Randall started his SC journey as a student volunteer and is an SC23 lead student volunteer. Meet this year’s 19 leads!

Making of an SC Veteran

While Randall may be early in his own HPC journey, he is well versed in the SC Conference. He also has a mature outlook on the value of doing more with computing technologies, especially for creating and continuing connections that can build better, lasting opportunities. Here, Randall offers a glance at why he readily can say, “I am HPC.”

Thomas Randall

Graduate Research Assistant, Clemson University

Thomas on Linkedin

Q: What single event most made you realize you wanted a career in HPC/computing?

Thomas: Touring industrial server closets at my dad’s job showed me how physically large and interesting computing systems could be and really sparked a deeper interest in computing.

Q: What do you consider your biggest contribution to the HPC/computing community?

Thomas: I’ve volunteered at SC for several years now, and my own research efforts contributed significant speedups to Word2Vec implementations on GPU accelerators. More to come in the future!

Q: In the past 35 years, what is the most significant overlooked breakthrough that has impacted the field in your eyes?

Thomas: I think that greater incorporation of the Internet in conferences and online distribution of science has missed a lot of available opportunities over the last few decades. However, the pandemic has started to push our field to make better use of the very technologies we develop and study to improve our connections to one another and the broader world.

Q: What would you like to see change about, within, or among the HPC/computing community?

Thomas: As we push towards greater reproducibility and accountability in our field, we should also seek to promote longer-term initiatives beyond artifact preparations for conferences and journals. Online resources permit greater connectivity, transparency and lasting relevancy through continued updates that our community has to put effort in to introduce, adopt, and cultivate for a stronger future.

Read More

Randall T, T Allen, and R Ge. 2021. FULL-W2V: Fully Exploiting Data Reuse for W2V on GPU-accelerated Systems. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 455-466.

Take Randall’s Path

Community-Sourced

Part of what makes this the premier venue for HPC research is found in the community: in 2022, over 11,000 attendees and 361 institutions representing the largest and most advanced computing centers in the world attended SC. Another ingredient that puts the “super” in the selected papers is the rigor by which research is evaluated.

Each submitted paper is directed into one of ten technical areas: Algorithms; Applications; Architecture and Networks; Clouds and Distributed Computing; Data Analytics, Visualization and Storage; Machine Learning with HPC; Performance Measurement, Modeling and Tools; Post-Moore Computing; Programming Frameworks and System Software; and State of the Practice.

SC23 will use a streamlined, single-round review-and-rebuttal process. All submitted papers will be reviewed by four or five experts in the technical area. All reviews will be double-anonymous so that reviewers do not know the papers’ authors or affiliations. Authors will have an opportunity to provide rebuttals, answering questions from the reviewers before the technical program committee meets to select papers to be accepted. Acceptance decisions will be released in mid-June. See the Papers page for full details on paper submissions.

The SC Conference is a leader in tangible progress towards scientific rigor, through its pioneering practice of enhanced reproducibility of accepted papers. The scientific method is the foundation of scientific research, utilized by aspiring science fair contestants and Nobel laureates alike. The successful application of the scientific method has a key feature: the result, under given conditions, is reproducible. The SC Papers program promotes this end with the Reproducibility Initiative.

Scientific Rigor

Reproducibility Initiative

First, the Artifact Description and Artifact Evaluation (AD/AE) appendices enhance transparency and improve reproducibility. However, achieving reproducibility might require non-trivial effort and time investment. Therefore, to diminish its impact, it is advisable to incorporate reproducibility practices early in the experimental design phase when validating a paper. Additionally, the benefits of reproducibility extend beyond ensuring trustworthy science, as authors can also reproduce their own experiments in the future, thus enhancing their own research outcomes. All paper submitters should review the information on the Reproducibility Initiative page, including the guidelines for AD/AE Appendices & Badges. Ensuring the reproducibility of scientific results is crucial for establishing trust in scientific findings.

Reproducibility challenge

Second, the Reproducibility Challenge takes a previously accepted paper and has students in the Student Cluster Competition attempt to reproduce it. Now this is where the rubber hits the road! The students will produce publish-quality, citable reports that will be made available through an archive.

Submissions Are Open