Philip Roth

First, congratulations on your selection as a 2024 HPCwire Person to Watch and as the general chair of SC24. Many people may not be aware of how much effort goes into being the SC general chair throughout the year. When did the process actually start?

Serving the HPC community as SC general chair is a many-year commitment. Michela Taufer, SC19 general chair, approached me in 2021 to ask if I’d be interested in being nominated for consideration as SC24 general chair. The SC steering committee selected me later that year, and my preparations for SC24 started almost immediately. Some of the early work involved recruiting the members of the executive committee, working with the graphic design contractor and communications chair on conference logo and branding, and working with the lead sponsor society representative (IEEE CS for SC24) on securing hotel and venue contracts. This is also the time to work through infrastructure upgrades for the host city’s convention center, if it’s needed. In our case, this involved upgrades to the internal and external network connectivity of the Georgia World Congress Center to support SCinet, the world-leading network that conference volunteers design and build for each year’s conference. These upgrades were planned for SC20 but were never implemented when that year’s conference pivoted to a fully virtual conference format during the pandemic.

The SC24 theme is “HPC Creates.” How did the idea of creativity in HPC come to your attention?

I usually come home from attending SC physically exhausted but mentally energized. When I was considering the SC24 conference tagline, I realized that my post-conference charge comes from the passion, energy, and creativity exhibited by the conference attendees, exhibitors, and organizing committee volunteers. That creativity shows up in the novel approaches to solving problems that are highlighted in the conference’s technical program and exhibit floor, but also in the ways that those advances are communicated to attendees and in the opportunities for professional and personal development that occur as part of an SC conference.

I am also fascinated by projects that combine technology with art, such as Kirk Cameron’s SeeMore cluster, or finding artistic and elegant ways to expose technology, such as interesting camera angles in photos of large HPC systems. I’m convinced that our SC community is full of creative people, and each year I look forward to seeing the many ways that they express that creativity.

When was your first SC? and what was your most memorable SC experience (or experiences)?

I first attended SC in Dallas in 2000, and have attended every SC since then. I was a PhD candidate under Bart Miller at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and every few years Bart and Jeff Hollingsworth (one of Bart’s former PhD students and general chair of SC12) would buy a research booth on the SC exhibit floor and demonstrate the software co-developed by their research groups. Because the software targeted parallel HPC computers, Bart and Jeff wanted to bring a small cluster to the conference and operate it from the booth as the demonstration platform. That first cluster was a collection of eight laptops with an ethernet switch, all packaged in an absolutely enormous Pelican case with custom foam for protecting the laptops, and I was the student responsible for getting it from Madison to the convention center in Dallas. I will never forget how worried I was that I’d have to boot each laptop individually at the airline counter to demonstrate that it contained working computers, and how challenging it was to lug that case plus my own suitcase on that trip.

At ORNL, one of your jobs is described as “the algorithms and performance analysis leader.” What type of “algorithms and performance” tasks do you perform on a daily basis?

I am the leader of a group called Algorithms and Performance Analysis within the Science Engagement section of the National Center of Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). With my Science Engagement colleagues, one of my responsibilities is to act as a liaison to projects that have significant allocations on the large production computing systems we host in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), currently Summit and the exascale system Frontier.

My own research is mainly in performance analysis techniques, and in my role within NCCS I apply those techniques to the software used by those projects to help ensure that the projects make good use of their allocations. I’m also in a natural position to help the NCCS with system procurement and evaluation. For instance, although Frontier has only recently gone into production, we’re already working on what will follow it. I’ve been tasked with leading the group that defines the requirements and ensures functionality for the performance and debugging tools that will run on Frontier’s successor.

What inspired you to pursue a career in STEM, and what advice would you give to young people who wish to follow in your footsteps?

Looking back, I’d say many factors and events led me into a STEM career. Both of my parents hold graduate degrees in mathematics, and my father taught high school math as a career, so perhaps I inherited some natural inclination and ability for STEM. My father was allowed to bring home a Tandy TRS-80 and Apple IIe over my first two years in high school, and I recall being fascinated by the idea that I could develop programs that would run on those systems. I briefly flirted with experimental physics as an undergrad, but settled on computer science and still get a visceral satisfaction from forming mental visualizations of the data structures and control flow of complex software.

I have two pieces of general advice for anyone at the early stages of their career. First, seek out mentors, ask them questions, and consider thoughtfully their responses as you make your own decisions about how best to proceed. The SC organizing committee is full of good mentor candidates — the service-oriented type of person who volunteers their time to organize the conference is likely to also recognize the importance of answering your questions. Second, keep in mind, when you are making tough decisions, that you are working with incomplete information, and give yourself some grace if things don’t always work out as you planned or hoped. Life sometimes gets in the way, and the unexpected detours might result in connections or experiences that prove to be more valuable than what you’d have gotten from your original plans.

Outside of the professional sphere, what can you tell us about yourself – unique hobbies, favorite places, etc.? Is there anything about you your colleagues might be surprised to learn?

I wouldn’t call any of my hobbies “unique,” but some of the things I like to do in my free time might surprise those who only know me professionally. I love listening to music, and I also play several musical instruments, at least well enough to play bass guitar or drums or keyboards most weeks with a church band. I like to cook and especially to bake, and when my kids were young I made and decorated some of their memorable birthday cakes. I’m especially proud of the cake with the Star Wars AT-AT walker design in the frosting and side collection of Ewok cupcakes. I also like woodworking, and recently made a nice charcuterie board from walnut and cherry for my wife. And I like to mess around with electronics. It’s really satisfying to me when I do a project where these hobbies intersect, such as a bass speaker cabinet I made a few years ago that let me combine woodworking with electronics in something that I can use when playing music.