Author Archives: Stem Trek

By Strahinja Trecakov, New Mexico Consortium

This year I had an opportunity to attend the TANGO@SC2 workshop organized by STEM-Trek in collaboration with Texas A&M University and the Conference on Next-Generation Arithmetic (CoNGA). This workshop took place at the Americas Center Convention Complex in St. Louis, Missouri on Friday and Saturday, November 14-15 before the International Conference on High-Performance Computing (HPC), Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC25. This year’s topic was nonTraditional Architecture and Next-Gen Computational Orchestration where I learned about Compute eXpress Link (CXL), RISC-V and Math that is driving more energy-efficient supercomputers. I was able to attend all CoNGA paper presentations, and keynotes by Jeffrey Sarnoff, Editor in Chief @ IEEE P3109, and John Gustafson, Arizona State University (of Gustafson’s Law). Moreover, during the TANGO workshop, I learned about the National Research Platform (NRP; San Diego Supercomputer Center) and Rogues Gallery testbed (Georgia Tech). This was a great start …

The SC25 conference in St. Louis proved to be a transformative experience, taking me from nervous presenter to confident contributor in the HPC community. As someone whose research typically focuses on adversarial machine learning and network security, presenting work on Python environment management represented both a significant expansion of my skill set and an opportunity to contribute to a conversation about making HPC more accessible.

Making Connections: From Exhibition to Presentation

The exhibitions opened on the third day, and I explored several posters at the Texas A&M University booth. One that immediately stood out discussed building a Jupyter AI assistant for scientific workflows. With my software developer background, this project felt especially relevant. It wasn’t just about automation, it addressed a fundamental challenge: how do we empower domain scientists who aren’t HPC experts to leverage these powerful systems?

Later that week, I attended a talk from a researcher at ETH …

By Wenyu Wang, PhD Student, Urban Planning, The Ohio State University

On my first day at SC25, I felt jet-lagged, nervous, and excited all at once. The day began with a friendly check-in and getting to know people around me, which helped me relax and step into the community. Later, I got to visit the Post Building in downtown St. Louis, an experience that stood on its own and meaningful in showing me the spaces and organizations supporting science and innovation in the region. Meanwhile, my understanding of GeoAI came from the sessions and conversations earlier in the day, where I was introduced to how spatial data and AI are evolving together.

On the …

By Vijay Shankar, Director of Bioinformatics and Statistics, Clemson Institute for Human Genetics

The title of this blog has multiple contextual meanings. The first comes from the fact that the number of members attending the Supercomputing Conference through STEM-Trek has doubled from 2017 to 2025. This growth is thanks to the incredible effort put forth by the STEM-Trek team in securing funding that enables HPC professionals to attend meetings and conferences for career-development opportunities. The community is stronger than ever before. This became especially apparent when, after attending SC24, I was invited to join the HPC Ecosystems Slack workspace hosted by members of STEM-Trek. Being able to collaborate, share knowledge, and solve problems collectively within this community has become a true highlight of my professional life. I’m delighted to see this group actively growing and developing. Strength in numbers, indeed!

The second meaning of the title points to this year’s …

By Horst Severini, University of Oklahoma (OU)

I am again very grateful for STEM-Trek’s support so I could attend SC25 in St. Louis. I met old friends, found new ones, and learned lots of new and exciting information, in both the TANGO/CoNGA workshops and at SC itself.

The GeoFutures Coalition presentation at the TANGO workshop on Friday morning made clear that there is always a trade off between privacy and convenience, such as when we give Google maps our location information in order to get directions. They also emphasized that US Intelligence gathering is only supposed to happen on foreign soil, not in the US — although I’m not convinced that that’s actually what’s happening. The Esri/ArcGIS talk also had lots of good information and reminded me that I went to a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) workshop at the OU Libraries a few years ago, which was also very informative, …

By Himeshi De Silva, Scientist at Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore

The Conference for Next Generation Arithmetic (CoNGA) found a new home this year in the form of TANGO (nonTraditional Architecture and Next-Gen Computational Orchestration) ahead of the Supercomputing (SC)25’ Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. CoNGA is the brainchild of Professor John Gustafson and provides an open venue for researchers and practitioners aiming to explore alternative forms of number representations and their arithmetic for various scientific applications to present their work. While I had been involved with organizing CoNGA for several years – joining as a student volunteer at its inception in 2018 and serving as program chair last year – attending the conference this year seemed uncertain, and I was facing the unfortunate possibility of missing it for the first time. Thankfully, Elizabeth Leake and TANGO fully embraced CoNGA and went even further to support …

By Babar Khan, Babar Khan Research

SC25 has concluded. I just checked the latest post on the LinkedIn page of SC Conference Series that SC25 welcomed 16,499 attendees and featured 559 exhibitors making it the second-largest SC conference by attendance and the largest ever in exhibition participation. That is impressive. Now that I am back home, sitting at my desk with a cup of coffee, the temperature nearing zero and Christmas not far away, this feels like the perfect moment to reflect on the experience and put my thoughts into my first ever blog for STEM-Trek.  Yay!

I would start by writing THANKS to our very own Elizabeth Leake and STEM-Trek for providing me this opportunity to attend SC2025 in St. Louis, USA. I truly mean it, because I know it is not an easy task to invite scholars from around the world while also ensuring that everyone remains safe, engaged, and …

By Maria E. Adonay, Clemson University Institute for Human Genetics

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I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Supercomputing Conference for the second year in a row, thanks to STEM-Trek. This year’s event (SC25) was held in St. Louis, MO — my first time visiting the city since childhood! Here’s a look back, told in “postcards.”

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Nov 14–15: Pre-Conference Hello from St. Louis!

The STEM-Trek group kicked off our pre-conference activities at The Post Building, where we heard a variety of talks, including some fascinating geospatial topics. (I left with several ideas about how geospatial analysis options could one day support our own cluster users!) The highlight of the day, though, was coasting down to ground level via the repurposed St. Louis Post Dispatch slide — just like …

By: Vijay Shankar, Director of Bioinformatics and Statistics, Clemson Center for Human Genetics

I have spent most of my academic career on the user side of high-performance computing (HPC). It is only in the last five years that I have begun to understand what it means to serve on the administrator side of HPC. I, like a few others I met at the ART@SC24 pre-conference workshop and the SC24 conference proper, have walked an atypical path toward the HPC world. My day job is that of a Computational Biologist and Core Director. What I do in between the lulls of academic responsibilities is administer a 40-node DELL EMC cluster owned by the Center for Human Genetics with my core team. Our cluster serves the research needs of approximately 120 users in the field of genetics and genomics at Clemson University. When I began this journey back in 2019, I knew …

By: Titus Nyarko Nde, PhD in Computing Student at Boise State University

Introduction

With this blog post I’ll share my unique experience at the supercomputing conference (or simply SC24) in Atlanta, Georgia. SC24 is the premiere International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. It was highly recommended during the International High-Performance Computing Summer School (IHPCSS) in Kobe, Japan, by my mentor, Maciej Cytowski. Thanks to Elizabeth Leake (STEM-Trek) for igniting my interest in attending this conference and for initiating the process to fund my trip to Atlanta. She made it all happen and also paid for my accommodation and some fun activities, which I will talk about later in this blog. I also want to thank Leif Nelson and everyone in the Boise State Research Computing Department for sponsoring the remainder of the cost to attend. Special thanks to my Ph.D. advisor, Nancy …