Angel Beltre, a doctoral student at Binghamton University, logged his fifth time as a Student Volunteer at SC19. He describes the impact that the SC Conference’s student volunteer programs have provided him throughout the years.

Inspired by Angel’s story? Be sure to check out all the excellent opportunities for students at Students@SC.

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Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

Rajani Pingili, a doctoral student from Western Michigan University, was a first-time SCinet Student Volunteer at SC19. She describes the experience as an “impactful hands-on opportunity” that the SCinet volunteers shared with the students.

Inspired by Rajani’s story? Be sure to check out all the excellent opportunities for students at Students@SC.

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Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

SC20 is proud to welcome 248 Students@SC participants and awardees to its unprecedented virtual conference. Along with 18 lead student volunteer and 102 students in the Virtual Student Cluster Competition, 128 students will participate in the SC Technical Program, a robust schedule of student-specific sessions organized for all student attendees. The Student Programming Committee, led by Dr. Sally Ellingson, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics at University of Kentucky, has drafted a unique program for the students with topics aimed at advancing hard skills, such as communicating research, and soft skills, including overcoming hurdles in school. Several beginner-level technical sessions are also being organized. Opportunities for professional development and guidance to help students identify the possibilities within the HPC field also will be available.

Below is a sample of the exciting opportunities that will be available to students during SC20. The Students@SC Committee will reveal more of its plans in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Student Programming

For two weeks, Students@SC will host virtual professional presentations open to all students attending the conference. Over that period, 12 subjects will be discussed, each featuring professionals in a panel setting or singular presentation. Students will be able to interact and ask questions.

“I have programmed sessions on micro-aggressions, overcoming hurdles in your career pathway, effectively communicating your research and/or interests, a large-scale HPC (Summit) hands-on session, and a careers in HPC panel,” Ellingson explained.

She was excited to share that Sunita Chandrasekaran will present “Evolution of a Parallelization Project” during the Success Skills Workshop that will begin with examples of successfully navigating a new project. Chandrasekaran is an assistant professor with the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. Her research spans HPC, parallel programming, benchmarking and data science.

Another speaker that Ellingson is eager to present is Derek William Jones, who will share his experience dealing with a soft skills topic.

“He is a former student of mine and has participated in the Students@SC program before,” Ellingson said. “He got a staff job out of his masters at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is starting his Ph.D. program now. He will speak during the “Overcoming Struggles and Hurdles in your Career Pathway” session.”

Mentor–Protégé Matching

Students seeking personal guidance can choose to participate in Mentor–Protégé Matching. Students will be matched with a mentor who will provide personal insight into career trajectory and the world of HPC while establishing a lasting mentoring connection.

“Mentor–Protégé Matching itself will be starting early this year to help build relationships in the months leading up to the conference,” said Kristen Brown, a data scientist at Intuitive Surgical. “After matching pairs based on their interests, backgrounds, and/or career goals, they will meet virtually twice to get to know each other in September and October. The program will continue throughout the conference and provide suggested activities.”

Speed Mentoring

Students also can find mentors in the speed mentoring event.

“In this session, we will discuss strategies to build successful and long-lasting mentoring relationships,” she said. “The session will include a hands-on exercise in networking, where mentors and protégés will meet to introduce themselves and discuss topics such as career advice and technical interests. Students will have the opportunity to connect with a few mentors and establish new connections that can often continue to grow after the conference,” Brown added.

Elevator Speech Workshop

The Students@SC program also will host the workshop “Perfecting Your Elevator Speech and Growing Your Professional Network”, where students can learn to introduce themselves using elevator speeches to set the stage for a professional conversation—whether it is at a networking event, with a colleague, or at the beginning of an interview. Elevator speeches are short and concise, spanning the time it takes to ride an elevator from the ground floor to the next stop. For many, having an elevator speech has proven useful at conferences such as SC where many networking opportunities are available and, of course, for job interviews. Two elevator speech workshops will be held.

Pitch Workshop

This workshop will begin with a presentation and then participants will break into smaller groups for activities and to practice pitches. Finally, the group will reunite and students can volunteer to present their pitches to the larger group.

