“SC07 will engage hundreds of educators, students, and underrepresented groups to ensure they are able to fully participate in the use of computational science tools to enhance learning,” says Becky Verastegui, SC07 conference chair of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Seven categories at the conference will place a larger emphasis on higher education for graduate and undergraduate students. The categories are:
- Cluster Challenge—The Cluster Challenge will show how clusters easily accessed today surpass those of national labs ten years ago. Judged on speed and the accuracy, undergraduate teams work to assemble small clusters to analyze and optimize workloads on the computers.
- Education Program—Starting a 3-year initiative, the program goal is to prepare the next generation of experts. As part of the program, hands-on activities for undergraduate faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and high school teachers are used to engage participants in applying computational science and grid computing and high performance computing resources in education.
- Student Volunteers – Volunteering gives students the opportunity to meet with the leading researchers and discuss the latest high performance networking. Both undergraduate and graduate students volunteer four to five hours a day assisting with the administration of the conference.
- Doctoral Showcase—A new feature this year, this program showcases the work of Ph.D. students that will graduate within a year. Out of 48 proposals the SC07 conference received, 12 were accepted and those students will present a short summary of their research.
- Broader Engagement Program - SC07 is launching a multi-year program targeted at including individuals from groups that have traditionally been underrepresented in HPC. It will include educators and students from locations throughout the nation.
- ACM’s Student Research Poster Competition – Six students who were finalists in the competition will present their work in a special session during the SC07 Technical Program and will be a featured part of the poster session.
- ACM/IEEE-SC Fellowship Program— This program honors exceptional Ph.D. students focusing on research in high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. Fellows are awarded $5,000 for one academic year as well as being invited to one SC conference.
More information on the SC07 conference opportunities for higher education is available at its Web site.