HPC Systems Professionals Workshop (HPCSYSPROS18)
Call For Papers (and artifacts)
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HPCSYSPROS18 is held in conjunction with SC18: The International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis.
http://hpcsyspros.org/

Submission Deadline - August 19th (NO EXTENSIONS)

Supercomputing systems present complex challenges to personnel who design, deploy and maintain these systems. Building these systems and keeping them running require novel solutions that are unique to high performance computing. The success of any supercomputing center depends on stable and reliable systems, and HPC Systems Professionals are crucial to that success.

The Third Annual HPC Systems Professionals Workshop will bring together systems administrators, systems architects, and systems analysts in order to share best practices, discuss cutting-edge technologies, and advance the state-of-the-practice for HPC systems.

This year, various types of artifacts as well as written papers will be accepted in an effort to match the high-quality technical efforts of the HPC System Professionals community with the HPCSYSPROS submission process. This will change the format of submissions as well as the submission timeline.

Submissions Website: http://hpcsyspros.org/submit

Topics of Interest
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Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Cluster, configuration, or software management
* Performance tuning/Benchmarking
* Resource manager and job scheduler configuration
* Monitoring/Mean-time-to-failure/ROI/Resource utilization
* Virtualization, Private Clouds, Containerization and Off-site clouds
* Designing and troubleshooting HPC interconnects
* Designing and maintaining HPC storage solutions
* Cybersecurity and data protection

All topics are expected to have an emphasis on HPC.

Submission Information
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Authors are invited to submit original, high-quality papers or artifacts with an emphasis on solutions that can be implemented by other members of the HPC systems community. Papers should be submitted in PDF format and should be between 6 and 8 pages including tables, figures and appendices, but excluding references and reproducibility appendices. Artifacts should include abstracts and descriptions from 2-4 pages depending on type, along with other materials. Paper authors may be asked to include artifacts to support the findings in their paper. Requirements for these new types of submissions are listed below:

* Architecture Descriptions should include an interesting network, storage or system architecture, or a hybrid thereof at the data-center level. It should be documented by multiple architecture diagrams and a four page description of the architecture in the provided template.

* Small Middleware or Systems Software should include an artifact of code, such as a BASH or Python Script. Additionally, there should be strong documentation that makes the artifact usable by the community. This documentation should be written in Markdown, and a two page abstract in the SC proceedings format is required.

* System Configuration and Configuration Management should include configuration or configuration management, and/or the interactions between multiple configured applications. Examples of this might be a puppet module, a config file used in a unique way, or more likely, a group of config files and configuration management bundled together. Strong documentation for reproducing the artifact, as well as a two page abstract in the SC proceedings format, is required.

Adding types of submissions can introduce some uncertainty to the submission process. To counteract this uncertainty, there will be a two-stage submission process. During the first stage, all submissions, papers and artifacts, will get reviewed and scored but there will be no decisions for inclusion in the program. The authors will then have three weeks to update their submission based on provided feedback, and resubmit. The second round will be reviewed and scored, and the highest-scoring submissions, papers or artifacts, will be invited to be included within the workshop program.

Proposals for different types of artifacts than those listed above will also be accepted. Additionally, hybrids of these types of artifacts are acceptable. If you have a relevant, high-quality artifact, which has an emphasis on reproducibility and implementation, and is not included in the types above, please propose it to the committee (contact info below) . If the committee agrees, the CFP will be amended to reflect the new artifact type and its requirements. The up-to-date CFP will always be available at:
https://github.com/HPCSYSPROS/CFP18

All papers, abstracts and descriptions should be formatted according to the IEEE Conference Proceedings template and are required to include a modified reproducibility appendix from SC18 which can be found at:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HPCSYSPROS/ArtifactDescriptor18/master/HPCSYSPROS18Appendix.tex

A sample template specific to the workshop in Overleaf is provided here:
https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/hpcsyspros18-paper-slash-description-template/pckhnxzxsfvd

All submissions should be submitted electronically through the SC18 linklings instance forwarded from http://hpcsyspros.org/submit. Please submit the main document (paper or abstract) in PDF form, as well as an accompanying zip (or gzip) file. All reviews and comments will be available on http://submissions.supercomputing.org. All accepted papers and artifacts will be published on GitHub and archived with a DOI in Zenodo.



Important Dates
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Submissions Open: April 9th
Submissions Closed: August 19th (NO EXTENSIONS)
Reviews Sent and Resubmission Open: September 7th
Resubmission Closed: September 27th
Notifications of Papers and Accepted Artifacts: October 12th
Final Abstracts for Program: October 14th
Workshop Date: Sunday, November 11th

Workshop Information
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Committee Contact: contact@hpcsyspros.org
Website: http://hpcsyspros.org
Updated CFP: https://github.com/HPCSYSPROS/CFP18
Submission Site: http://hpcsyspros.org/submit
or
https://submissions.supercomputing.org/?page=Submit&id=SC18Workshop:HPCSYSPROS18FirstSubmission&site=sc18