Travel: Student Program - Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, 2024

Research computing stakeholders have grown to consider The Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) Conference series as a forum for discussing challenges, opportunities, and solutions specific to research computing. Also, the consistent growth in data and the ubiquity of research instruments has increased the diversity of research that relies on advanced research computing. Thus, access to reliable, robust and resilient high-performance computing (HPC) resources as well as data solutions is no longer a luxury, but an expectation and requirement for the modern researchers in order to stay competitive in their domain. In addition, the need for human capital has never been more urgent. Highly skilled individuals are needed to facilitate computation and accompany users in their usage of research computing tools. Thus, the theme for this year’s PEARC conference of “Human Powered Computing”. Building on the success of the XSEDE and PEARC conference series, this year’s conference aims to highlight the role and importance of the human capital while broadening the community by reaching out to grade school teachers and students to introduce them to the world of Research Computing. The conference will expose students and scientists to career opportunities, people networks and other resources that help them to connect, build skills and accelerate research. Students will be paired with mentors from a community of experts who will provide support and network opportunities to the students long after the conference. They will have the option to present themselves and their research through lightning talks to all attendees during lunches. PEARC24’s program and its intimate size (about 900 participants) provides students with a unique opportunity to gain hands-on-experience in advanced research computing and hopefully ignite their desire and interest to pursue a career in it. The student program committee recruits students with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion of underrepresented groups and from a diverse set of institutions by using the extended network of communities of the overall research computing community. 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.