Résumé Workshop

Students@SC program will offer a résumé workshop open to all students attending the conference. Professional leaders from research labs, academic institutions, recruiting agencies, and private industry will virtually meet with students to provide individual feedback on résumés and elevator speeches.

The Resume Workshop will have parallel Zoom sessions based on categories. In each session, students will be greeted individually, after which they will be placed in a breakout session with a designated reviewer. Students may participate in different “categories” and repeat the experience as they prefer. To better target companies they are interested in, students will be provided with a list of reviewers per room.

Job Fair

The Job Fair is open to all students, post-docs, and professionals attending the conference

Participating employers include research labs, academic institutions, recruiting agencies, and private industry representatives who will be available to discuss graduate fellowships, internships, summer jobs, co-op opportunities, graduate student positions, and permanent employment.

As in the résumé workshop, the Job Fair will also feature parallel Zoom sessions based on categories. In each session, students will be greeted individually, after which they will be placed in a breakout session with a designated interviewer.

Job postings will be available soon at:
Job Fair

For students, post-docs, and professionals:
Upload your résumé

For recruiting organizations:
Create a job posting

—

Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) apprenticeship program selects highly qualified early- to mid-career women working in IT (Informational Technology) careers to join the SCinet volunteer workforce for the SC Conference. Wendy Huntoon, WINS Co-lead, explained that the program’s main goal was “to address the prevalent gender gap in the Information Technology field, primarily network engineering, by partnering with SC and SCinet skill development and professional development.”

“The original idea for the program came through a discussion between me, Jason Zurawski and Marla Meehl at the February 2014 Winter Conference for The Quilt,” Huntoon said. “The underlying issue was Jason’s observation that the number of women participating in SCinet had declined significantly. While I had not participated directly for years, Jason knew that I had been one of the original instigators for SCinet (in 1991) and original female volunteers.”

While women make up 59% of the total workforce, they are averaging only 30% of the workforce across major tech companies. With the WINS program, SCinet has been working hard to change that curve. In 2007, 15 of the 105 volunteers were women, the largest group until 2015. In 2020, 44 of 113 volunteers and 40% of the SCinet leadership are woman. The WINS program’s end goal is to contribute to developing the next generation of IT women leaders in the United States.

“Over time, the long-term goals for the program have expanded,” Huntoon emphasized. “In addition to increased female participation in SCinet, we are also focused on providing broader skill and professional development opportunities outside of SC; leadership training and opportunities with SC, SCinet, and in general; as well as opportunities to interact with and present to broaden the research and education community.”

The program is designed toward women of all ages, races, backgrounds, IT-related professions, and geographical areas. This year, SCinet is proud to include 10 past WINS participants, nine of whom have leadership roles

The Selection Process

This year, WINS selected from a pool of especially qualified candidates, representing a variety of universities and national labs. Three participants were carefully chosen by the review committee, led by Huntoon.
“Selecting the top candidates was not easy due to the high quality of the applications,” Meehl, co-PI of the WINS program, said. “We want to thank the review committee for their diligent work in picking the participants.”
The committee included:

• Eli Dart, ESnet
• Wendy Huntoon, Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER)
• Dave Jent, Global Research Operations Center/Quilt
• John Kolb, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Amy Philipson, Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP)
• Amber Rasche, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
• Linda Winkler, Argonne National Laboratory

“The WINs application peer-review process has been fortunate to receive an impressive collection of strong applications each year,” said Linda Winkler, SC20 Space Chair and member of the candidature review committee. “The review process has evolved to weigh candidates’ technical skills, experience, and motivation, as well as the potential benefit from attending SC both personally and professionally. We focus on selecting individuals who will benefit from the experience and will use it to mentor others.”

Meanwhile, the SCinet teams reviewed the candidates and have enthusiastically welcomed all four awardees.

“We believe this group represents talented and diverse future leaders in our community,” Meehl added.

SC20 WINS Awardees

Kristen Beneduce

Kristen Beneduce, from Sandia National Laboratories, will work with the Network Security Team, mentored by Soledad Antelada Toledano, of NERSC-Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, herself a WINS awardee in 2017 and a 2020 Co-chair on SCinet’s Network Security and WINS team. Toledano noted that this year “eight out of 15 members on the Network Security team are female,” and most are WINS awardees or alumni.

