Scope
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Responding to disasters such as COVID-19, wildfires, hurricanes, extreme flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, and accidents; technological advances are creating exciting new opportunities that have the potential to move HPC well beyond traditional computational workloads. Whilst HPC has a long history of simulating disasters, what’s missing to support emergency, urgent, decision making is fast, real-time acquisition of data and the ability to guarantee time constraints.

Our ability to capture data continues to grow very significantly, and combining high velocity data and live analytics with HPC models can aid in urgently responding to real-world problems, ultimately saving lives and reducing economic loss. It’s not just responding to disasters, but also making urgent decisions addressing more general issues such as human health emergencies and global diseases. The challenges here are significant, but if HPC can be proven as a tool in responding to these real-world issues, the impact for our community is huge.

Leveraging HPC for urgent decision making requires expertise in a wide range of areas, from dealing with real-time data, to experience in generating results within a specific time frame (real-time constraints), and generating visualisations enabling front-line decision makers to make correct choices first time, every time. It isn’t just technical challenges, but also policy issues that also need to be considered such as utilising our HPC machines in a more interactive manner to enable the urgent exploration of numerous disaster responses.

This workshop will bring together stakeholders, researchers and practitioners from across the HPC community to identify and tackle issues involved in using HPC for urgent decision making. Success stories, case-studies and challenges will be shared, with the goal of further building up a community around leveraging HPC as an important tool in urgently responding to disasters and societal challenges.

Call for Papers
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We invite you to submit both full and hot-topic research papers detailing original work in the area of using HPC for making urgent decisions. Topics of interest for workshop submissions include (but are not limited to):

* Use of HPC and big-data for tackling COVID-19
* Example use-cases and case-studies that use HPC for urgent decision making
* Techniques for integrating HPC workflows with real-time data
* Approaches to verify and validate unreliable real-time data, for instance from sensors, IoT and satellites
* System design for data reduction and pre-processing at source, for instance using edge computing and heterogeneous resources such as FPGAs
* The use of data formats and conversion techniques to support the handling of data from numerous and diverse sources
* Algorithmic techniques to guarantee result generation in specific time frames, such as result refinement which generates more accurate results as time progresses
* Studies of leveraging HPC for workloads with real-time time constraints
* Changes to existing HPC technologies and policies that are required to support using HPC interactively
* The ability for HPC codes to adapt their resource requirements dynamically, for instance via elastic compute
* Visualisation and presentation techniques to support rapid and accurate urgent decision making by the end user
* Reduction and feature extraction of results to highlight critical issues of interest
* Complimenting results with provenance data for additional context and certainty
* Data analysis techniques for making urgent decisions in response to disasters

Paper Submission Guidelines
======================
* Papers should be submitted electronically via the SC20 Submission Page (https://submissions.supercomputing.org).
* Papers will be published via IEEE TCHPC and as such they must follow the IEEE formatting, templates available athttp://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html
* Full paper submissions are limited to 10 pages and hot-topic submissions 6 pages. The page limit includes figures, tables, and appendices, but does not include references, for which there is no page limit.
* Submitted papers should not have appeared in or be under consideration for a different workshop, conference or journal.
* In submitting the paper, the authors acknowledge that at least one author of an accepted submission will register for and attend the workshop.

Questions?
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There is more information available at https://www.urgenthpc.com and please feel free to email any questions to Nick Brown (n.brown@epcc.ed.ac.uk)

Organizers
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* Nick Brown (EPCC at the University of Edinburgh)
* Vinay Amatya (PNNL, DoE)
* Deidre Brucker (NCAR)
* Thierry Goubier (CEA)

Program Committee
=================
* Guillaume Colin de Verdière (CEA)
* Robert Rallo (PNNL)
* Antonino Tumeo (PNNL)
* Gerald Baumgartner, Louisiana State University
* Gordon Gibb, EPCC at the University of Edinburgh
* Stefano Markidis, KTH
* Andreas Gerndt, DLR
* Johannes Guenther, Intel
* Sabri Pllana, Linnaeus University
* Peter Messmer, NVIDIA
* John Feo, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
* Steven W.D. Chien, KTH
* Sergio Rivas-Gomez, KTH
* Piero Poletti, FBK
* Giorgio Guzzetta, FBK
* Brandon Posey, Clemson