International Workshop on HPC User Support Tools to be Held at SC14

Aug. 4 — Researchers pushing the boundaries of science and technology are an existential reason for supercomputing centres. In order to be productive, they heavily depend on HPC support teams, who often struggle to adequately support the researchers.

Recent surveys have pointed out that there is an abundant lack of collaboration between HPC support teams all around the world, even though they are frequently facing very similar problems in order to provide end users with the tools and services they require.

The first International Workshop on HPC User Support Tools (HUST-14) aims to bring together all parties involved, i.e., system administrators, user support team members, tool developers, policy makers and end users, to discuss these issues and bring forward solutions, either existing ones or new ones the community should come up with. The workshop provides a platform to present tools, share best practices and exchange ideas that help streamline HPC user support. This in turn can prevent HPC support teams from re-inventing (existing) solutions time and again.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

defining and customising the user environment
software build and installation tools
performance analysis tools
workflow and pipeline tools
novel environments: cloud, etc.
supporting Hadoop or other Big Data tools and frameworks
establishing baseline configuration efforts for HPC
software development/system testing
documentation: creating, maintaining and updating

Submissions

We invite authors to submit original, high-quality work with sufficient background material to be clear to the HPC community. Papers should be submitted in PDF format and should not exceed 10 pages including tables, figures and appendices, but excluding references. They should be formatted according to the standard SC14 format, i.e., the double-column IEEE format for Conference Proceedings (IEEEtran LaTeX Class (template) V1.8 packages and IEEEtran V1.12 BibTeX (bibliography)). Similar to the SC14 policy, margins and font sizes should not be modified. We kindly refer authors to the necessary templates.

All submissions should be made electronically through the Easychair website. Submissions must be double blind, i.e., authors should remove their names, institutions or hints found in references to earlier work. When discussing past work, they need to refer to themselves in the third person, as if they were discussing another researcher’s work. Furthermore, authors must identify any conflict of interest with the PC chair or PC members.

Proceedings will be published in both IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital library through collaboration with ACM SIGHPC.

Important Dates