“This welcoming environment brings a unique opportunity to WINS awardees to participate and have a deep-dive, hands-on experience and accelerated training as they work side by side with leading network, software, and systems engineers who create a state-of-the-art security architecture,” Toledano explained. “This experience will also provide Kristen and the other WINS awardees with the opportunity to build a great network of expert peers and bring a new set of skills and lessons learned to their back-home institutions.”

Melinda DeHerrera

Melinda DeHerrera, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, will join the Fiber Team.

“I first heard about this program from a fellow colleague that works for the NIE Telecommunications team. I just loved the concept of women being brought together from all parts of the US to build a network from scratch and see the benefits of its functionality as a whole till the end. I was super excited to have been one of the few chosen this year to attend and was crossing my fingers that it was going to fly.”

DeHerrera will be mentored by Julie Locke, co team lead and past WINS awardee, with Annette Kitajima.

Shashwitha Puttaswamy

Shashwitha Puttaswamy, from George Washington University, was selected to the Routing Team. She will be guided by co-team lead Jessica Shaffer, of Georgia Tech, with Debbie Fligor, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Both Shaffer and Fligor are past WINS awardees.

Jennifer Kim

Jennifer Kim, an IT Manager at Montgomery County Community College, will be part of the Edge Team.

“My initial learning of the program was through my leadership shortly after starting my current role and happened to be the year of WINS’ inception,” Kim said. “I look forward to the energy that surrounds SCinet and tapping into the wealth of knowledge and experience of the collective Edge team. I also look forward to getting to know fellow awardees and their journeys to SCinet.”

Kim will be mentored by Angie Asmus, IT Security Analyst/Interim Cybersecurity Team Lead at Colorado State University. Asmus was a WINS awardee in 2016 and has been with the Edge Team since, serving as its lead for the last two years.

“We are looking forward to introducing Jennifer Kim to SCinet and the Edge Team,” Asmus added. “As a WINS alumnus, I realize the importance of mentoring women looking to further their career in IT and networking. By participating in SCinet and the Edge Team, Jennifer will be able to learn what SCinet is, how it all comes together, and fully participate in our team as we plan and build the edge network. She will also have the opportunity to learn from some great minds and grow her professional network.”

Past Awardees Become Leaders

The WINS experience does not end after the SC conference. It is an ideal opportunity to grow and develop a long-lasting mentoring and peer networks. Amber Rasche is a technical writer supporting N-Wave, NOAA’s enterprise network. In 2016, she had her first SCinet volunteer experience as one of seven women selected to participate in the WINS program. SC20 marks her fourth year volunteering with the SCinet communications team.

“Participating in WINS has been a catalyst for some exciting changes in my professional career, including several opportunities to take on leadership responsibilities as a SCinet volunteer, and a new professional role providing communications support for a national, high-speed network,” Rasche shared. “I credit WINS with helping me establish connections within the communities that support high-performance networking across educational institutions, government agencies, and HPC facilities. From a career mentor who encouraged me to apply to WINS to a fellow SCinet volunteer who referred me to a new job opportunity, I am grateful to know this community and to be part of it. Serving on the WINS Application Review Committee feels like coming full circle as I am now able to support the success of future WINS participants and give back to the program that has supported my professional career.”

Huntoon added: “Early on, we realized that activities outside of SCinet were needed in order to build on the experiences the WINS volunteers had during SC and SCinet. To that extent, we have, since the program’s inception, supported WINS presentations at regional and national conferences, such as the annual conferences for the regional R&E Networks (KINBER, NYSERNet, CENIC, etc.), national conferences (Internet2 Global Summit and Technology Exchange, PEARC, etc.). Initially, participation and presentations focused on discussing the WINS program and diversity activities but have recently expanded to highlight the technical skills of the WINS participants.

Making WINS Possible

This annual program is grant-funded.

