Workshops

What is A Workshop?

SC presents full- and half-day workshops with the goal of expanding the knowledge base of practitioners and researchers in a particular area of interest. Workshops provide a venue for focused, in-depth presentations, discussion, interaction, and hands-on activities. Many workshops are organized as “mini-conferences” on a specific theme with their own featured speaker, while others may be focused on developing recommendations for future research and development directions for a specific HPC community.

Workshop proposals are peer-reviewed and selected with a preference for submissions that foster deep and interactive dialogue on topics of interest to the HPC community.

There are generally three types of workshops at SC:

• Workshops centered around published technical papers
• Workshops centered around panelists and discussion (“mini-symposia”)
• Workshops for working groups with invited speakers

In recent years, more than 90% of the workshops were of the first type.

Workshop Goals

Every workshop at SC should have a clear goal to develop, expand, or evolve a specialized sub-field in HPC and is encouraged to have additional goals to socialize early works, provide professional development, and/or develop useful artifacts. A workshop’s goals must be defined clearly and fall into one or more of the following areas:

A. Ideation: The development, expansion, and evolution of specialized sub-fields relevant to HPC, including knowledge acquisition, community building or growth, community networking and engagement, workforce development and ideation of R&D principles or practice. All SC workshops must target this Goal.

B. Socialization of Early Works: To learn about and receive feedback on emerging R&D principles or practice.

C. Professional Development: Opportunities for professional development, including
technical presentation, writing, and publishing skills; organization and leadership skills, service and career building.

D. Artifacts: Tangible artifacts, e.g., proceedings, a sub-field report or white paper. Additionally, a workshop may be an instrument for student/professional recruitment.

preparing your submission

The Workshops submission form gathers information about the history, format, content, and needs of the proposed workshop, along with an attached document summarizing the workshop’s scope, relevance, participants, etc.

Please limit the leadership of each workshop (i.e. workshop organizers) to four for simplicity of communication. You are welcome to include more participants on your scientific or steering committees.

SC strongly recommends that organizers practice inclusivity when organizing their workshop. Proposals should describe inclusivity plans, and those plans will be evaluated as part of the proposal review criteria.

reproducibility initiative

We believe that reproducible science is essential, and that SC is a leader in this effort. Moving in this direction, reproducibility is encouraged in Workshops. Learn more about the Reproducibility Initiative.

Implementing Reproducibility

Upon acceptance, workshop organizers who intend to participate in the Reproducibility Initiative should provide for their workshop authors:

• Information about this initiative on the workshop’s website, explaining how authors can present their reproducibility documentation
• An evaluation of each author’s reproducibility documentation, as part of the review process

Workshop proposals are peer-reviewed by a committee of experts. Each proposal will have at least three reviewers. The review committee will execute a fair and uniform selection process that considers a proposed workshop’s prior performance at SC and the quality of the submission. All Workshops will be subject to the same competitive review process. Long-standing workshops will neither summarily be accepted nor rejected based solely on longevity.

The peer review process is single-blind. Reviewers have access to the names of workshop submitters. While Workshops Committee members are named on the SC23 Planning Committee page, the names of the individuals reviewing each proposal are not made available to workshop submitters.

conflict of interest

Please be aware of, and adhere to, these SC Conference guidelines regarding potential conflicts of interest and disclosure.

A potential conflict of interest occurs when a person is involved in making a decision that:

• Could result in that person, a close associate of that person, or that person’s company or institution receiving significant financial gain, such as a contract or grant, or
• Could result in that person, or a close associate of that person, receiving significant professional recognition, such as an award or the selection of a paper, work, exhibit, or other type of submitted presentation.

Program Committee members will be given the opportunity to list potential conflicts of interest during each program’s review process. Program Committee chairs and area chairs will make every effort to avoid assignments that have a potential COI.

According to the SC conference you have a conflict of interest with the following:

• Your PhD advisors, post-doctoral advisors, PhD students, and post-doctoral advisees;
• Family relations by blood or marriage, or equivalent (e.g., a partner);
• People with whom you collaborated in the past five years. Collaborators include: co-authors on an accepted/rejected/pending research paper; co-PIs on an accepted/pending grant; those who fund your research; researchers whom you fund; or researchers with whom you are actively collaborating;
• Close personal friends or others with whom you believe a conflict of interest exists;
• People who were employed by, or a student at, your primary institution(s) in the past five years, or people who are active candidates for employment at your primary institution(s).

Note that “service” collaborations, such as writing a DOE, NSF, or DARPA report, or serving on a program committee, or serving on the editorial board of a journal, do not inherently create a COI.

Other situations can create COIs, and you should contact the Technical Program Chairs for questions or clarification on any of these issues.

Plagiarism

Please review the ACM guidelines on identifying plagiarism.

Authors should submit new, original work that represents a significant advance from even their own prior publications.

