Welcome to PEARC20! PEARC20’s theme is “Catch the Wave.” This year’s theme embodies the spirit of the community’s drive to stay on pace and in front of all the new waves in technology, analytics, and a globally connected and diverse workforce. We look forward to this year’s PEARC20 virtual meeting, where we can share scientific discovery and craft the future infrastructure.
The conference will be held in Pacific Time (PT) and the times listed below are in Pacific Time.
The connection information for all PEARC20 workshops, tutorials, plenaries, track presentations, BOFs, Posters, Visualization Showcase, and other affiliated events, are in the PEARC20 virtual conference platform, Brella. If you have issues joining Brella, please email pearcinfo@googlegroups.com.
Systems professionals who are interested in high performance computing (HPC) are often left without curricula to study to advance their professional knowledge. Rarely there is a course at a university or college that is dedicated to the topics a professional would need to advance in their field. Available courses typically only teach system administration without an HPC treatment or teach HPC as a way to approach scientific problems and gloss over any information about the operation of HPC machines. As such, much learning is "on the job" and often in an apprenticeship learning model. Because of this, many entry-level computing professionals are not aware of the opportunities in the HPC field and may either not seek positions in this field or may feel overwhelmed with a lack of knowledge. When they do pursue these types of positions the on-ramp to being productive can be quite steep if they have no prior experience in HPC. High-throughput interconnects, parallel storage and issues of computing at scale are some of the barriers that must be overcome in addition to any basic system administration training they may need. This BoF will discuss efforts from a joint committee between two SIGHPC virtual chapters, the System Professionals (SYSPROS) chapter and the Education chapter, to promote the educational advancement of HPC systems professionals. While some of this BoF will be dedicated to reporting current efforts from the committee, much of the time will be dedicated to crowd-sourcing information on ways to develop, collect, and distribute information of interest to HPC system professionals.