“The primary funding has come from the National Science Foundation, first as a supplemental grant then through a second grant to fund a three-year project,” Huntoon explained. “We are currently on the second no-cost extension for the primary grant (NSF 2016 grant #ACI-1640987), which has included supplemental funding for WINS to do a review and then report on long-term sustainability.”

WINS awardees receive in-kind and travel support from the Department of Energy through ESnet. The in-kind support has been essential in contributed staff support from people such as Lauren Rotman, Zurawski, Kate Mace, and others to help WINS interact effectively with SC and SCinet, as well as with mentoring, communications, and so many other facets for the program. Juniper has sponsored the in-person WINS luncheon during SC for a number of years. The luncheon allows all the WINS participants, SCinet mentors, sponsors, and other supporters to meet in person, get an update on the program, and let participants develop more personal ties.

Other organizations, such as PNWGP, have provided WINS-branded giveaways at SC each year. Since 2019, WINS has accepted contributions to fund volunteer travel and other associated expenses from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, including International Networks at Indiana University, SC Steering Committee, and more recently Ciena.

“WINS success is a direct result of the support we have received from our various sponsors, home institutions (UCAR, KINBER, ESnet), and the community as a whole,” Huntoon noted.

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Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

After many years as an SC Student Volunteer, Neda Tavakoli, a computer science major at Georgia Tech, shares how impactful the SC Conferences have been in keeping her up to date with new trends and research.

Be sure to check out all the excellent opportunities for students at Students@SC.

—

Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

At SC19, Mohammed Tanash, from Kansas State University, made his third appearance as a Student Volunteer, this time with SCinet. Here, he details how his first-ever SCinet experience afforded him with a cohesive team building opportunity.

Be sure to check out all the excellent opportunities for students at Students@SC.

—

Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

Like many events this year, the SC20 Student Cluster Competition has shifted to a virtual competition. While the pandemic forced the change, it did not curb the enthusiasm surrounding this popular event. For this virtual SCC, or “VSCC,” 17 teams from around the world will compete in a novel setting.

“This year’s Student Cluster Competition will be very different, as it will be 100 percent cloud based,” explained SC20 SCC Team Lead Verónica G. Melesse Vergara, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“As the VSCC will be run on Microsoft Azure, the VSCC team is still working on updating the rules to make sure the new ones added apply to the cloud. The thought is to have students manage their cloud dollars instead of their power budget,” said VSCC Co-Chair Scott Michael, from Indiana University.

Meanwhile, Vergara added, “There are many new angles we can explore now that the competition is in the cloud. While we will no longer be able to use power as the main limiting factor, we plan to provide the teams with a cloud budget that they will need to learn to manage. I am looking forward to seeing how teams adapt to the cloud, how they prepare and learn about Microsoft Azure, and what mechanisms they come up with to optimize the applications for this new environment.”

“Holding the competition in the cloud also allows us to reach a much wider audience by providing access that before would only have been available to in-person participants,” she continued, “plus, the virtual format reduces cost barriers that have prohibited smaller institutions from applying to the SCC in the past. This will be a great opportunity for the teams to learn a whole set of extra skills in addition to HPC. Having experience in cloud environments will also provide students with an advantage when they start to enter the workforce.”

Meet the Teams

Among the selected participants there is one brand-new team, while some of the returning teams have added new members, sometimes from new educational institutions.

Clemson University, USA

Team Dabo’s Tech Support

• John Hollowell
• Griffin Dube
• Nik Heitzeg
• Sarah Placke
• Cavender Holt
• Sansriti Ranjan

Clemson University will be a first-time competitor, bringing Team Dabo’s Tech Support to the VSCC. Although individual members of the team have worked together in the past, the current group has not competed in HPC-related competitions. Dr. Jon Calhoun, the team’s advisor, explained that this submission represented Clemson’s third attempt at trying to compete in the SCC.

“We all felt that our applications kept getting stronger with every attempt, and, this year, our hard work paid off,” Calhoun said. “With all that is going on in the world and with the university due to COVID, competing at the VSCC gives the students a concrete goal that they can work toward.”

Most team members learned about the SCC via presentations at Clemson. Cavender Holt joined the team after first hearing about high-performance computing and the SCC in Calhoun’s data structures and algorithms course, in the spring 2019. The team was very pleased to learn that they were selected.

