SC24: a first-time attendee's view
20 December 2024
Laura Moran writes about the incredible size and variety of the annual Supercomputing conference, which is held in a different city in the United States each year.
Above: Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
SC24 was hosted in Atlanta, Georgia from November 17–22, 2024. This was the first time I had attended, and I was not ready for the scale of it, I learned from the opening talk that there were 17,500 attendees!
The conference comprised workshops, tutorials, a technical programme, and an exhibition floor where EPCC had a booth. I attended discussion sessions and talks, and spent some time staffing the EPCC booth.
Above: Nicky Fox, NASA, gives the SC24 plenary talk.
There was such a huge range of topics running in many concurrent sessions that it was hard to choose which to go to! I particularly enjoyed some sessions around sustainable and green supercomputing, as well as some focused on the impact of AI and LLM. The SC24 plenary given by Nicky Fox from NASA was absolutely awe-inspiring. As someone with an undergraduate degree in astrophysics, I really enjoyed hearing about the work NASA is doing and how HPC can support it. I asked Nicky a question at the end about what she viewed as her greatest career success and failure. Her success was related to the launch of the Parker Solar Probe, which I am familiar with from work in my Masters dissertation. Truly an excellent start to the technical programme.
One of the more interesting sessions I attended was around LLMs and was titled “The paper is dead. Long live the paper?”. The subject matter was whether paper publishing will change in light of the prevalence of LLMs and generative AI.
I was surprised to hear how many of the panellists were so solidly pro-AI, with one even going so far as to believe that AI should be included as an author on some papers, and thus held responsible for the content it creates for such publications. While I think that transparency around use of generative AI is important, it did spark a discussion around what it might mean to “hold an AI responsible”.
The audience certainly seemed more sceptical about the level to which the community should embrace these methods of writing technical papers, not least due to the potential risks of putting unpublished ideas and work into these applications. It really got me thinking, and I’m sure this debate will only continue as the popularity of generative AI grows.
Above: EPCC colleagues Eleanor Broadway and Laura Moran.
Spending time on the EPCC booth was a great way to have interesting conversations with people. The exhibitor floor had 494 exhibitors! At the booth we had Wee Archie, our Raspberry Pi cluster demo supercomputer which does well at outreach events for schoolchildren but certainly drew the adults in at SC! We had some merchandise too, and it flew off the stand on the first evening. EPCC was also participating in both the “Outreach Scavenger Hunt” and the “Students@SC Scavenger Hunt” which brought many people to the booth. I enjoyed chatting to people who have used some of the services we host, such as ARCHER2, especially since I have spent time on the service desk working in user support.
SC24 was a conference of epic proportions, with evening events, vendor parties, a packed daytime schedule, and some sunny weather in November! I went to as much as I possibly could and have come away with new connections, new ideas, and new energy to carry into 2025.
