[hpc-announce] Opportunity for lightning talks at Interactive and Urgent HPC ISC23 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 ISC23 workshop.

This will run in conjunction with ISC 2023, on Thursday morning the 25th of May.

If this is something that you would be interested in doing then please email Albert Reuther, reuther at ll.mit.edu, by Tuesday 25th of April with a short one paragraph description of your proposed lightening talk.

Workshop Scope
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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 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.


Workshop topics
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* 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
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