“I was very excited, especially after everything that has been going on, and after getting rejected last year,” said Griffin Dube.

Sarah Placke added, “I was thrilled after hearing the news because we reached our goal after working persistently in a field in which most of us were unfamiliar.”

Meanwhile, Sansriti Ranjan shared, “This summer after my internship got canceled, I felt a bit dejected as I was really looking forward to an experience and putting my skills into use. I decided to channel that energy into this opportunity in whatever way I could contribute. On knowing that we were finally selected, it gave me new energy, concrete hope, and something to look forward to building and embarking on this summer. We started with an expectation and ended with an experience that will be worth working for in the days to the competition.”

Dabo’s Tech Support team will have much to offer to this competition. VSCC is happy to welcome this new team and watch them in action.

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany

Team deFAUlt

• Ruben Baecker
• Pierre Lindenberg
• Gabriel Dengler
• Timur Perst
• Ricardo Lang
• Marius Fleischer

Team deFAUlt of FAU has an extensive participation record at SCCs. They have qualified for multiple competitions in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Some of their biggest accomplishments were the LINPACK awards at ISC17 and ISC18. Dr. Johannes Hofmann, this year’s team mentor, is happy to present the team members.

“The current team members have all joined the team in April and do not have previous experience in HPC,“ he explained.

Hofmann said his team is “eager to apply the theory learned in lectures and gain practical knowledge in solving hardware optimization problems.” He noted they also are looking forward to pushing state-of-the-art technology to its limits while competing in an international context.

Twitter: @FAU_Germany
Twitter: @SCC_deFAUlt
Facebook: @fauenglish

Tsinghua University, China

Team Diablo

• Chen Zhang
• Jiajie Chen
• Yutian Wang
• Zeyu Son
• Mingshu Zhai
• Runxin Zhong

Returning from Tsinghua University, Team Diablo has an impressive track record as overall champions at SC18 and SC19. To date, they have won more than 10 championships in ASC, ISC, and SC competitions. All of the team members are students from Tsinghua University’s Computer Science and Technology department.

Team Diablo is looking forward to the VSCC. In addition to the competition, they “want to make friends with other teams, which will be a little challenging for this year’s virtual competition, and learn more about parallel computing.”

Twitter: @Tsinghua_Uni

Shanghai Tech University, China

Team GeekPie_HPC 

• Zijun
• Tianyuan
• Kaiyuan
• Yixuan
• Yiwei
• Longwen

The Shanghai Tech University team, GeekPie_HPC, is a student-led association that is participating in SCC for the second year in the row. Professor Shu Yin is GeekPie’s advisor, and the team already has named him “the greatest team advisor.” Per the team, they have been “collecting EECS-related (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) geeks in the School of Information and Science Technology (SIST) at Shanghai Tech.”

On GeekPie_HPC, each team member fills a precise role. Four of the team members, Zijun, Tianyuan, Kaiyuan, and Yixuan, are from Laboratory of I/O System and Data Science (L.I.O.N.) at SIST. They hold different roles in the lab, from parallel file systems to I/O optimization and scientific computing. Yiwei is another team member from System and Software Security lab, SIST, who focuses on symbolic execution. Longwen is part of the ACM-ICPC algorithm team, who already has won several silver awards in nationwide competition.

The team explained it is “growing steadily thanks to success at ASC18, ISC18, and SC19 student cluster competitions and the newcomer influx.” These new members are endowed with “courage, eagerness, and devotion.” The team noted it is especially grateful to the SIST and the university’s Library and Information Center for supporting them with comprehensive HPC resources.

With new energy injected into this vigorous team and more advanced HPC resources this year, GeekPie_HPC is seeking to become one of the most influential student supercomputing teams at SC20’s VSCC.

Facebook: @shanghaitech
Twitter: @ShanghaiTechUni

Wake Forest University, USA

Team Daemon Deacons

• Sophia Fang
• Paul Kefer
• Robert Langefeld
• Hao Tong
• Eva Wu
• Yixin Zhang

From Wake Forest University, the Daemon Deacons will be a third-time competitor in the SCC at SC20. Team Advisor Dr. Sam Cho shared that the team finished first in the Reproducibility Challenge last year, and are ready to improve in the other sections. This international “American” team has representatives from three different nations, and its team members can fluently speak German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. Two are veterans, including one who participated in two previous SCCs, and four are first-time competitors.

