PEARC

PEARC
Name	PEARC
Type	Professional conference and association
Headquarters	Unknown
Founded	Unknown
Fields	High-performance computing; research computing; cyberinfrastructure

PEARC

PEARC is a professional conference and community focused on high-performance computing, research computing, and cyberinfrastructure. It brings together practitioners from universities, national laboratories, corporations, and government agencies to share advances in computing, data management, and scientific workflows. The conference emphasizes collaboration among researchers, system administrators, software developers, and policy makers to accelerate discovery across domains.

Overview

PEARC convenes technologists and researchers from institutions such as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Texas Advanced Computing Center. The event features contributed talks, tutorials, posters, and vendor exhibits representing organizations like IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, Cray Research, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Attendees include members of academic programs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Funding and partnerships have involved agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and European Commission.

History

The conference evolved from earlier regional and national meetings tied to research computing communities associated with centers such as XSEDE and projects led by figures from National Institutes of Health, NASA, and the European Union Horizon 2020 framework. Early iterations drew contributors from initiatives like TeraGrid, Grid 2003, and consortia that included SDSC and NERSC. Over time PEARC incorporated programmatic elements inspired by workshops connected to Supercomputing (conference), ISC High Performance, and forums organized by ACM and IEEE. Key milestones mirror the expansion of cloud and GPU computing championed by companies such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and research efforts at Facebook and Microsoft Research.

Conferences and Events

Program formats include plenary keynotes delivered by leaders from institutions like MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and corporations such as Dell Technologies and ARM Holdings. Sessions often cover topics linked to projects at CERN, Human Genome Project, NOAA, and multinational collaborations including Gaia (spacecraft) data processing and Square Kilometre Array planning. Workshops and tutorials can be co-located with events sponsored by United States Department of Energy offices, academic societies like SIAM, and initiatives such as DataCite and The Carpentries.

Organizational Structure

Organizing committees typically include representatives from universities such as University of Washington, Columbia University, University of Michigan, and Harvard University; national labs including Brookhaven National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; and industry partners including Red Hat and Canonical (company). Governance models reflect practices from professional societies like Association for Computing Machinery and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, with standing committees for program, finance, and diversity modeled after frameworks used by American Physical Society conferences. Advisory boards frequently include participants from initiatives such as Open Science Grid and consortia like PRACE.

Programs and Initiatives

PEARC sponsors initiatives aimed at workforce development and reproducible research, collaborating with training programs such as The Carpentries, outreach efforts associated with Broad Institute, and internship models similar to Google Summer of Code and DOE Scholars Program. It supports best-practice working groups on topics represented by organizations like Research Data Alliance, DataONE, and CODATA. Pilot projects have paralleled efforts by Software Sustainability Institute and partnerships with bodies such as EuroHPC Joint Undertaking to advance interoperability among middleware, container technologies like Docker (software) and Singularity (software).

Membership and Participation

Participants come from academic departments and centers including Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program, engineering schools at Carnegie Mellon University and California Institute of Technology, and research groups from Johns Hopkins University and Yale University. Vendor and service participation features companies such as Canonical (company), SUSE, and cloud providers including Microsoft Azure. Student engagement often mirrors activities at competitions and student tracks sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, ACM SIGHPC, and regional consortia like XSEDE Campus Champions.

Impact and Recognition

PEARC has influenced practices adopted by projects at CERN, NOAA Fisheries, and large-scale collaborations like Human Connectome Project and LIGO Scientific Collaboration by disseminating methods for scalable workflows, provenance, and benchmarking. Work presented at PEARC has been cited alongside results from venues such as SC (conference), NeurIPS, and journals affiliated with ACM Transactions on Computer Systems and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. Awards and recognitions given at or informed by PEARC have connections with fellowships and prizes from National Science Foundation programs, society awards from ACM, and honors administered by IEEE.

Category:Conferences in computing