PEARC (conference)

PEARC (conference)
Name	PEARC
Status	Active
Genre	Technical conference
Frequency	Annual
First	2015
Organizer	XSEDE
Venue	Varies
Country	United States

PEARC (conference)

PEARC is an annual technical conference focusing on cyberinfrastructure and research computing that brings together practitioners from Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Science Foundation, United States Department of Energy, Los Alamos National Laboratory and industry partners such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon (company), IBM and Intel. The conference assembles staff from European Organization for Nuclear Research, Max Planck Society, CERN Openlab, Riken, Fujitsu, NVIDIA, Cray Research and Hewlett Packard Enterprise alongside representatives from academic institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, University of Texas at Austin and Purdue University. PEARC features presentations, posters, workshops, and training sessions that draw participants from programs like XSEDE, Compute Canada, PRACE, GÉANT, TACC, NCSA, and ESnet.

History

PEARC originated from the consolidation of earlier gatherings such as meetings organized by XSEDE, GRID2002, SC Conference (supercomputing), Interop, Supercomputing Conference, and regional symposia sponsored by National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Renaissance Computing Institute, and Ohio Supercomputer Center. Early editions featured collaborative efforts with National Institutes of Health, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, European Grid Infrastructure, Australian Research Data Commons, and Japan Science and Technology Agency. Over time, organizers partnered with professional societies including Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, SIAM, ACM SIGARCH, ACM SIGOPS, ACM SIGPLAN and IEEE Computer Society to broaden technical scope. Notable keynote speakers have included leaders from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York University, Columbia University, and Harvard University. PEARC locations have varied across cities such as Chicago, Dallas, Boston, Portland (Oregon), San Francisco, Austin (Texas), and Denver.

Organization and Sponsorship

The conference is typically organized by consortia involving XSEDE, Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC* institutions), and host universities in collaboration with funding agencies like the National Science Foundation, United States Department of Energy, United States Department of Defense, and philanthropic organizations such as Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Corporate sponsorships come from Intel Corporation, NVIDIA Corporation, AMD, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, Microsoft Corporation, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Corporation and Cisco Systems. Program committees have included members from Princeton University, Cornell University, Yale University, Brown University, Duke University, University of Michigan, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, Imperial College London, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Technical University of Munich. Organizing structures often reference standards bodies such as OpenStack Foundation, Linux Foundation, Kubernetes, Open Grid Forum and World Wide Web Consortium for interoperability initiatives.

Topics and Technical Program

PEARC’s technical program spans topics including high performance computing workflows used at CERN, Large Hadron Collider, and LIGO Scientific Collaboration; data management practices from Human Genome Project, 1000 Genomes Project, Earth System Grid Federation, and NOAA; software engineering approaches from projects like GitHub, Apache Software Foundation, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Jupyter Project; and operational practices informed by ESnet, Internet2, GÉANT, and National LambdaRail. Sessions cover scalable system design from architectures such as ARM (processor), RISC-V, GPU (graphics processing unit), TPU, and vendors like Cray, HPE Cray, and IBM Summit; storage solutions from Ceph, Lustre, GPFS, ZFS; and orchestration with Kubernetes, Docker, Slurm Workload Manager and HTCondor. Program areas include machine learning workflows used by OpenAI, DeepMind, Facebook AI Research, reproducible science practices exemplified by FAIR Guiding Principles, DataCite, Zenodo, and Dataverse, as well as cybersecurity topics referencing NIST, CISSP, ISO/IEC 27001, and FIPS.

Workshops, Tutorials, and Training

Workshops and tutorials at PEARC often partner with training programs such as Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, The Carpentries, EDUCAUSE, National Center for Supercomputing Applications training, and XSEDE User Services. Training tracks include hands-on sessions with tools from Anaconda (company), Conda, Singularity (software), Apptainer, OpenMPI, Intel MPI, CUDA, OpenACC, and OpenMP. Collaborative workshops have been co-located with initiatives like Research Data Alliance, EarthCube, OpenAIRE, Open Science Grid, Galaxy Project, and Bioconductor Project, covering reproducibility, workflow automation with Nextflow, Snakemake, CWL (Common Workflow Language), and data provenance with PROV.

Attendees and Community

Attendees include researchers from universities such as University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of Toronto, McGill University, University of Melbourne, and Monash University; staff from national labs like Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Argonne, Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore; engineers from companies including Red Hat, Canonical (company), SUSE, VMware, Amazon, Google and Microsoft; and representatives from consortia such as PRACE, Compute Canada, XSEDE, NeCTAR, NORDUnet and GÉANT. The community fosters collaborations leading to projects with NSF EPSCoR, HPC Wire, Inside HPC, ACM Careers, IEEE Spectrum, and international collaborations with European Commission Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, CERN Openlab, and EUDAT.

Awards and Recognition

PEARC presents awards and recognitions similar to honors from ACM, IEEE, SIAM, and USENIX including best paper, best poster, and community impact awards often judged by panels including members from National Science Foundation, DOE Office of Science, NERSC, TACC, PSC (Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center), RCC (Rensselaer Computational Center), and representatives from Intel, NVIDIA and HPE. Recipients frequently include researchers associated with projects like OpenMP ARB, MPI Forum, The Carpentries, Galaxy Project, DataONE, and Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. Awards have highlighted contributions that influenced initiatives such as FAIR Principles, Research Data Alliance, OpenStack, and national infrastructure strategies by NSF and DOE.

Category:Conferences