This team is diverse yet complimentary. Fang and Langefeld are both juniors. Fang is interested in biostatistics, while Langefeld favors clinical image analysis, machine learning, and molecular dynamics simulations. Wu, Kefer, Tong, and Zhang are all seniors. Wu is interested in language competence, computer vision, and statistical models. Kefer’s focus is artificial intelligence; Tong’s is biomedical informatics; and Zhang’s is algorithms, machine learning, and HPC. This team is motivated with a fun side: their team slogan is “Never Gonna Give You Up” (the Rick Astley song).

Twitter: @WakeForest
Instagram: @wfuniversity

University of Texas at Austin, USA

Team Cloud CloUT (members revealed at a later date)

The University of Texas at Austin is home to a returning team that won three overall SCC competitions at SC12, SC13, and SC14. Joe Garcia is the team Mentor.

“The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has supported teams from the University of Texas at this competition in previous years. This year our team, “Cloud CloUT,” finds itself with team members that are all first-time competitors,” Garcia explained, “The team is eager to participate in this year’s competition and the extra fun of the competition being completely virtual this year only adds to this excitement. As a team, we look forward to not only the challenges presented with the various applications, but the added bonus of running the apps in a cloud environment. The team hopes to learn much from this experience and enjoy the competition setting.”

Texas A&M University

Team Ag-Jag Cluster (TAMU)

• Michael Lau
• Shaina Le
• Dylan Rodriguez

Team Ag-Jag Cluster (TAMU-SA)

• Petar Lachkov
• Jonathan Rosett
• Selina Urias

Team Ag-Jag Cluster, from Texas A&M University (TAMU), previously participated in the SCC at SC18. The team’s name represents the collaboration between TAMU (Aggies) and Texas A&M University-San Antonio (TAMU-SA) (Jaguars). They are a cross-institutional team participating together for the first time. The students from TAMU-SA are first-time participants and will be paired with TAMU students who have competed in prior SCCs. Dr. Lisa M. Perez (TAMU), the team advisor, with Co-Advisor Dr. Smriti Bhatt (TAMU-SA), are proud to present the team.

“Jonathan [Rosett] is looking forward to learning more and getting personal experience with HPC in general, as he doesn’t have prior experience in the HPC area of computing,” Perez said. “Shaina [Le] is looking forward to learning more about HPC infrastructure and to the experience overall. She typically doesn’t like competing, yet she finds herself in a lot of competitive situations. Since the competition venue is in the cloud this year, she is excited to see how the SC committee formats the competition accordingly and the challenges that will arise with it.

Perez added, “After hearing SC20 would appropriately be renamed VSCC20, Selina [Urias] is looking forward to the challenge of deploying our cluster in the Azure cloud, networking with experts, and researching applications CESM and GROMACS. She is interested to see how the GROMACS challenge can simulate current world issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Twitter: @AgJag_Cluster
Facebook: TAMUSACyber
Instagram: TAMUSACyber

University of California, San Diego, USA

Team SDSC/UCSD

• Hongyi Pan
• Xiaochen (Jacob) Li
• Max Apodaca
• Zihao Kong
• Arunav Gupta
• Vy Nguyen
• Hungry Zou

The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) team, also recognized by the unofficial icon “The Pink Flamingo,” is mentored by Dr. Mary Thomas. This is the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC)/UCSD’s first opportunity to sponsor an SCC team. Thomas said she is excited to bring a team to the SCC event, which includes six members and an alternate.

According to Thomas, this team has been carefully crafted. “The team was formed during the month of July 2020, and each member has distinct qualities that will enhance their role within the competition,” she noted.

