IPDPS is an international forum for engineers and scientists from around the world to present latest research findings in all aspects of parallel computation. In addition to technical sessions of submitted paper presentations, the meeting offers workshops, tutorials, and commercial presentations & exhibits along with a PhD forum for young researchers. This award will contribute towards increasing student participation in the symposium and the field. The award will contribute funding for up to 20 students to travel to IPDPS 2012 in Shanghai, China.
A major goal of the project was to provide student travel grants to the attendees of various IEEECS Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP) sponsored conferences, and in particular to support student engagement activities at the IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS). Idea was to attract and help develop human resources in the areas within the purview of TCPP, namely parallel and distributed processing and high performance computing. This NSF project partially supported 28 students who otherwise may not have been able to attend conferences in the PDCS and related areas to do so. It also allowed possible freeing up of research advisor's funds for encouraging their students to attend other conferences and thus expose them to a wider and broader base of research activities. Finally, it supported human resources development in the increasingly important and pervasive HPC areas, including encouragement of underrepresented students to continue R&D activities in the HPC and PDCS disciplines. TCPP sponsored conferences (such as IPDPS, HiPC, PerComm, DCOSS, PACT and ICPADS) have a tradition of attracting top researchers, academicians, and industry personnel. Obviously, students supported by this project gained exposure to their insights and will be able to use those insights to further their R&D productivity. At IPDPS '13, we also started a small group student mentoring session by some of the senior researchers in the PDCS field. Experience gained from TCPP's flagship conference IPDPS is used to seed start student engagement activities at other conferences sponsored by TCPP.
