SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing Business Meeting
February 20, 2014
Portland, OR
Minutes of the SIAG/SC business meeting

Ali Pinar (SIAG Chair) chaired the session of the business meeting. 

Ai Pinar started thanking outgoing officers, then delivered a presentation, prepared by Susan Whitehouse, on the activity groups statistics. The group is vibrant, well developed in industry, academia, and the labs. The number of non-student members seems to be stable; the number of student members is not at its highest.

New SIAM fellows from the activity group as well as the SIAG/SC prize recipients are congratulated.

The following additional issues were discussed.

1) Next SIAM conference on PP: It is agreed the SIAG/SC will submit a proposal to hold it in Paris. Laura Grigori and Rich Vuduc will be the chairs. Laura presented the current plans, the location, how to handle the hotels and the like. One suggestion was to have short days to keep the people in the conference room, by allowing time to visit the city. She is working with INRIA to handle all the arrangements. It is argued that reduced budget lines for travel at the US national labs would not reduce the attendance. Audience suggested that one could identify contacts at the research labs in Europe to incite people to attend the meeting.

2) The possibility of launching "best paper award" in the general theme of supercomputing is discussed. Questions and comments from the audience included:

(i) Which years to include? Test of time (ToT) criteria is suggested: Look 5-10 years back and consider any good paper (wrt ToT) in any journal or conference.

(ii) What kind of publications? Conference, or any journal (not restricted to SIAM's own journals). It is mentioned that many good papers in supercomputing never make into journals.

(ii) It is thought to be (sort of) equivalent to mid-career prize, in order to complement SIAG/SC prize coverage.

3) The ratio of female members is 11%. This is lower than SIAM in general, and lower than many other activity groups. Ali called for help to make a dent in this hard to solve problem. The audience suggested that prizes could be offered to female members.

4) SIAG/SC can help his members being recognized. The chair suggested that the members could nominate fellow members for the fellowships.

5) It is recalled that SIAM journal SISC has a section that accepts and publishes supercomputing papers.

Meeting adjourned.


Bora Ucar (secretary) and Ali Pinar (chair)