Thomas explained that Li is eager to use his knowledge on parallel and quantum computing to determine optimal solutions to the competition’s applications. Apodaca has experience in computer architecture and has dabbled in cloud computing. Kong is focused on embedded system design, and his curiosity about a supercomputer’s architectural design motivated him to participate in the competition. Gupta has wanted to be part of an SCC team since he heard about the SCC from his friends at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Gupta hopes that his software development and cloud computing experience will help the team to be successful. Nguyen is interested in parallel Linux systems, while Zou has a background in systems, databases, and networks that he will use to help the team. Pan will function as a team alternate, who aspires to be a research scientist working in computational linguistics.

“The students on our team are self-motivated, technically competent, highly interested in HPC, and are looking forward to learning about HPC, playing in the cloud, and learning to work with each other as a team,” Thomas said. “The SCC opportunity is important because there is no undergraduate HPC-related program at UCSD, so this gives them an opportunity to develop key skills needed in the future.”

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Team UIUC

• Pranshu Chaturvedi
• Jonathan Nativ
• Jialiang Xu
• Nishant Sheikh
• Freddy Zhang
• Rittika Adhikari

The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) SCC group includes undergraduate students who have been active participants in the SC SCC competitions for the last three years. The team is guided by three experienced mentors, Dr. Volodymyr Kindratenko, Chit Khin, and Yan Zhan (a past SCC competitor), as well as two advisors, Omri Mor and Simeng Liu, both also past SCC competitors.

Nativ, Chaturvedi, and Sheikh will provide their technical know-how as they were part of UIUC’s SCC team at SC19. Chaturvedi has a special interest in computational biology and applied machine learning, while Nativ’s focus is on the hardware and software of large-scale distributed and parallel systems. Sheikh is a freshman in the pre-engineering program and is interested in the application of distributed systems in interdisciplinary research. The three other members are new to the team. The VSCC will mark Zhang’s first experience with HPC, and he is excited to learn more, particularly about hardware systems and computer architecture. The VSCC will also be Adhikari’s first hands-on experience with HPC, and she is excited to learn more about the field, especially in distributed systems and general computer science. Xu, who is majoring in electrical engineering with a computer science minor, was an understudy for SC19 on the IO-500 benchmark application.

The diverse backgrounds of the UIUC team promise to make this challenge interesting to watch. Collectively, they team said they are looking forward to showcasing their skills, meeting other teams, and having fun.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Boston University, USA

Team BUHPC 

• Norman A. Toro Vega
• Parker Van Roy 
• Yujia Zhang
• Po Hao Chen
• Benjamin Li

Team BUHPC is a consortium of schools based in Massachusetts, that competed separately until they merged in 2012. Team Advisor Kurt Keville explained that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) first appeared in the SCC at SC09, and Boston University at SC11. Since then, the schools, which also are university partners with the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), have competed in six SCC, four ISCC, and two ASC events in China in some arrangement.

“We fielded a team in each track of the SC13 competition,” Keville said, “The six teammates this year are all Boston University students.”

Twitter: @BUHPC
GitHub: @BUHPC
Facebook: @bostonuHPC

Nanyang Technological University

Team Supernova 

• Li Shenggui
• Li Mengyang
• Pang Jin Hui
• Dong Yunxing
• Aurelio Jethro Prahara
• Tan Jia Qing

From Nanyang Technological University, Team Supernova is returning for the fourth year in a row, to the SC arena. Team Supernova won the overall championship in SC17 and ranked 2nd place overall in SC18. They broke the LINPACK benchmark record in SC17 and SC18. The team consists of members of different nationalities, and Prof. Francis Lee. is their supervisor.

Team Supernova is known to be very dynamic. They work together closely to deliver results and are eager to learn and explore different fields in high performance computing. They enjoy learning and growing through various challenges. Despite the virtual setting, they are eager to interact and make friends with all the other enthusiastic participants of the VSCC.

Twitter: @realntuhpc

Additional Teams

The following teams will be returning to participate in the SC20 VSCC as well.

• Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
• Northeastern University, USA
• North Carolina State University, USA
• Peking University, China
• Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
• Southern University of Science and Technology, China
• Team Warsaw, Poland

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Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

As a Student Volunteer at SC19, Gabriel Freguglia Barros, from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, experienced a wave of many “firsts.” He was a first-time SC volunteer at his first conference for the first time in the United States. He also was glad to share how his first experience with the various SC workshops for students helped to develop his communication skills.

