PASC20 – Save the date!

We are pleased to announce that preparations are well underway for next year’s conference, which will be held in the international city of GenevaSwitzerland. Home to more than 17,000 students from 150 different countries, the University of Geneva will welcome PASC20 participants from June 29 to July 1, 2020.

The PASC Conference series is an international and interdisciplinary platform for the exchange of competences in scientific computing and computational science, with a strong focus on methods, tools, algorithms, application challenges, and novel techniques and usage of high performance computing.

The program will continue to center around the eight PASC scientific domains: Chemistry and Materials, Climate and Weather, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics,Emerging Application Domains, Engineering, Life Sciences, Physics, and Solid Earth Dynamics.

The agenda will feature keynote presentations, papers, minisymposia and poster sessions, a panel discussion, and an interdisciplinary dialogue.

 

Conference theme: New Challenges, New Computing Paradigms

PASC20 – chaired by Professor Sinéad Ryan (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) and Professor Bastien Chopard (University of Geneva, Switzerland) – invites scientists and researchers to discuss New Challenges and New Computing Paradigms in scientific computing.

“Computational science is important across diverse research communities from established areas in physics and chemistry to new applications in life and social sciences. The drive to exascale computing, together with new computational paradigms in machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data present opportunities for science and society but also significant challenges for both traditional HPC and the new user communities. This growing community requires increased computing power, new heterogeneous architecture paradigms, new software and new policies for resource access while benchmarks like High-Performance Linpack are becoming less and less representative of the computing ecosystems. Although new hardware solutions are emerging, computers become fatter, not faster, and exploiting the coming exascale systems remains a challenge for many traditional HPC applications. PASC20 aims to open discussions on these new challenges, explore problems and propose solutions to address them and shape the future of scientific computing,” Sinead Ryan and Bastien Chopard (Chairs of PASC20)

Call for Papers

The Papers Program Committee for PASC20 is co-chaired by Prof. Sunita Chandrasekaran (University of Delaware) and Prof. Ümit V. Çatalyürek (Georgia Institute of Technology).

PASC20 PAPERS SUBMISSIONS

  • Oct 15, 2019 (next deadline)
  • Dec 15, 2019 (last deadline)

As in previous years, the technical program of PASC20 is organized around eight scientific domains:

  • Chemistry and Materials
  • Climate and Weather
  • Computer Science and Applied Mathematics
  • Emerging Application Domains (incl. but not limited to social sciences, finance, …)
  • Engineering (incl. but not limited to CFD, computational mechanics, computational engineering materials, turbulent flow, …)
  • Life Sciences (incl. but not limited to biophysics, genomics, bioinformatics, systems biology, neuroscience and computational biology, …)
  • Physics (incl. but not limited to astrophysics, cosmology, plasma modelling, QCD, …)
  • Solid Earth Dynamics

PASC20 solicits high-quality contributions of original research related to scientific computing in all of these domains. Papers that engage with the theme of PASC20 – New Challenges, New Computing Paradigms – are particularly welcome, as are submissions that seek to define the state of the art in a particular application area.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Extreme scalable methods in computational science and engineering, such as algorithms and software for scalable multi-scale, multi-physics, and high-fidelity computational science and engineering problems.
  • Numerical methods, algorithms, or large-scale simulations in computational fluid dynamics, computational mechanics, computational engineering materials, turbulent flow, and computational cosmology.
  • Effective use of advanced computing systems for large-scale scientific applications, including modern multi- and many-core CPUs and accelerators with deep memory hierarchies, and energy-efficient architectures.
  • Best practices and tools for productive and sustainable scientific and engineering software development.
  • The integration of large-scale experimental and observational scientific data and high-performance data analytics and computing.
  • Reproducibility for computational science and engineering.
  • Verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification.
  • Domain specific languages; toolchains for source-to-source translation/adaption.
  • Runtime systems and middleware, such as task- and data-driven computation on heterogenous architectures.
  • Algorithms and strategies for effective use of machine learning, deep learning or AI to accelerate computational science.
  • Unstructured vs structured meshes for computational science applications at exascale.
  • Numerical algorithm development for exascale computing, including, but not limited to, communication avoiding algorithms, use of reduced or mixed precision, and integration of scalable numerical libraries in application software.

Papers accepted for PASC20 will be presented as talks, and published in the Proceedings of the PASC Conference, accessible via the ACM Digital Library. A selection of the highest quality papers may be given the opportunity of a plenary presentation. In selecting papers for plenary presentation, the Papers Committee will place particular weight on impact, interdisciplinarity and interest to a broad audience.

