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.
Ask.CI, a Q&A site for Research Computing, was launched at PEARC18. The goal of the site is to aggregate answers to a broad spectrum of questions that are commonly asked by the research computing community. As researchers, facilitators, staff, students, and other users ask and answer questions on Ask.CI, they are creating a shared knowledge base for the larger community and alleviating the burden of a central resource to provide support to a user base. For smaller institutions, this provides a wealth of knowledge that was not previously available in an easily searchable Q&A format. For larger institutions, this self-service model frees up time for facilitators and cyberinfrastructure engineers to focus on more advanced subject matter, thereby elevating the practice. Establishing a Q&A site of this nature requires some tenacity. In partnership with the Campus Champions, Ask.CI has gained traction, and continues to engage the broader community to establish the platform as a powerful tool for research computing. Since launch, Ask.CI has attracted over 250,000 page views (currently averaging nearly 5000 per week), over 400 contributors, hundreds of topics, and a broad audience that spans the US and parts of Europe and Asia. While Ask.CI has shown steady growth in both contributions and audience, it is still in its early stages. Finding ways to continue to grow audience participation through innovation and outreach is an ongoing focus of attention. In the past year, we introduced "Locales", which allow institutions to create subcategories on Ask.CI where they can experiment with posting institution-specific content and use of the site as a component of their user support strategy. At this BOF, the Ask.CI team and locale partners will discuss strategies, key accomplishments, challenges, and plans for the upcoming year.