Inspired by Gabriel’s story? Be sure to check out all the excellent opportunities for students at Students@SC.

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Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

After four stints as an SC Student Volunteer, Jan Laukeman, from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, moved on to SCinet for the first time at SC19. Here, he reveals the many positive qualities his first SCinet experience provided.

Inspired by Jan’s story? Be sure to check out all the excellent opportunities for students at Students@SC.

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Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.

Mentor–Protégé Matching at SC is an opportunity provided to all student volunteers and aims to support the growth of a vibrant high-performance computing community by connecting students with experienced mentors. Matches are based on multiple factors, including research interests, career goals, long- and short-term plans, and general interests. Once the pairs are made, they are connected and off they go—engaging before, during, and after the conference.

Mike Lam (far left), the Mentor–Protégé lead for SC20, is a computer science faculty member at James Madison University, specializing in program analysis, compilers, systems tools, and HPC. Lam began his involvement at SC as a graduate student at University of Maryland in 2009. Since then, he has been a faithful participant, missing out only on SC14. When the Mentor–Protégé program (now Mentor–Protégé Matching) started in 2016, Lam was happy to take part in it.

“I wanted to give back,” he explained. “I had been unofficially mentored for many years, so I felt I could do this. I am also so excited to be running the program as I am sure it is a great opportunity for the students.”

To take part in the program, students and mentors need to sign up and fill out a survey. Lam offered specific advice for the process.

“Both mentors and protégés fill out the linked questionnaires,” he said. “It is very important for applicants to be very precise while filling out the surveys. They have to be very particular when they write about what they want to be matched on, such as field or domain, demographic, entering topics, work-life balance, and so forth. The pairing process is mostly automatic, using a Python script, though I will verify them before they are communicated.”

Since 2016 he has had four protégé experiences. Lam’s 2018 match with Srinivasan Ramesh (left), at the time a first-year doctoral student at the University of Oregon, particularly stands out. Lam said: “We were paired because of our similar interest in performance tool research, and Srinivasan’s desire to learn more about academia and teaching in this field.”

Ramesh added: “My primary question with Mike was about teaching. At that point in time, I was contemplating between research and teaching. Thus far, I have always been a research assistant and have never had the opportunity to be a teaching assistant. Mike helped me to try out teaching and encouraged me to apply for a fellowship offered by my department at the University of Oregon. I need to finish my candidacy exams before I can apply for it, which I will be ready to do fall/winter of 2020.”

While Lam reassured Ramesh “that R1 does not have to be the sole goal,” he also validated Srinivasan’s interest in teaching in addition to research, as that is what being a mentor means.

“We continued to correspond throughout the year, and our relationship grew,” Lam added. “At SC19, we went to the Technical Program Reception together, which was held at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum. This was a really fun event for me as I have always loved planes. I was more than a professional mentor. Srinivasan was facing difficult life decisions that we also openly spoke about.”
For Ramesh, the connection started by the Mentor–Protégé program has had lasting impact.

Beyond the incredible human connection that this program enables, Lam would like to start Mentor–Protégé Matching in the summer this year. These virtual events will be programmed, where all members will be able to participate in ice-breaker activities, as well as career goal sessions. The objective is for everyone to feel connected before the SC20 conference.

“The Mixer and Speed Mentoring will be on Monday, like past years,” Lam said. “The Resume and CV Review Workshop also will continue, as well as other social opportunities, with an extended group, such as virtual trivia nights. We are still working on the program, and nothing is set in stone yet. So, if any protégés or mentors have ideas, they should share that with us, so we can develop that for them.”

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Christine Baissac-Hayden
SC20 Students@SC Communications Liaison (Easy English 4 All)

Christine Baissac-Hayden created Easy English 4 All, which provides multilingual communication tools for clients from diverse backgrounds in the renewable energy, medical, defense, marine science, and film industries. Easy English 4 All provides English as a Second Language (ESL), French, Spanish and Japanese tutoring from certified native-speaking teachers and organizes international student exchanges with personalized objectives and goals.