[hpc-announce] [CFP] HPCSYSPROS2020: HPC Systems Professionals Workshop

[Jackson, Gary L.]

# Call For Participation

HPC Systems Professionals Workshop - HPCSYSPROS20 Held in conjunction
with SC20: The International Conference on High Performance Computing,
Networking, Storage, and Analysis.

Workshop Website: http://sighpc-syspros.org/workshops/2020  
Submission Website: https://tinyurl.com/HPCSYSPROS20  
Contact: contact at hpcsyspros.org  

Supercomputing systems present complex challenges to personnel who
design, deploy and maintain these systems. Standing up these systems
and keeping them running require novel solutions that are unique
to high performance computing. The success of any supercomputing
center depends on stable and reliable systems, and HPC Systems
Professionals are crucial to that success.

The Fifth Annual HPC Systems Professionals Workshop will bring
together systems administrators, systems architects, and systems
analysts in order to share best practices, discuss cutting-edge
technologies, and advance the state-of-the-practice for HPC systems.
This CFP requests that participants submit either papers, slide
presentations, or 5-minute Lightning Talk proposals along with
reproducible artifacts (code segments, test suites, configuration
management templates) which can be made available to the community
for use.

Authors are invited to submit original, high-quality papers,
presentations, and artifacts with an emphasis on solutions that can
be implemented by other members of the HPC systems community.  All
submissions should be in PDF format.  Papers should be between 6
and 8 pages including tables, figures and appendices, but excluding
references.  Slide decks should consist of less than 30 slides.
Lightning Talks should be submitted as a 1-2 paragraph abstract for
a talk of approximately 5 minutes in length. Artifact descriptions
should be described in 1-2 pages in length.  All submissions should
be formatted according to the SC Proceedings template. Per SC policy,
margins and font sizes should not be modified. Papers submitted
with an artifact are required to have an appended artifact descriptor
as a part of the requirements for reproducibility.

## Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Cluster configuration and software management
* Cybersecurity and data protection
* Performance tuning and benchmarking
* Monitoring, Mean-time-to-failure, ROI, or Resource utilization
* Resource manager and job scheduler configuration
* HPC storage solutions
* Virtualization and Clouds
* Elastic workloads or optimizations for workload types (e.g.,
  bioinformatics, new-user cases)
* Web-based cluster front ends

## Artifact Types

* Architecture Descriptions would include an interesting network,
  storage or system architecture, or a hybrid thereof at a data-center
  level. It would be documented by multiple diagrams describing the
  architecture and a four page description of the architecture and
  why it is interesting.
* Small Middleware or Systems Software would include an artifact
  of code such as a Bash or Python Script. Additionally, there should
  be strong documentation that would make the artifact reproducible
  and a two page abstract additional to the artifact and documentation.
* System Configuration and Configuration Management would include
  interesting configuration or configuration management and the
  interactions between multiple configured applications. Examples of
  this may be a Puppet module, a config file that helps do something
  interesting, or more likely a group of config files and configuration
  management. Documentation for reproducing the artifact on a system
  as well as a two page abstract would be required.

We will also accept proposals for different types of artifacts from
those that have been listed. If there is a type of artifact that
is not listed that is a high-quality artifact with an emphasis on
reproducibility and implementation, we invite you to propose it to
the committee. If the committee agrees, we will amend the CFP to
reflect the new artifact and the requirements for the artifact.

## Submissions

We will use Linklings for all submissions to the workshop, and we
will use the review system in Linklings for all feedback.

For artifacts, we will require that submitters submit a Git URL at
a specific commit that the committee can clone and review. The
committee will review and accept pull requests for updates during
the different stages of review. The final artifacts will be hosted
on the HPCSYSPROS Github as well as in a digital library for
posterity.

## Important Dates

Submissions open - April 29th  
Submissions closed - August 21st  
Reviews Sent and Resubmission Open - September 6th  
Resubmission Closed - September 18th  
Notifications of Accepted Artifacts - October 2nd  

## Committee

Workshop Chair: Matt Bidwell  
Program Chair: Gary Jackson  

Committee Members:

John Blaas  
John Legato  
David Clifton  
Kurt Maier  
William Scullin  
Jenett Tillotson  
Stephen Harell