[hpc-announce] Opportunity for lightning talks at Interactive and Urgent HPC SC22 workshop

[Nick Brown]

Are you or your project undertaking work in the use of HPC to run
interactive and/or urgent workloads in responding to disasters? If so
then there is the opportunity to present a short, 5 minute, lightning
talk at the Interactive Urgent HPC SC22 workshop.

This will run in conjunction with SC22: the International Conference for
High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, on Monday
morning the 14th of November and is running hybrid so participation can
either be in-person or remote.

If this is something that you would be interested in doing then please
email me n.brown at epcc.ed.ac.uk by Wednesday 14th of September with a
short one or two paragraph description of your proposed lightening talk.

Workshop Scope
==========
Interactivity enables users to exploit HPC resources in new and
revolutionary ways. One such area is that of urgent computing, where the
global pandemic and recent bouts of extreme climate events have
demonstrated the need to make urgent, accurate, decisions for complex
problems. Combining interactive computational modelling with the near
real time detection of unfolding disasters results in a powerful tool
that can aid emergency responders making live-critical decisions for
disaster response. Ultimately exploiting HPC to save lives and reduces
economic loss.

If done right, the ability to bring the user into the loop whilst a
simulation is running opens a very wide range of opportunities. In this
workshop we are focused on how interactivity can empower HPC with a
specific focus around supporting urgent workloads. This includes
responding to human health emergencies (e.g. global pandemics – COVID,
vaccines development and distribution), natural disasters (e.g.
wildfires, hurricanes, extreme flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, winter
weather conditions), public unrest, food and energy resource management,
traffic accidents, and space weather.

The technical challenges associated with interactivity and urgent
computing on HPC are not simple to solve, and properly supporting this
requires many technological advances across a wide range of disciplines.
Whilst there are several disjoint efforts in using HPC for disaster
response, and some advances around interactivity, much of this is
currently piecemeal and done on an institute-by-institute basis. Put
simply, there is much replication of effort, and therefore significant
value can be unlocked if we work together as the SC community on the
technical and policy side.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together stakeholders,
researchers and practitioners from across the HPC community who are
working, or interested, in the fields of interactive HPC and the use of
supercomputing for urgent decision making. Success stories, case-studies
and challenges will be shared across the interactive and urgent
computing themes with a view to enhancing the communities activities and
identifying synergies.

This workshop represents a combination of the two previously successful
SC workshop series, the UrgentHPC and InteractiveHPC initiatives. As
these initiatives have grown over previous SCs we have realised that
interactivity is not only a key enabler in running urgent workloads on
HPC machines, but furthermore both these areas share many of the same
technological and policy challenges. Consequently, we feel it makes a
lot of sense to merge these complimentary activities, and by doing so
will further the impact delivered to the community.

Workshop topics
==========
* Example use-cases and case-studies that use HPC for interactivity
and/or urgent decision making
* Techniques for integrating HPC workflows with data driven approaches
* Approaches to verify and validate unreliable real-time data, for
instance from sensors, IoT and satellites
* System design for data reduction and pre-processing at source, for
instance using edge computing and heterogeneous resources such as FPGAs
* Implementation experiences and lessons learned by staff at HPC centers
* Algorithmic techniques to guarantee result generation in specific time
frames, such as result refinement which generates more accurate results
as time progresses
* Studies of leveraging HPC for workloads with real-time time constraints
* Changes to existing HPC technologies and policies that are required to
support using HPC interactively
* The ability for HPC codes to adapt their resource requirements
dynamically, for instance via elastic compute
* Visualisation and presentation techniques to support rapid and
accurate urgent decision making by the end user
* Reduction and feature extraction of results to highlight critical
issues of interest
* Complimenting results with provenance data for additional context and
certainty
* Maintaining security while providing interactivity in supercomputing
* Strategies for leveraging interactivity for reproducible science
* Impact of increased interactivity on how HPC centers operate
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. Is e buidheann carthannais a th’ ann an Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann, clàraichte an Alba, àireamh clàraidh SC005336.