HPC Pros Co-Located Conference at DAC 2020 Changes

April 1, 2020
Derek Magill
0
Grid Computing, Info, License Management, Storage Management
DAC

Due to the unprecedented global impact of the novel corornavirus pandemic, the HPC Pros Board of Directors is announcing that this year’s Co-Located Conference at DAC will not continue in person as originally planned. In addition, the usual Evening Networking Event is cancelled.

This was a difficult decision to make. The CELUG conference has been happening annually at DAC since 2011. DAC is our “home”. However, after surveying the membership, it became apparent that our in-person attendance this year would make it economically infeasible for us to hold the event.

There were several factors which played in to this decision:

As of March 30, The COVID-19 cases around the world, and in the United States in particular, are still climbing rapidly.
Currently around 80% of the US is under a shelter-at-home order.
Even by late July, many people may feel personally apprehensive about travel and large social gatherings.
The US Congress has passed a historic $2 trillion stimulus package to deal with the economic fallout.
The Dow Jones Industrial average has given up most of the gains of the last three years.
Travel is always the first casualty of economic cutbacks at companies.

As of this writing, DAC itself is still planning on going forward. This means that the Design Infrastructure Alley is still being planned, and we absolutely encourage those of you who had been planning on coming for that to continue to do so! You can see the latest information on DAC’s response to the novel coronavirus by visiting the DAC website.

Exploring Online Options

Because our mission is to help the community, we are currently seeking help in exploring online options to deliver the content that would have happened at the conference. There are several technical and logistical challenges we must overcome in order to deliver a quality experience to not only the attendees but to the speakers. We are fortunate in that most of us have the opportunity to continue to work from home even in these challenging times and are already accustomed to remote meetings. As such, the HPC Pros BOD is asking for your help to define how we can deliver effective online sessions in an economic and secure way. We are open to help from regular HPC Pros members as well as HPC Supplier members.

Help the HPC Pros Board Define Our Online Delivery Mechanism For This Year's Conference!

We are looking for 2-3 volunteers to help us in the month of April to answer some key questions such as:

Securely delivering meeting content
Economically streaming live events
How to encourage participation during and after events

We need volunteers by April 10, 2020!

If you wish to volunteer, please send an email to Derek Magill (dmagill at hpcpros.org).

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dmagill

Derek Magill has been in Engineering IT for over 20 years, starting out on the UNIX Help Desk at Texas Instruments. While at TI, he held several technical and leadership roles, mainly focused on the areas of license management and HPC. While at Qualcomm, he led the global EDA License Infrastructure team, the Grid Administration Team, and was the primary Engineering Cloud Architect. He currently is an HPC Solutions Architect at Flux7 Labs, a DevOps Cloud Consultancy. Derek has also served as the Chairman of CELUG since 2015 and is the Executive Director of the Association of High Performance Computing Professionals. He also is a member of the Executive Committee of the 2020 Design Automation Conference.

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