Author Archives: Stem Trek

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 …

By: Marcus Bond, Professor of Chemistry and Physics, Southeast Missouri State University

“It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon” declared my dentist in the middle of a recent procedure.  Good advice for surviving SC—and life in general.

SC16 was my first.  This was a conference I never believed I would be able to attend.  But thanks to the support of STEM-Trek have been able to attend most conferences since.  As I vaguely recall from my SC16 blog, I had set a goal during a discussion at the outing to Benihana, to scale the small cluster I was operating in our department, at the time, up to a central research computing system for the university.

 I did not meet that particular timeline or that particular goal. But with some patience and persistence I now involved in a NSF grant funded state-wide project that has seen 12 compute nodes dedicated to undergraduate …

by: Senzo Mpungose, Projects and Operations Manager, University of the Witwatersrand

The adventure to Atlanta for the ART@SC24 Preconference and the SC24 Conference began with a test of patience—an airline mishap that saw my luggage taking its own detour. Thankfully, it made a dramatic entrance halfway through the trip, just in time to share in the discoveries and insights of a packed agenda. And what a journey it turned out to be!

ART@SC24 Preconference

The preconference kicked off with a visit to Georgia Tech, a hub of innovation that sets the bar for technological exploration. The tour of Georgia Tech’s Texas Instruments Makerspace, guided by the insightful and perceptive Assistant Director Stevie, was one key highlight. The tour was a goldmine for ideas and inspiration for me and my department, as we are in the midst of developing our own makerspace. Stevie’s advice on resource management, encouraging innovation, and guaranteeing …