Workshop organizers who decide to use the SC submissions website for collecting and reviewing workshop papers will be given access to the plagiarism tools embedded in the portal.

registration

One complimentary Workshops registration will be provided for each accepted workshop, which allows access to any scheduled workshop. For additional registrations, please refer to Registration for fees. Note that registration fees may differ depending on whether you also have a Technical Program registration.

Workshops registration is for one or multiple days, during which time you have access to any scheduled workshop.

Collection & Review of Workshop Papers

If desired, workshop organizers may use the SC submissions website for the collection and review of your workshop papers. Workshop organizers are strongly encouraged to use the SC submissions website.

Workshop Organizers Please Note: It is recommended that workshop organizers set their paper notification deadline no later than September 8, 2023, well in advance of the early registration deadline of October 13, 2023.

proceedings & Archives

Proceedings

SC will publish Workshops Proceedings as a separate volume from the Technical Papers Proceedings. Inclusion in the SC Workshop Proceedings is open to workshops that employ a competitive peer-review process and agree to meet SC’s high standards for publication. The submission form for a workshop must indicate if the workshop organizers wish to publish in the SC Workshop Proceedings. During the review process, the Workshops Committee will determine whether a workshop meets the standards and whether the papers for the workshop will be included in the SC Workshop Proceedings. If a workshop is accepted with proceedings, the workshop must designate a liaison to work with the Workshops Proceedings Chair to prepare the workshop papers for the proceedings.

Archives

Workshop organizers are invited to archive their workshop’s agenda and presentations on the Technical Program Archives page. Note that the publication of material to this archive is only possible if you upload your workshop URL and program to the SC submissions website before September 29, 2023.

schedule & location

Workshops are scheduled on Sunday, November 12; Monday, November 13; and Friday, November 17, 2023. Workshops are either half- or full-day events. Note that on Friday, November 17, only half-day workshops are scheduled.

• Sunday and Monday Full-Day Workshops: 9 am–5 pm
• Sunday and Monday Half-Day Workshops: 9 am–noon and 1:30–5 pm
• Friday Half-Day Workshops: 9 am–noon

Workshop organizers and presenters are expected to be in-person at the conference. Remote participation by organizers and presenters should only be considered under hardship and special circumstances to be discussed with workshop organizers and Workshop Co-Chairs.

All workshops must be held at the Colorado Convention Convention Center in the room assigned by SC.

Each workshop must start and end at the time assigned by the Workshops Chair. Agreements with the convention center do not allow us to extend the use of reserved rooms beyond the time allocated to your workshop. Violation of these agreements may result in fines, which will be the responsibility of the individual workshop organizer(s).

Food & Coffee Breaks

During Workshops, two 30-minute coffee breaks, at 10 am and 3 pm, are provided on Sunday and Monday; one 30-minute coffee break at 10 am is provided on Friday.

Sunday and Monday full-day workshops include a lunch break from 12:30–2 pm. Lunch is not provided or included with registration for workshop participants and attendees. The SC Conference works with the convention center to ensure that restaurants and other sources of refreshment are easily accessible.

Current SC Conference policies and procedures do not allow workshop organizers to provide lunch to their workshop participants and attendees.

infrastructure

Workshops are assigned either a classroom or a theater room equipped with standard AV facilities:

• Projector
• Microphone and podium
• Wireless lapel microphone or wireless handheld microphone
• Projection screen

According to current SC policies and procedures, the conference does not provide the following in your workshop room:

• Poster boards
• Round tables
• Wired internet connection
• Power strips on the tables or under the chairs
• Recording of talks at the workshop

Can I update my workshop submission?

Yes, you can update your workshop submission until the submission deadline.

The workshops submission strongly encourages including an inclusivity plan. Do you have guidance on what an inclusivity plan should include and how it will be evaluated during proposal review?

SC’s inclusivity effort is described on the Inclusivity page, including a link to demographic information about the conference’s organizing committee. With respect to the inclusivity plan for workshop proposals, we’re looking for some content that describes the submitters’ plans for practicing inclusivity in their workshop organizing committee. For instance, if the workshop is organized around peer-reviewed technical papers, the inclusivity plan may describe how the proposal submitters will demonstrate inclusivity when putting together their paper review committee.  Note that the plan does *not* deal with demonstrating inclusivity in the papers that such a workshop would accept.  

Since not all workshops follow the peer-reviewed paper model, we’re not requiring a specific format for the inclusivity plan, similar to how we do not require a specific format for the advertising plan or expected outcome from the workshop.

The inclusivity plan will be reviewed similarly to the other content in the workshop proposal, with the reviewer indicating whether the proposal includes a plan and the reviewer’s rating indicating their evaluation of the plan’s likelihood to produce inclusivity in the workshop organizing committee.

What are the requirements to have the workshop proceedings published in the SC Workshop Proceedings?

To have its proceedings published in the SC Workshop Proceedings, the Workshop Committee must accept the workshop and accept inclusion of the workshop in the proceedings. Articles to appear in SC Workshops Proceedings must be subject to a competitive peer-review processes that meets the standards of the SC Conference.