Luckily, Denver is a really nice city with a European-style pedestrian shopping area and many excellent restaurants in the city center, otherwise it would become boring coming here so often. It felt like I had been here just a while ago, but it was actually March. I came here (yet again) for the Technical Program Paper Selection meeting on June 5 and 6 as well as our next SC planning meeting on June 6 and 7. In addition, there was a meeting of the SC Steering Committee on June 9.

SC17 Tech Paper committee meeting — Picture by Bernd Mohr

The first one and half days the SC17 Tech Paper committee met face-to-face to discuss and select the final paper submissions for the conference in November. Almost the complete committee attended — over 200 people! SC is one of a few parallel computing conferences where this meeting is face-to-face; normally the paper selection is done in a smaller group or on-line only. This is remarkable, given the size of the committee (which is larger than the number of actual attendees for quite a few smaller HPC conferences or workshops I know) and that at least 35% of the reviewers are non-US, which means, they have to travel transatlantic or transpacific just to attend this short meeting (on their own or their home institution’s money!). A big thank you to them for their hard and dedicated work!

SC considers it essential that this meeting is done face-to-face to ensure that every paper is well discussed in a fair manner,  to ensure a balance in fairness and quality across the different topic areas and to ensure a high quality of the accepted papers. Since last year, the review is done double-blind, i.e. not only the reviewers are kept anonymous to the authors but also the author names and organizations are hidden from the reviewers. This is to ensure that the reviews are fair to everyone and not only submissions of well-known authors or organizations are chosen.

SC17 continued efforts started at SC16 to promote reproducibility of scientific results in the SC Technical Papers program. SC16 introduced an Artifact Description appendix, an optional appendix for paper submissions. SC17 continued with this optional appendix and introduced a second, complementary, and also optional, Computational Results Analysis appendix for papers. As the Reproducibility Initiative FAQ explains “The Artifacts Description appendix is simply a description of the computing environment used to produce the results in a paper. By itself, this appendix does not directly improve scientific reproducibility. However, if this artifact is done well, it can be used by scientists (including the authors at a later date) to more easily replicate and build upon the results in the paper. Therefore, the Artifacts Description appendix can reduce barriers and costs of replicating published results. It is an important first step toward full scientific reproducibility.”

While the paper committee was meeting, a small group and me used the time to visit a few catering companies which want to provide the food and drinks for our two big evening events in November namely the Sunday night Exhibitor event and the Thursday night Tech program event. Both are attended by over 2,000 people so you better make sure you have enough space and enough food and drinks 😉 Of course the visits included a food tasting at the various caterers. This sounds like fun but as I can tell you now from my own experience, it is actually quite stressful! At each caterer, they prepared about 20 different samples and of course they are all delicious and you want to eat them all, but you have to restrain yourself and only take small bites, otherwise you would not be able to walk out by yourself at the end of the day 😉

Chili Bucket Wall Segment — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Chili Buckets — Picture by Bernd Mohr

We also learned about new trends in the food industry — especially about innovations to help feed our larger group of attendees more quickly: one such innovation is the food bucket wall (see above). Multiple segments each with 80 or more little buckets (the size of a large coffee mug) forming a long (15 to 20 m) wall containing for example a variety of Chili (beef, buffalo, or vegetarian). People entering the event quickly can grab a bucket and the buckets are large enough to satisfy hunger. Waiters behind the wall can quickly repopulate the wall with new buckets.

After the Tech paper meeting, the SC planning committee met for another one and half days. We discussed the status and next steps for each of the different areas (Communication, Exhibits, Finance, Infrastructure, Inclusivity, Local Arrangements, SCinet, Students@SC, and Tech program) especially items which needed interactions between the different subcommittees. A lot can be prepared over emails and phone calls, but nothing beats sitting in a group around a table and getting things done 😉 !

SC17 committee at work — Picture by Christine Harvey

Overall, the organization of the conference is running smoothly, no major issues. Must be because the conference is led by a well-organized German for the first time 😉 — just kidding, it is of course because of all the work of my amazing committee!!

An interesting item we decided in this meeting was the design for the stage we will use for the opening of the conference, the award sessions and the invited speaker talks in the main ballroom. The stage (and its main presentation screen) will be 50m(!) wide, that is all I can reveal at this point. It will be breath-taking but you will have to come to the conference in November to see yourself!

On March 21 and 22, 2017, we had our 6th SC17 Planning meeting, again in Denver, Colorado. Wow, time flies, I still remember getting some rest over the Christmas holidays and then spent a nice week in the US at the SC16/17 Turnover meeting in January.  Where did the past two month go? Now there are only 235 days left until the opening of SC17 in November. Saying it is still 5640 hours is not really helping 😉 At least we had nice Spring weather — last year around the same time when we had our 1st meeting, Denver was hit by a major snowstorm!

