EduHPC-20: Workshop on Education for High Performance Computing, In Cooperation with

Held in conjunction with SC: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysys

Georgia World Congress Center
Atlanta, Georgia
Co-located with SC20
Friday, November 13th, 2020

https://tcpp.cs.gsu.edu/curriculum/?q=eduhpc20

Technical Programme

Registration is open!

High Performance Computing (HPC) and, in general, Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) has become pervasive, from supercomputers and server farms containing multicore CPUs and GPUs, to individual PCs, laptops, and mobile devices. Even casual users of computers now depend on parallel processing. Therefore, it is important for every computer user (and especially every programmer) to understand how parallelism and distributed computing affect problem solving. It is essential for educators to impart a range of PDC and HPC knowledge and skills at multiple levels within the educational fabric woven by Computer Science (CS), Computer Engineering (CE), and related computational curricula including data science. Companies and laboratories need people with these skills, and, as a result, they are finding that they must now engage in extensive on-the-job training. Nevertheless, rapid changes in hardware platforms, languages, and programming environments increasingly challenge educators to decide what to teach and how to teach it, in order to prepare students for careers that are increasingly likely to involve PDC and HPC.

This workshop invites unpublished manuscripts from academia, industry, and government laboratories on topics pertaining to the needs and approaches for augmenting undergraduate and graduate education in Computer Science and Engineering, Computational Science, and computational courses for both STEM and business disciplines with PDC and HPC concepts. Recently the workshop also extended its focus to data science and computational science education. Additionally, we highly encourage manuscripts that validate their innovative approaches through the systematic collection and analysis of information to evaluate their performance and impact.

The workshop is particularly dedicated to bringing together stakeholders from industry (both hardware vendors and employers), government labs, and academia in the context of SC-20. The goal is for each to hear the challenges faced by others, to learn about various approaches to addressing these challenges, and to have opportunities to exchange ideas and solutions. In addition to contributed talks, this workshop will feature invited talks on opportunities for collaboration, resource sharing, educator training, internships, and other means of increasing cross-fertilization between industry, government, and academia.

This effort is in coordination with the NSF/TCPP curriculum initiative on Parallel and Distributed Computing and the Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources (CDER). Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. Pedagogical issues in incorporating PDC and HPC in undergraduate and graduate education, especially in core courses
2. Novel ways of teaching PDC and HPC topics
3. Data Science and Big Data aspects of teaching HPC/PDC including early experience with data science degree programs.
4. Evidence-based educational practices for teaching HPC/PDC topics that provides evidence about what works best under what circumstances.
5. Experience with incorporating PDC and HPC topics into core CS/CE courses and in domain Computational Science and Engineering courses
6. Pedagogical tools, programming environments, infrastructures, languages, and projects for PDC and HPC
7. Employers' experiences with and expectation of the level of PDC and HPC proficiency among new graduates
8. Education resources based on higher-level programming languages and environments such as X10, Chapel, Haskell, Python, Cilk, CUDA, OpenCL, OpenACC, Hadoop, and Spark.
9. Parallel and distributed models of programming and computation suitable for teaching, learning, and workforce development.
10. Projects or units that introduce students to concepts relevant to Internet of Things, networking, or other topics in mobile devices or sensor networks.
11. Issues and experiences addressing the gender gap in computing and broadening participation of underrepresented groups.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: We are accepting submissions for Full papers (6 to 8 pages), Lightning Talks (2-page abstract) and Peachy Parallel assignments (1-page abstract) categories. Please see details below.

Papers: Authors should submit 6-8 pages papers in PDF format through the Linklings submission site. Submissions should be formatted as single-spaced, double-column pages (IEEE format), including figures, tables, and references. Submitted papers will be peer reviewed and all accepted papers will be published in the IEEE TCHPC Proceedings and will be included in the IEEE Xplore digital library. Accepted papers will be available from the CDER website approximately 2 weeks before the workshop so attendees can read papers before attending the talks. Authors may optionally (modestly) revise their papers to incorporate feedback from the workshop. Authors will be further invited to publish their work in a Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC) special issue, as in the past workshops.

SC Reproducibility Initiative: Considering SC’s focus on reproducibility, we highly encourage authors to provide an artifact description appendix (up to two pages) along with their manuscript, describing the details of their software environments and computational experiments to the extent that an independent person could replicate their results. More information on the reproducibility initiative can be found here. In the context of the educational research, the artifact description appendix may contain the detailed description of the tools or techniques, classroom evaluation settings, metrics, evaluation results etc.

