ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference

SC, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, is the annual conference established in 1988 by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society. In 2019, about 13,950 people participated overall; by 2022 attendance had rebounded to 11,830 both in-person and online. The not-for-profit conference is run by a committee of approximately 600 volunteers who spend roughly three years organizing each conference.

WWW supercomputing.org

Sponsorship and Governance

SC is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society. From its formation through 2011, ACM sponsorship was managed through ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH). Sponsors are listed on each proceedings page in the ACM DL; see for example. Beginning in 2012, ACM began the process of transitioning sponsorship from SIGARCH to the recently formed Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC). This transition was completed after SC15, and for SC16 ACM sponsorship was vested exclusively in SIGHPC. The conference is non-profit.
The conference is governed by a steering committee that includes representatives of the sponsoring societies, the current conference general chair, the general chairs of the preceding two years, the general chairs of the next two conference years, and a number of elected members. All steering committee members are volunteers, with the exception of the two representatives of the sponsoring societies, who are employees of those societies. The committee selects the conference general chair, approves each year's conference budget, and is responsible for setting policy and strategy for the conference.

Conference Components

Although each conference committee introduces slight variations on the program each year, the core components of the conference remain largely unchanged from year to year.

Technical Program

The SC Technical Program is competitive with an acceptance rate around 20% for papers. Traditionally, the program includes invited talks, panels, research papers, tutorials, workshops, posters, and Birds of a Feather sessions.

Awards

Each year, SC hosts the following conference and sponsoring society awards:

ACM Gordon Bell Prize
ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship
ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award
ACM SIGHPC Computational & Data Science Fellowships
ACM SIGHPC Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award
ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award
IEEE-CS Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award
IEEE-CS Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award
IEEE CS TCHPC Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in HPC
Test of Time Award

Exhibits

In addition to the technical program, SC hosts a research exhibition each year that includes universities, state-sponsored computing research organizations, and vendors of HPC-related hardware and software from many countries around the world. There were 353 exhibitors at SC16 in Salt Lake City, UT.

Student Program

SC's program for students has gone through a variety of changes and emphases over the years. Beginning with SC15 the program is called "Students@SC", and is oriented toward undergraduate and graduate students in computing related fields, and computing-oriented students in science and engineering. The program includes professional development programs, opportunities to learn from mentors, and engagement with SC's technical sessions.

SCinet

SCinet is SC's research network. Started in 1991, SCinet features emerging technologies for very high bandwidth, low latency wide area network communications in addition to operational services necessary to provide conference attendees with connectivity to the commodity Internet and to many national research and engineering networks.

Name changes

Since its establishment in 1988, and until 1995,
the full name of the conference was the "ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference". The conference's abbreviated formal name was "Supercomputing 'XY", where XY denotes the last two digits of the year. In 1996, according to the archived front matter of the conference proceedings,
the full name was changed to the ACM/IEEE "International Conference on
High Performance Computing and Communications". The latter document
further announced that, as of 1997, the conference will undergo a name
change and will be called "SC97: High Performance Networking and
Computing". The document explained that
A 1997 HPC Wire article discussed at length the reasoning,
considerations, and concerns that accompanied the decision to change
the name of the conference series from "Supercomputing 'XY" to "SC
'XY",
stating that
Despite these concerns, the abbreviated name of the conference, "SC",
is still used today, a reminiscent of the abbreviation of the
conference's original name—"Supercomputing Conference".
The full name, in contrast, underwent several changes.
Between 1997 and 2003,
the name "High Performance Networking and Computing" was specified in
the front matter of the archived conference proceedings in some years
, whereas in other years it was omitted
altogether in favor of the abbreviated name.
In 2004,
the stated front matter full name was changed to "High Performance
Computing, Networking and Storage Conference".
In 2005,
this name was replaced by the original name of the conference—"supercomputing"—
in the front matter.
Finally, in 2006,
the current full name, as used today, emerged: "The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis".
Despite all of the name variances in the proceedings through the years, the digital library of ACM, the co-sponsoring society, records the name of the conference as "The ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing" from 1998 - 2008, when it changes to ""The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis". It is these two names that are used in the full citations to the conference proceedings provided in this article.

History

The table below provides the location, name of the general chair, and acceptance statistics for each year of SC. Note that references for data in these tables apply to data preceding the reference to the left on the same row; for example, for SC17 the single reference substantiates all the information in that row, but for SC05 the source for the convention center and chair is different than the source for the acceptance statistics.
Originally slated to be held in Atlanta, GA, SC20 was converted to a fully virtual conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic; the conference agenda spread across two weeks instead of the typical one week for an in-person conference. Over 7,440 attendees participated from 115 countries. SC21 was held as a hybrid conference with both in-person attendance in St. Louis, MO, and virtual attendance options available.