SC17 Committee Meeting in Denver — Picture by Bernd Mohr

The SC17 committee (which by now has 540 members, counting everyone including all the technical program reviewers) is working daily on preparing the conference in November. Meanwhile, I am spending 2 to 4 hours a day reading and answering SC committee email, and working on SC plans, guidelines, policies and contracts. Luckily for me, I am fully supported by Forschungszentrum Jülich and my institute, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, for this task — doing such a job aside (in your free time) is hardly possible.

We are making good progress. Selection of technical program elements are in full swing. Workshop submissions have already been reviewed and handled. We accepted 36 out of 54 submissions. Last year there were 56 submissions, another sign we are well on track. Currently, the submission is open for technical papers and tutorials, the other two major elements of our technical program, with deadlines coming up early April. The deadline for other program elements are later in the year in July and August. Managing the submission, reviewing and selection of the various technical program elements is the largest part of the currently on-going work.This explains why the technical program committee is the largest of our conference committees (currently 368 members). Just the Technical Paper Committee features over 200 members, so we can assure that every paper submission gets at least 4 reviews, and the review can be done in a reasonable amount of time.

Beside this, the space plan, a detailed document which shows which activity and conference functions are located in which conference center room at which time, with all details including the room layout, available electricity and AV equipment, is almost complete. A group of people which are responsible for the various conference activities as well as our local arrangements team visited the Colorado Convention Center again to familiarize themselves with the rooms and center layout. Sales of commercial and research exhibit booths for our show floor are also  coming together well — we are well set for another record number of exhibitors and exhibition booth space.

To keep me focused on my SC organization work, I bought myself a 20cm replica of the Blue Bear statue out side of the Colorado Convention Center (see below). It is standing now in my book shelf behind my back in my office watching me work 😉

The “Blue Bear” mascot of the Colorado Convention Center, Denver — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Replica of Blue Bear mascot of Colorado Convention Center — Picture by Bernd Mohr

On August 3 and 4, 2016, we had our third SC17 planning meeting in the SC17 conference city, Denver, Colorado. In Germany, we would call this August meeting “mountain party” (“Bergfest”) , as we reached now the halftime in our three year quest to organize the SC17 conference, and after 18 months of steep, hard, up-hill work to reach the summit, the second half of the trip should be easier and down-hill. Of course, the future will show whether it is really down-hill 😉 It is also the last (face-to-face) planning meeting this year before the SC16 conference in Salt Lake City in November, however the organizing committee will continue to meet in monthly tele-conferences.

The “Blue Bear” mascot of the Colorado Convention Center, Denver — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Meeting attendance was again higher than past meetings: 31 attendees compared to 22 and 12, so beyond the top-level Executive Committee much more of the next level Committee Chairs (mainly from Infrastructure and Local Arrangements) and of our contractors (like Exhibition Management, Meeting Management, or Web Design) attended.

Like in the last meeting we mainly discussed the progress the teams accomplished the past three months and the next steps ahead of us. Most of the work done at this point is actually working on contracts: After we had finalized in 2015 all the contracts with hotels for our attendees and exhibitors for the conference in November 2017 (almost two dozen of them!), in 2016 the work concentrates on the contracts with hotels for the five planning meetings in 2017 (January, March, June, August, and October), the SCinet meeting also in October, the January meeting (“turnover”)  in 2018, the final Convention Center contract, and, last-but-not-least, renewals or even competitive bids for our contractors. Luckily we get a lot of support here from professionals working for ACM and IEEE, the SC conference sponsors! The second focus point is the communication team, which has to get our first version of the SC17 website live and public by November 17, the Thursday of this year’s conference. The same day, a short (2 minutes) SC17 preview video will be shown for the first time. The production of this video is especially exciting as we hired a producer which won already 9(!) Emmy awards, so you see how serious we take this task 😉

After the meeting, a smaller group of us used the opportunity being in our conference city touring more possible locations for our two big evening events: the Sunday Exhibitor and Thursday Tech Program Networking Events. The locations must be able to host a couple of thousand attendees and you can imagine that even in a big city like Denver, there are not too many of those. In addition, they should be close to the Convention Center and conference hotels, and finally, they must be available for us on the two very specific dates (because these are already set). I can report that we found fabulous locations for both events, but of course I cannot tell you yet, as it would ruin the surprise (and, of course, we have not finalized the contracts(!) with them yet 🙂

New Denver A line train connection Denver airport to Downtown — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Arriving in Denver Union Station! — Picture Bernd Mohr

This visit allowed me also to test the new Denver tram line which connects Denver airport to downtown Union station. Worked like a charm! A one-way trip is US$ 9 and there is a train every 15 minutes. The ride takes about 40 minutes. The best part is that this makes the trip to the airport much more reliable, because before that it depended very much on the traffic in and around Denver.