Lightning Talk Proposal: We are planning to have a lightning talk session to encourage the presentation of ongoing research, new and innovative ideas, or prospects for partnership and collaboration.  Additionally, Lightning talk will be an appropriate track of submission for our large body of early adopters to present their curriculum adoption experiences, findings and recommendations. Proposals should be limited to a 2-page PDF document (IEEE format) submitted through the Linklings submission site, including an abstract of 250 words, a detail description of the significance of the work, and an outline of the 5 minutes lightning talk presentation. You may also submit supporting materials such as website link, source code, descriptive documents, video etc. through the same submission link. Each proposal will be peer reviewed and the accepted authors will be presenting a 5 minutes lightning talk during the workshop via slides, interactive demonstration etc. The accepted proposals will be further curated to create a summary paper authored by the track chairs and the proposal authors. The summary paper will be published in the IEEE TCHPC Proceedings and will be included in the IEEE Xplore digital library.

Peachy Parallel Assignments: Course assignments are integral to student learning in computing and also play an important role in student perceptions of the field. Instructors love to give exciting assignments that highlight important applications while emphasizing important principles and techniques. Unfortunately, creating great assignments is time-consuming and even our best efforts do not always succeed. With this in mind, EduHPC is introducing a session showcasing "Peachy Parallel Assignments" - high-quality assignments, previously-tested in class, that are readily adoptable by other educators teaching topics in parallel and distributed computing. This effort is inspired by "Nifty Assignments" (http://nifty.stanford.edu).

We invite submissions of "Peachy Parallel Assignments" to highlight in this special session. Assignments may be previously published, but the author must have the right to publish a description of it and share all supporting materials. We are seeking assignments that are 1) Tested - All submitted assignments should have been used successfully in a class. 2) Adoptable - Preference will be given to assignments that are widely applicable and easy to adopt. Traits of such assignments include coverage of widely-taught concepts, using common parallel languages and widely-available hardware, having few prerequisites, and (with variations) being appropriate for different levels of students. 3) Cool and Inspirational - Peachy assignments should be fun and inspiring for students. They encourage students to spend time with the relevant concepts. Ideal assignments are those that students want to demonstrate to their roommate. Assignments can cover any topics in Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Initial submissions should be a 1-page PDF document (IEEE format) submitted through the Linklings submission site and describing the assignment and its context of use. What is the main idea? What concepts are covered? Who are its targeted students? In what context have you used it? What prerequisite material does it assume they have seen? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Are there any variations that may be of interest? You may also submit supporting assignment materials such as website link, source code, descriptive documents, video etc. through the same submission link. Preference will be given to assignments aimed at students in the early courses.

If accepted, authors will be asked to submit their (a) 1-page camera-ready paper, and (b) assignment (the file actually given to students) and any supporting materials (given code, etc.) to be archived and maintained on CDER courseware repository. All accepted authors will be presenting a 5 minutes lightning talk during the workshop via slides, interactive demonstration etc. All accepted peachy assignments will be further curated to create a summary paper authored by the track chairs and the peachy assignment authors. The summary paper will be published in the IEEE TCHPC Proceedings and will be included in the IEEE Xplore digital library. Please contact David Bunde (dbunde@knox.edu) if youy have any further questions about Peachy Assignments.

KEYNOTE: There will be one keynote address.

Best Paper Award: All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed and considered for the Best Paper Award.

PANELS and SPECIAL SESSIONS: EduHPC 2020 will contain some special sessions. There will be an update from the CDER community regarding the revision effort to the NSF/IEEE-TCPP Curriculum Guideline for Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) in Undergraduate Education that is currently in progress. Please check back to the EduHPC 2019 website in the near future for details on how to participate in a special session. Proposals for panels and special sessions are also welcome. If you have an idea for a panel or a special session, please contact the program committee co-chairs, Trilce Estrada (trilce@unm.edu) and Joel Adams (adams@calvin.edu).

CONTACT
Workshop Chair: Sushil Prasad
Program Chair: Trilce Estrada <trilce@unm.edu>
Peachy Assignments Chair: David Bunde <dbunde@knox.edu>

IMPORTANT DATES:
Abstract Submission deadline (Required): August 10th
Paper Submission deadline: September 7th
Paper Author notification: September 23rd
Paper Camera-ready paper deadline: October 4th

Lightning Talk submission deadline: September 14th
Lightning Talk Author notification: September 23rd
Lightning Talk Camera Ready: September 30th

Peachy Assignment submission deadline: September 14th
Peachy Assignment Author notification: September 23rd
Peachy Assignment Camera Ready: September 30th

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Workshop Chair: Sushil K. Prasad, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
Program Chair: Trilce Estrada, University of New Mexico, USA
Vice Chair: Joel Adams, Calvin College, USA
Former Program Chair: Debzani Deb, Winston-Salem State University, USA
Peachy assignments Chair: David Bunde, Knox College, USA
Proceedings Chair: Satish Puri, Marquette University, USA
Martina Barnas, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Sheikh Ghafoor, Tennessee Technological University, USA
Anshul Gupta, IBM Research, USA
Cynthia Phillips, Sandia National Laboratories, USA
Alan Sussman, University of Maryland, USA
Charles Weems, University of Massachusetts, USA
Ramachandran Vaidyanathan, Louisiana State University, USA