’ in advanced research computing—discussing challenges, opportunities, and solutions,” said John Towns, principal investigator for XSEDE. “Those who have attended the impactful annual XSEDE conference over the years will benefit and benefit from this new collaboration. We are looking forward to welcoming everyone at PEARC17.”
The merging of these activities creates a unified forum for developing, delivering, and supporting infrastructure enabling science and will focus on best practices and the experiences that shape the technical aspects of research. Bringing all of these efforts into one event will allow it to expand beyond the scope of the XSEDE program and the National Science Foundation where XSEDE will continue to be a partner in facilitating but no longer own the conference.
PEARC will allow for sharing the best practices as well as accomplishments and impacts, said Bill Kramer, project director and principal Investigator of the Blue Waters Project at the NCSA. “Furthermore, PEARC can be an important component in supporting the goals of the National Strategic Computing Initiatives, in particular the objectives for increasing the coherence between technology for modeling/simulation and data analytics, increasing the capacity and capability of an enduring national HPC ecosystem, and developing and/or expanding the U.S. government, industry, and academic collaborations to share the benefits of high performance research.”
PEARC17 will take place July 9–13, 2017, at the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans, Louisiana.
