Texas A&M High-Performance Research Computing (HPRC) significantly contributed to the PEARC24 (Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2024) conference. Eleven HPRC and ACES’ (Accelerating Computing for Emerging Sciences) affiliate papers were presented; 10 are included in the conference proceedings and Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library, and one is featured in a special edition of the Journal of Computational Science Education (JOCSE). Two were recognized as “Best Paper” in their respective categories, and one received the prestigious Phil Andrews Award.

Three HPRC PEARC24 papers reflect activities of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded SWEETER (Southwest Expertise in Expanding Training, Education and Research), GenCyber (Cybersecurity Camp for secondary school children), and NSF BRICCs (Building Research Innovation at Community Colleges) projects that are led by HPRC Director of User Services and Research and Principal Investigator (PI) Dhruva K. Chakravorty. The BRICCs project co-PIs are Sarah Janes (San Jacinto College), Tim Cockerill (Texas Advanced Computing Center, TACC), and Honggao Liu (HPRC). The PEARC24 paper was authored by Wesley A. Brashear (HPRC), with Chakravorty, Liu, Janes, Tabitha Samuel (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Ralph Zottola (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Fidelis Ngang (Houston Community College), Stephen Miller (Eastern New Mexico University), and Lisa M. Perez (HPRC). BRICCs is funded under NSF award number 2019136,

Dr. Chakravorty said, “Academic institutions are enthusiastic about AI and CI-enabled (Cyber Infrastructure enabled) research and education, but only a fraction of colleges and universities in the U.S. have access to advanced CI. BRICCs’ regional collaborations provide a pathway for the millions missing from the federated CI ecosystem envisioned by the NAIRR Pilot program, among others. All contributions are needed to address global grand challenges.”

Eight HPRC PEARC24 papers chronicle the results of benchmarking and other trials on the NSF ACES composable system that has been in testbed operation since August 2023. Its composable architecture, featuring a variety of novel accelerators and agile memory management, is useful when optimizing artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. HPRC Executive Director Honggao Liu leads the ACES project with Co-PIs Shaowen Wang (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), Tim Cockerill (TACC), Dhruva K. Chakravorty (HPRC), and Lisa Perez (HPRC). To date, 144 institutions (including 15 EPSCoR) have used ACES to accelerate the process of AI discovery in a wide range of domains.

Phil Andrews Award

From the conference website: The Phil Andrews Award honors the full paper submission deemed to have the most impact on research computing, broadly interpreted to encompass all areas in scientific research, technical innovation, state of practice, and workforce development. The award is offered in memory of Phil Andrews, a pioneer in advanced computing infrastructure for over 25 years. Phil brought tremendous passion and creative energy to NICS, PSC, SDSC, TeraGrid, and XSEDE. With degrees in physics, mathematics, and plasma physics from Cambridge, Purdue, and Princeton universities, he was experienced in artificial intelligence, visualization, archiving, digital libraries, and computational medicine. During his career, Phil authored approximately 40 papers on distributed and data-intensive computing and visualization techniques, theoretical plasma physics, and nonlinear dynamics. The winner of the Phil Andrews Award is selected by the PEARC Awards Chair and the Technical Program Co-Chairs, acting as a committee, from among the papers selected as the best papers in each track. Identifying a winner among the excellent candidate papers is always difficult, but the PEARC24 committee’s decision to recognize the Texas A&M HPRC’s BRICCs paper was unanimous.

Digest of HPRC and Collaborator Papers

Full Papers: Applications and Software

• Article 6: “Container Adoption in Campus High-Performance Computing at Texas A&M University,” by Richard Lawrence (HPRC) et al.
• Article 7: “Insight Gained from Migrating a Machine Learning Model to Intelligence Processing Units,” by Hieu Le (HPRC) et al.
• Article 10: “Impact of Memory Bandwidth on the Performance of Accelerators” Sambit Mishra (HPRC), et al.

Full Papers: Workforce Development, Training, Diversity, and Education

• Article 29: “Cultivating Cyberinfrastructure Careers through Student Engagement at Texas A&M University High-Performance Research Computing,” by Wesley Brashear (HPRC) et al.
• Article 31: (Best Paper in this category, and Phil Andrews Award Winner): “BRICCs: Building Pathways to Research Cyberinfrastructure at Under-Resourced Institutions,” by Dhruva K. Chakravorty (HPRC), et al.

  

Short Papers: Applications and Software

• Article 43: “NetPointLib: Library for Large-Scale Spatial Network Point Data Fusion and Analysis,” Yunfan Kang, Fangzheng Lyu, and Shaowen Wang.
• Article 46: “Performance of Molecular Dynamics Acceleration Strategies on Composable Cyberinfrastructure,” by Richard Lawrence (HPRC) et al.
• Article 48: “Providing Accessible Software Environments Across Science Gateways and HPC,” by Alexander Michels, Mit Kotak, Anand Padmanabhan, John Speaks, and Shaowen Wang (UIUC/ACES Collaborator).
• Article 64: “Exploring the Viability of Composable Architectures to Overcome Memory Limitations in High-Performance Computing Workflows,” by Wesley A. Brashear (HPRC) et al.

Short Papers: Workforce Development, Training, Diversity, and Education

• Article 86 – Best Paper in this category: “Engaging Secondary Students in Computing and Cybersecurity,” by Sandra B. Nite (HPRC) et al.

Top photo, from left: ACCESS-ACO Principal Investigator John Towns (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) delivers the Phil Andrews Award to BRICCs Collaborators Sarah Janes (San Jacinto Community College), Ralph Zottola (U-Alabama, Birmingham), Tabitha Samuel (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), and Lisa Perez (Texas A&M HPRC). PEARC24 was held in Providence, Rhode Island, July 21-25, 2024. Photo courtesy of the PEARC24 conference.