June 21, 2024 - by Santina Russo
This year’s Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) Conference, held from June 3 – 5 at ETH Zurich’s main building, marked the conference's ten-year anniversary with the biggest turnout ro date. The PASC Conference chairs — Katherine Evans, Division Director for the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, and Siddhartha Mishra, professor for computational and applied mathematics at ETH Zurich — and the whole organizing team were thrilled to welcome 501 attendees from 30 countries.
There was also another first at this year’s PASC Conference: the PASC ACM Student Research Competition. “This competition looks for students who are doing high-quality work in their domain and who can explain the work and its impact to the broader computer science community,” explained Jay Lofstead, Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, USA, and organizer of the competition's PASC conference debut, “which means that competitors need to be excellent technically as well as able to communicate well.”
Eleven posters from junior researchers across the world were pre-selected for the competition, which also included travel funding from ACM SIGHPC (Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing). In a first round of the competition, six finalists were chosen based on an initial abstract review. In the second round, the candidates, their posters, and their presentations were thoroughly evaluated by nine judges in person.
Winners to represent HPC
“The ACM Student Research Competition is actually one of the most prestigious events for the youngest generation of computer scientists, for undergraduate and graduate students at the beginning of their career,” stated Torsten Hoefler, professor at ETH Zurich, Chief Architect of Machine Learning at CSCS and representative of SIGHPC at PASC24. Like all the winners of the ACM Student Research Competition at the poster stage, the gold medallist from PASC24 will get the chance to take part in a consecutive round of the competition, and, if he or she is successful, in the grand final. The ACM Student Research Competition offers students an opportunity to compete against the entirety of computer science.
Until now, of the more than 20 conferences selected to offer this ACM competition for students, PASC24 was the only one centred on HPC. “That the PASC Conference has gained a place in this circle provides more visibility to young researchers in HPC, as well as a higher impact of HPC in the computing community,” Lofstead said.
Congratulations to the gold, silver, and bronze medal winners at PASC24:
- Marc Marot-Lassauzaie from Technical University of Munich: “Mixed-Precision in High-Order Methods: Studying the Impact of Lower Numerical Precisions on the ADER-DG Algorithm”
- Stephen Nicholas Swatman from CERN and University of Amsterdam: “Finding Optimistic Upper Bounds for Task Graph Throughput on Heterogeneous Systems Using Linear Programming”
- Sonali Mayani from Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich: “Efficient, Portable, Massively Parallel Free-Space Solvers for the Poisson Equation”
Ten Years: Reflecting on the PASC journey
This year marked the PASC Conference’s ten-year anniversary, and much has happened since its beginnings. In 2014, the first PASC Conference was attended by 265 researchers and computer and software engineers, with more than 80 percent of them based in Switzerland. Now, ten years later, its size has all nearly doubled and it has attracted experts from all over the world. The number of participants exceeded 500 this year, with more than 60 percent of them working in institutions outside of Switzerland.
On top of plenary sessions, which included three keynote presentations, a panel discussion, and the interdisciplinary dialogue on bridging quantum and classical computing, attendees could choose from over 180 talks in 49 minisymposia, 26 full research papers, and over 60 posters.
Read more on PASC24 in the full article >
At PASC24: Torsten Hoefler
Video interview with Torsten Hoefler, professor at ETH Zürich, Chief Architect of Machine Learning at CSCS and representative of SIGHPC at PASC24
Jay Lofstead at PASC24
Video Interview with Jay Lofstead, Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, USA, and organizer of the ACM Student Research Competition at PASC24
Join PASC25!
After PASC is before PASC: The next conference will be held in Brugg, Switzerland, from June 16 – 18, 2025. It will be chaired by Laura Grigori, professor of applied and computational mathematics at EPFL and Head of the Laboratory for Simulation and Modelling at Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Switzerland, and Peter Vincent, professor of computational fluid dynamics at Imperial College London.
About PASC Conference:The Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) Conference is an interdisciplinary conference in HPC that brings together domain science, applied mathematics, and computer science — where computer science is focused on enabling the realization of scientific computation. The PASC Conference provides three days of stimulating and thought-provoking sessions, including keynote presentations, minisymposia, peer-reviewed papers, panels, and poster sessions. The conference is co-sponsored by ACM SIGHPC, and full papers are published in the ACM Digital Library.