Keynote speakers

The following table details the keynote speakers during the history of the conference; as of SC23, 16.7% of the keynote speakers have been female, with a mix of speakers from corporate, academic, and national government organizations.

Conference	Keynote Speaker	Gender	Affiliation	Job Title	Presentation Title
SC88	Seymour Cray	Male	Cray Research	Founder	What's this about Gallium Arsenide?
SC89	John Rollwagon	Male	Cray Research	CEO	Supercomputing – A Look Into the Future
SC90	Danny Hillis	Male	Thinking Machines Corporation	Founder	The Fastest Computers
SC91	Allan Bromley	Male	Office of Science and Technology Policy	Chair	The President's Initiative in HPCC
SC92	Larry Smarr	Male	NCSA	Director	Grand Challenges! Voyages of Discovery in the 1990s
SC93	Neal Lane	Male	National Science Foundation	Director	HPCC and the NII
SC94	Ed McCracken	Male	SGI	CEO	Making the NII Real
SC95	William A. Wulf	Male	University of Virginia	Professor	And Now For Some "Really" Super Computing
SC96	Frances Allen	Female	IBM	IBM Fellow	Scaling Up
SC97	Paul Saffo	Male	Institute for the Future	Director	Is Digital Dead?
SC98	Bran Ferren	Male	Walt Disney Imagineering	President of R&D	There's No Bits Like Show Bits
SC99	Donna Shirley	Female	NASA	Mars Exploration Program manager	Managing Creativity in Technical Projects
SC00	Steve Wallach	Male	CenterPoint Ventures	Advisor	Petaflops in the year 2009
SC01	Craig Venter	Male	Celera Genomics	Founder	Accelerating Discovery through Supercomputing
SC02	Rita Colwell	Female	National Science Foundation	Director	Computing: Getting us on the Path to Wisdom
SC03	Donna Cox	Female	NCSA	Professor	Beyond Computing: The Search for Creativity
SC04	Tom West	Male	National LambdaRail	CEO	NLR: Providing the Nationwide Network Infrastructure for Network and "Big Science" Research
SC05	Bill Gates	Male	Microsoft	CEO	The Changing Role of IT in the Sciences
SC06	Ray Kurzweil	Male		Inventor	The Coming Merger of Biological and Non-Biological Intelligence
SC07	Neil Gershenfeld	Male	MIT	Professor	Programming Bits and Atoms
SC08	Michael Dell	Male	Dell	Founder and CEO	Higher Performance: Supercomputing in the Connected Era
SC09	Al Gore	Male	US Government	Former Vice President of the United States	Building Solutions: Energy, Climate and Computing for a Changing World
SC10	Clayton M. Christensen	Male	Harvard Business School	Professor	How to Create New Growth in a Risk-Minimizing Environment
SC11	Jen-Hsun Huang	Male	NVIDIA	CEO	Exascale: An Innovator's Dilemma
SC12	Michio Kaku	Male	City University of New York	Professor	Physics of the Future
SC13	Genevieve Bell	Female	Intel	Intel Fellow	The Secret Life of Data
SC14	Brian Greene	Male	Columbia University	Professor	The Quest for Nature's Deepest Laws
SC15	Alan Alda	Male	Actor		Getting Beyond a Blind Date with Science: Communicating Science for Scientists
SC16	Katharine Frase	Female	IBM	Chief Technology Officer of Public Sector	Cognitive Computing: How can we accelerate human decision making, creativity and innovation using techniques from Watson and beyond?
SC17	Philip Diamond	Male	Square Kilometre Array project	Director General	Life, the Universe and Computing: The Story of the SKA Telescope
SC18	Erik Brynjolfsson	Male	MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy	Director	How to Deploy the Unruly Power of Machine, Platform, and Crowd
SC19	Steven Squyres	Male	Cornell University	Professor	Exploring the Solar System with the Power of Technology
SC20	Bjorn Stevens	Male	Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology	Department Head/Professor	Climate Science in the Age of Exascale
SC21	Vint Cerf	Male	Google	Vice President	Computing and the Humanities
SC22	Jack Dongarra	Male	University of Tennessee	Distinguished Professor	ACM A.M. Turing Award Lecture: A Not So Simple Matter of Software
SC23	Hakeem Oluseyi	Male	Self	Inspirational Speaker	A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars
SC24	Dr. Nicola (“Nicky”) Fox	Female		Associate Administrator	NASA’s Vision for High Impact Science and Exploration
SC25	Thomas Koulopoulos	Male	Self	Futurist, Author	Gigatrends: The Exponential Forces Shaping Our Digital Future