TCPP April 2024 Newsletter

Dear TCPP Members,

As would any student with no clue on how to start their dissertation do, allow me to start this message with an “inspirational yet humoristic opening message regarding the evolution of technology” written by a LLM:

“Friends, gather ’round and let me tell you a tale of tech-tastic proportions! Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, our ancestors huddled around campfires, communicating with grunts and cave drawings. Fast forward a few centuries, and here we are, grunting into our smartphones and drawing on tablets! From parchment to pixels, the evolution of technology has transformed us from cave dwellers to digital wizards, making the world smaller, faster, and more connected. So raise your virtual glasses, and let’s toast to the future, where robots may be our friends and self-driving cars will hopefully remember where we parked them! Cheers!”

May these pieces of technology also support our researches, and lead us to further discovery, more enthusiastic meetings and greater understanding of our surroundings!

This newsletter, although late, is also a great place to congratulate and welcome Alfredo Goldman, who has been elected as next chair of this Technical Community. Anne Benoit (current chair until June 2024) and he will share their thought with you. Then, will come the congratulations to the last award recipients and a reminder of the upcoming events.

TCPP news from the Chairs Anne Benoit and Alfredo Goldman

 

Anne — After more than four years chairing TCPP, it is my pleasure to pass away the position to Alfredo, who has been recently elected by the community. We have started working tightly together, and we plan to keep working together for the last few months of my term. Hence, we are currently discussing new ideas and initiatives to further develop our parallel processing community, some of them that you will discover below. It has been a great honor to be chairing TCPP all these years — thanks for trusting me and electing me for two terms, and I wish best of luck to Alfredo for the coming years. I will always be available to discuss ideas and provide guidance.

 

Alfredo — I am thrilled to be the new TCPP chair. I still have much to learn from Anne. We are discussing a lot, and I am getting used to all my duties. When I first met her around 2000, I could not imagine that she would pass the baton of TCPP to me this year. For the past years as a member, I’ve learned a lot from the TCPP community and engaged in various activities, such as co-workshop chair of SC 23.
A sense of community is essential to follow our mission and achieve our goals. I hope to contribute to enhancing the TCPP by widely promoting it. Bearing in mind how the TCPP initiatives positively impact our careers and the advancement of the field, I will — with your support — continue the initiatives to make it even better for current and potential new members.
I am writing to express my gratitude to Anne for her outstanding work during her time as the chair and for sharing with me the knowledge she has acquired in this position. I am strongly committed and will do my best to promote and elevate the TCPP to the next level.

Awards

We congratulate the following people for their awards in the field of HPC:

[Early Career] Johannes Doerfert (Lawrence Livermore National Lab.), Wenqian Dong (Florida International University), and Prashant Pandey (University of Utah) received the 2023 IEEE-CS TCHPC Early Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing.

[Charles Babbage Award] Franck Cappello (Argonne National Lab.) received this award for pioneering contributions and inspiring leadership in distributed computing, high-performance computing, resilience, and data reduction.

[Ken Kennedy Award] Keshav Pingali (University of Texas) received this award for contributions to programmability of high-performance parallel computing on irregular algorithms and graph algorithms.

[Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award] Manish Parashar (University of Utah) received the 2023 Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award for contributions to distributed high-performance computing systems and applications, data-driven workflows, and translational impact.

[Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award] Not awarded in 2023.

Upcoming deadlines and events

The following deadlines are to be noted for this year:

The following TCPP events are getting closer as well:

We are going to have two new TCPP activities this year:

  • We plan to launch a parallel programming quest by the second semester. The contest will be virtual to allow broader participation. One of the motivations is to have diverse teams from all over the world.
  • We should also launch a joint student program to allow students to attend both SC and IPDPS.

 

Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have remarks or suggestions about TCPP and this newsletter, and feel free to encourage colleagues to become TCPP members as well for free: http://computer.org/jointcpp.

Clément FOYER

TCPP Web coordinator