Travel: NSF Travel Grant Support for IEEE/ACM CCGrid 2024 Conference

The IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Internet Computing 2024 (CCGrid 2024) is a high tier academic forum for presenting work in critical large-scale computing topics such as Cloud Computing, Edge Computing and Internet of Things (IoT), Internet Computing, and Cluster computing. These topics concern critical infrastructure that supports private business as well as public use, including all computational research into fields such as drug discovery, artificial intelligence, and climate change. This infrastructure is now crucial to maintaining national security. It is critical to maintain diverse technical expertise and research programs into these areas to drive progress forward and maintain the ever growing quantity of large-scale computational resources used in the United States today. To that end, academic conferences such as CCGrid 2024 provide a crucial training functionality for Ph.D. students nationwide, allowing them to engage with leading experts in the field, and engage others in their own research. This project helps fund the travel of eligible students enrolled in US institutions of higher learning who are pursuing research careers in these domains based on financial need and merit with special attention to underrepresented and minority groups within computing disciplines. This project will provide 20-25 students with travel funding to support travel and conference registration as part of the CCGrid 2024 Student Travel Grant Program. The Travel Grant Chair will review applications alongside the conference committee to prioritize students based on financial need, institutional and individual diversity, and merit with efforts to represent students that are from underrepresented minority groups in computing and students who would otherwise be unable to attend the conference without direct financial support. The Travel Grant Committee Chair will document the applications and received and the methodology used to select students from student applicants. This data will be stored and shared with future conference organizers to ensure the program can continue to improve. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.