SCIENCE

The technical program for SC11, the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, is now accepting online submissions athttps://submissions.supercomputing.org/.  SC11 will take place Nov. 12 – 18, 2011, and is expected to bring as many as 11,000 attendees from academia, industry and government to the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. 

This year’s conference, the 24^th in the SC series, will offer peered-reviewed papers covering a broad spectrum of technical research fields as well as panel discussions with leading researchers and industry leaders, posters showcasing research results from around the world, tutorials, workshops and a doctoral showcase. New to the technical program this year is State of the Practice, a venue for discussing best practices involving provisioning, using, and improving the critical systems and services in high performance computing, networking and storage. All technical papers, tutorials, workshops, state of the practice reports and posters undergo a rigorous, anonymous peer review by hundreds of internationally recognized experts resulting in a paper acceptance rate of 20 to 25 percent.

“SC11 will continue the tradition of providing an outstanding, thought provoking technical program featuring the work of international leaders in their fields,” said Scott Lathrop, SC11 General Chair and education director for the Blue Waters Project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. “This is the conference that attracts the best minds in industry, academia and government and our attendees know they will gain insights into the future of high performance computing technologies and how they will affect everything from scientific discovery to product development to education.”

This year’s conference will feature the interdisciplinary thrust of data intensive science. Participants will be addressing this topic through a variety of conference activities including the technical program, exhibits, and the communities program.

“Data is a huge challenge in science today. Today, the rapid advancements in data collection and generation are challenging traditional methods of storing, managing and analyzing the information,” said John Johnson, conference thrust chair and associate division director at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “Our community is being called upon to rise to the data challenge and develop methods for dealing with the exponential growth of data and the strategies for analyzing and storing huge datasets.”

In addition to the conference-wide thrust, the SC11 Technical Program will focus on sustained performance, or how to achieve real, measurable productivity using leading-edge computing, networking storage and analysis technologies.

“Our community is rapidly moving toward petascale systems, and the SC Technical Program provides the opportunity to identify the unique choices and challenges we will face as we strive for sustained performance on these systems,” said Bill Kramer, technical program co-chair and project director of the Blue Waters project at NCSA. “The choices we make now will set the HPC agenda for the next decade.”

For the first time in conference history, the technical program will feature a full day of events on Friday, November 18, which expands the program to a full six days. Friday events will include tutorials and workshops in addition to the regular offering of panel sessions. The expansion is designed to increase the amount of technical information available to attendees while maintaining the conference’s high standards and competitive acceptance criteria.

SC11 also will feature the inaugural Visualization Showcase, which will highlight the art and science involved in creating scientific visualizations that rely on high performance computing.

“The visualization showcase will be set up much like a museum or art exhibit, giving conference participants the opportunity to browse and enjoy scientific visualizations that are at once beautiful and able to communicate important research results,” said Jim Costa, technical program co-chair and a senior manager at Sandia National Laboratory. “It also gives the many visualization experts in our community the change to become more active participants in the technical program.”

Submission Deadlines

Submissions for most areas of the SC11 technical program are now being accepted.  Visualization Showcase submissions will be accepted beginning in mid March. Abstracts for technical papers and ACM Gordon Bell Prize nominations are due April 1. Full final papers and ACM Gordon Bell Prize nominations are due April 8, as are submissions for panels, tutorials and workshops.

Submissions for the Student Cluster Competition, which showcases student teams competing to build a small computing cluster, are due by April 15 and State of the Practice reports are due May 20. All submissions should be made online at https://submissions.supercomputing.org/.

For a complete list of SC11 program deadlines, see http://sc11.supercomputing.org/?pg=dates.html.

Questions about the technical program should be directed to techprogram@info.supercomputing.org.

For general information on SC11, see the SC11 website: http://sc11.supercomputing.org/.