This proposal requests NSF support to assist students in attending the 16th ACMSIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP 2011). PPoPP is the premier venue for leading work on all aspects of parallel programming, including foundational and theoretical aspects, techniques, tools, and practical experiences. The symposium covers work on concurrent and parallel systems (multicore, multithreaded, heterogeneous, clustered systems, distributed systems, and large scale machines). This support will broaden participation in PPoPP by subsidizing the travel for participants who might not otherwise travel to attend PPoPP. The funds will be used solely to provide travel support for students from US universities.
The purpose of this project was to provide travel support, in the form of reimbursement for travel expenses and conference registration, to graduate students in Computer Science who wished to participate in the 2011 ACM Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP). PPoPP is the premier forum for researchers in industry and academia to share cutting-edge research results. The grant amount was $10,000, which we used to reimburse registration ($250) for 25 students. We used the remaining funds to reimburse travel and lodging costs for students. We were also able to leverage this grant to receive roughly $10,000 in additional student support funds from IBM, Qualcomm, Google, and Microsoft. This allowed us to reimburse more lodging and travel expenses. In total, 25 students were supported. All are currently enrolled in PhD programs at US universities. 4 were female. The students came from a total of 14 different universities, distributed throughout the country. In after-conference reports, the students uniformly reported that their participation at PPoPP would help their future research and professional growth. Students were able to network with potential future collaborators, meet with researchers with whom they might have internships, and grow intellectually throught the ideas that they encountered. 15 of the 25 awardees presented papers and posters at PPoPP. They reported that the experience of presenting their findings to an audience of internationally recognized experts, and to attend other presentations, helped them to become better at communicating their research.
