The grant will provide travel support for students to attend a conference on partitioned global address space programming (PGAS). The broader impacts are to provide research experiences to the students.
The partitioned global address space-programming (PGAS) model has been gaining increasing attention due to its high productivity. It offers ease of use due to its global shared address space abstraction, whereas its locality awareness helps exploit higher performance. This can result in reduced development and execution times. The PGAS Conference is a forum to present and discuss ideas and research developments in the area of the PGAS model, its languages, and applications. From its beginnings in 2005, the PGAS Conference has offered the participants an exciting program with tutorials, panels, keynotes, invited talks, and contributed papers in PGAS research areas focused on new innovative applications, models and language development, programming tools, as well as compilers and implementations. However, during the past PGAS conferences, we have observed a relative lack of student participation. We believe it is very important to encourage college students across the country to participate in these efforts, both from the research and adoption viewpoints. The purpose of this NSF award, in the amount of $5000, was to encourage student participation in the 2011 PGAS conference. In order to solicit applications, we advertised the grant and its conditions through the conference website (pgas11.rice.edu) and public mailing lists, and received 15 applicants. The participation awards were open to graduate students who were currently enrolled at tertiary institutions in the US, although they were not restricted to US citizens. In addition to providing identifying information and a statement that describes what the student expected to gain from participation in the conference, the application also required a supporting letter that was expected to typically come from the student’s graduate advisor or sponsor, thus increasing the awareness of both the PGAS conference and the NSF support. Through a defined process, the conference chairs and awardees of this grant reviewed the applications and made 8 awards to graduate students across the US, including both students that had a paper accepted in the conference, and several that did not have papers in the program, but who were engaged in research directly relevant to the themes of PGAS. The award covered the conference registration (including tutorial participation), hotel expenses, and meals during the conference period for each of the successful awardees. Each of the student awardees attended at least one of the conference tutorials. We believe these funds increased the impact of the PGAS Conference within the community, and encouraged long-term interest in this programming model in both industry and academia. In addition to the technical information gained, this award has enabled students to meet and interact with conference attendees, and thus potentially help them meet prospective future employers.
