Broader Engagement

Our Mission

The Broader Engagement (BE) Program’s goal is to increase the participation of individuals who have been traditionally under-represented in HPC. The program offers special activities to introduce, engage and support a diverse community in the conference and in HPC. Competitive grants will be available to support limited travel to and participation in the SC13 Technical Program. Consideration will be given to applicants from groups that traditionally have been under-represented in HPC, including women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Pacific Islanders and people with disabilities. We encourage applications from people in all computing-related disciplines—from research, education and industry.

New in 2013: The On Ramp and Superhighway
At SC13, we are enhancing our program activities to strengthen our intent for BE to be an “On Ramp” for the Technical Program. Consistent with these ideas, we are organizing our funded participants into two tracks: On-Ramp (formerly known as the "standard" track) and Superhighway (formerly known as the "advanced track"). Competitive grants will be awarded to participants in both tracks. We expect the majority of funded On-Ramp participants to be new to HPC, to participate fully in BE, and to stay through at least the end of Thursday to experience the Technical Program. We expect the majority of funded Superhighway participants to have HPC experience, to participate in the SC13 Tutorials, and to at least partially fund themselves. We will provide mentoring to help Superhighway participants find external funding. Each of these groups will benefit from a diverse line-up of top-flight speakers from industry, academia, and government laboratories.

Consistent with the aim of serving as a pipeline, we are making shifts in the BE schedule and activities prior to, during, and after SC13. For example, both our Student and our Faculty/Professional application deadlines are now six weeks prior to the SC13 poster submission deadline. This will facilitate leveraging the Mentor/Protégé program to provide pre-submission mentoring to those submitting posters.  Consistent with this, we are adjusting the focus of the Mentor/Protégé program to center around mentoring that leads to participation in the SC Technical Program. Of course, we hope that broader academic- and career-oriented mentoring will happen as a natural by-product, but our goal is to serve the HPC research community directly and intently by expanding it.

We are also reviving a component of the SC11 BE program that provided BE participants with a hands-on HPC experience. This hands-on experience will be accessible to novice On-Ramp participants, including undergraduates with little or no programming background.

Click here to download the BE Flyer in PDF format.

Broader Engagement applications opened April 1, 2013 and closed June 19, 2013.
 

Questions:be@info.supercomputing.org