The goal of the PASC Conference Papers Program is to advance the quality of scientific communication between the various disciplines of computational science and engineering in the context of high performance computing. The program was built from an observation that the computer science community traditionally publishes in the proceedings of major international conferences, while domain science communities publish primarily in disciplinary journals – and neither of which is read regularly by the other. The PASC Conference provides a unique venue that enables interdisciplinary exchange in a manner that bridges the two scientific publishing cultures.

SUBMISSION AND REVIEW

The PASC20 Papers Program Committee is responsible for the paper evaluation process. The committee is chaired by Sunita Chandrasekaran (University of Delaware) and Ümit V. Çatalyürek (Georgia Institute of Technology) and comprised of domain chairs who are specialists in their scientific fields. Papers will be evaluated on their significance, technical soundness, originality, and quality of communication.

We employ a rigorous academic peer-review process: most notably, we allow the possibility for provisional acceptance (revision and author rebuttal), and specialized reviewers are solicited for each submission (there is no pre-selected standing committee of reviewers). The paper selection process thus combines the strengths of conference and journal publication schemes to provide an effective, high-impact publication venue in large-scale computational science.

Contributions must be submitted through the PASC Conference online submission portal. Submissions should include the following:

  • Title: Maximum 20 words.
  • Scientific Domain: Select a primary and optionally secondary scientific domain(s).
  • Author details: Full names and contact details of author(s).
  • Short Abstract: Maximum 200 words.
  • Paper: Maximum 10 pages including figures, tables, and appendices.

As submissions are evaluated double blind, authors should not be named in the paper itself (nor should their affiliations or funding bodies), and references to previous own work should be made in the third person. Papers must be submitted in the current ACM Article Template (sigconf proceedings) format [1].

ROLLING SUBMISSION DEADLINES

The PASC Conference uses a rolling submission and review process. There are six submission deadlines every year, on the 15th day of even numbered months. The final deadline for PASC20 will be December 15, 2019. From February 15, 2020, submissions will be considered for PASC21. Deadlines are 11:59 pm anywhere on earth (‘AoE’ or ‘UTC-12’).

The submission system is open continuously throughout the year. Manuscripts will be assigned to reviewers at the date of the next submissions deadline; reviews will be returned to authors within 5 weeks with a decision of accept, reject or revision. Revisions will be due 4 weeks after notifications.

  • 15 October 2019: Next rolling deadline for new submissions.
  • 15 December 2019: Final rolling deadline for new submissions.

POST-CONFERENCE JOURNAL SUBMISSION

Following the conference, authors will have the opportunity to develop their papers, and, where appropriate, associated open-source software, for publication in a relevant, computationally focused, domain-specific journal. The journal paper should be an expanded version of the conference paper (consistent with the ACM policy for major revisions [2]) presenting a more complete description of the work – a fuller introduction, deeper project description, additional results, etc. and may be accompanied by associated open-source software.

To facilitate post-conference journal publications, the PASC Conference has formed collaborative partnerships with a number of high-quality scientific journals, including Computer Physics Communications (CPC) [3], the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES) [4], and ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (ACM TOMS) [5]. Members of the journals’ editorial boards will work with the Scientific Committee in reviewing PASC papers and in identifying papers to be extended and submitted to partner journals. Authors should communicate their interest in publishing with a partner journal during the submission process.

PAPERS PROGRAM DOMAIN CHAIRS

Chemistry and Materials

  • Carlo Cavazzoni (CINECA, Italy)
  • Zeila Zanolli (Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia, Spain)

Climate and Weather

  • Katherine Evans (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US)
  • Nils Wedi (ECMWF, UK)

Computer Science and Applied Mathematics

  • Kathryn Mohror (Livermore National Laboratory, US)
  • Laura Grigori (INRIA Paris, France)

Emerging Application Domains

  • Michael Bussmann (Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany)
  • Luca Gelisio (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Germany)

Engineering

  • Richard Sandberg (The University of Melbourne, Australia)
  • Philipp Schlatter (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)

Life Sciences

  • Daniel Janies (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, US)

Physics

  • Katrin Heitmann (Argonne National Laboratory, US)
  • Stan Scott (Queen’s University Belfast, UK)

Solid Earth Dynamics

  • Monica Maceira (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US)
  • Andreas Fichtner (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)

If you have any questions regarding the submission or reviewing process please email info@pasc-conference.org.

Best regards,
The PASC20 Organizing Team