Will you be at SC25? This year, the large supercomputing conference known as SC will be held in St. Louis, from Sunday, Nov. 16 to Friday, Nov. 21, at the America’s Center Convention Complex. ACCESS will have a booth at the conference, and our team will be presenting at several events. Here’s a sampling of ACCESS-affiliated content at SC25:

ACCESS at Booth 119

You can find a map of the SC25 exhibits here. ACCESS will host its ACCESS the Experts series on Tuesday, Nov. 18, with a high concentration of experts and Principal Investigators (PIs) on hand to answer questions (full schedule below). ACCESS will continue to have a booth staffed with experts throughout the duration of the conference, who will be available to answer your questions.

We’ll also have some goodies for visitors of the booth to take home. When you stop by, look for our ACCESS-branded fidget keychain or our new ACCESS transfer stickers! We’ll also have our new Project Year 3 booklet highlighting some of the many accomplishments and research enabled by ACCESS over its third year.

Finally, Booth 119 isn’t the only place where you can learn more about ACCESS. ACCESS Resource Providers will also be at SC25, and their booths have exciting events planned as well. Here’s a list of ACCESS Resource Provider (RP) booth locations:

Check out some highlighted RP events in the schedule below to see what ACCESS-affiliated events are happening throughout the conference:

Sunday 11/16

Workshop: Research Software Engineers in HPC

9 a.m. – 5:30 p.m., Room 267 (link to event)

Research software engineers (RSEs) play a crucial role in the impact of HPC, data science and the broader scientific community. They have existed for decades, though often not under that name. Over the past several years, however, the RSE concept has evolved, with the development of common job titles and career paths, the creation of professional networks to connect RSEs, and the emergence of RSE groups in universities, national laboratories and industry. This workshop will bring together RSEs and allies from all over the world involved in HPC to grow the RSE community by establishing and strengthening professional networks among current RSEs and RSE leaders. Attendees will hear about successes and challenges that RSEs and RSE groups have experienced, and discuss ways to increase awareness of RSE opportunities and improve support for RSEs. The workshop will be highly interactive, featuring breakout discussions, panels, invited addresses and submitted talks.

Monday 11/17

Tutorial: Mastering AI Workflows Using ACCESS Pegasus

8:30 a.m. – 12 p.m., Room 126 (link to event)

This tutorial is designed for both users and facilitators who want to deepen their understanding of modeling AI pipelines in a portable and reproducible manner using scientific workflows and application containers. Scientific workflows are essential for managing complex computations: they define the dependencies between steps in data analysis and simulation pipelines, automate execution, and capture provenance information critical for verifying results and ensuring reproducibility. Workflows also promote sharing and reuse. Participants will learn to use Pegasus, a leading scientific workflow management system now integrated into the ACCESS offerings. ACCESS Pegasus offers a fully hosted environment, built on Open OnDemand and Jupyter, that enables users to develop and run workflows directly from a web browser. Workflow execution is powered by HTCondor Annex, enabling jobs to run across multiple ACCESS resources, including PSC Bridges-2, SDSC Expanse, Purdue Anvil, NCSA Delta, and IU Jetstream 2. Through hands-on exercises in a hosted Jupyter notebook, participants will work through an example LLM-RAG (Large Language Model Retrieval-Augmented Generation) workflow that leverages GPUs across ACCESS resources. Along the way, the tutorial will address key challenges and best practices across the entire workflow life cycle.

Tutorial: Advanced MPI Programming

8:30 a.m. – 12 p.m., Room 122 (link to event)

The vast majority of production parallel scientific applications today utilize MPI and run successfully on the world’s largest systems. Parallel system architectures are evolving to include complex, heterogeneous nodes that comprise general-purpose CPUs as well as accelerators, such as GPUs. At the same time, the MPI standard itself is evolving to address the needs and challenges of future extreme-scale platforms and applications. This tutorial will cover several advanced features of MPI that can help users program modern systems effectively. Using code examples based on scenarios found in real applications, session leaders will cover several topics, including one-sided communication, hybrid programming (MPI + threads, shared memory, GPUs), neighborhood and nonblocking collectives, some of the new performance-oriented features in MPI-4, and the new ABI (Application Binary Interface) in MPI-5. Attendees will leave the tutorial with an understanding of how to use these advanced features of MPI and guidelines on how they might perform on different platforms and architectures.

Tuesday 11/18

BoF: The Future of NSF-Supported Advanced Cyberinfrastructure

5:15 – 6:45 p.m., Rooms 261, 262, 265, 266 (link to event)

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s vision and investment plans for cyberinfrastructure are designed to address the evolving needs of the science and engineering research community. Senior leadership and program staff from NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) will discuss OAC’s vision, strategic and national priorities, as well as highlights from the latest funding opportunities across all aspects of the research cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. Substantial time will be devoted to audience Q&A sessions between attendees and NSF staff, as well as unstructured time for informal meetings with NSF staff.

Wednesday 11/19

BoF: AI’s Impact on HPC: Opportunity or Threat?

12:15 – 1:15 p.m., Room 274 (link to event)

In recent years, the HPC ecosystem has undergone profound changes. In Europe, for example, the EuroHPC JU has invested significantly in developing a World-Class Supercomputing Ecosystem with a strong focus on AI. The objective of this BoF is to provide an overview of the current state of HPC activities in Europe, Japan, and the U.S., with a particular focus on investments in public AI infrastructure. Session leaders will present and discuss the current state of play, future plans, and challenges with various international HPC stakeholders, and critically analyze the impact of an AI-focused strategy on the HPC ecosystem as a whole.

Community Engagement and Support: ACSC@SC25

3:30 – 4:15 p.m., Booth 3537 (link to event)

Presented by the United States National Science Foundation Leadership-Class Computing Facility, led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Advanced Computing Student Collaborative (ACSC) recruits undergraduate students from all disciplines who want to learn or enhance computational and data analytics skills and create positive change in their community. No prior programming experience or knowledge of the program theme is required. The paid, weeklong program, with virtual training activities leading up to the experience, engages students who want to work collaboratively to learn about HPC, data analysis, and computational thinking; experience the latest tools and techniques for exploring data through visualization; expand skills in team-based problem-solving; learn to communicate ideas more effectively to the general public; and experience a professional conference.

Thursday 11/20

Panel: Research Software Engineering in the Age of AI

1:30 – 3 p.m., Rooms 240, 241, 242 (link to event)

AI has drastically altered the area of software engineering. Session leaders will discuss its impact in the context of HPC and research software engineering, focusing on the development and maintenance of software used in scientific computing and research. Potential uses of AI include developing new code, developing tests, testing and debugging code, reducing technical debt, porting code, optimizing code, updating software when dependencies are updated, generating code documentation, and building workflows of existing components. Panelists who are both researchers and software developers/maintainers will discuss their experiences in AI and research software, and how they expect things to change in the short and long term.