The PASC20 Conference
The Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) Conference, co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), will be held from June 29 to July 1, 2020, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Conference
PASC20 is the seventh edition of the PASC Conference series, an international and interdisciplinary platform for the exchange of competences in scientific computing and computational science, with a strong focus on methods, tools, algorithms, application challenges, and novel techniques and usage of high-performance computing.

The Conference is co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the PASC structuring project and it is managed by the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS).

PASC20 will be held from June 29 to July 1, 2020, at the University of Geneva (Uni Mail), located in Geneva, Switzerland.


Scope
Theme: New Challenges, New Computing Paradigms
Computational science is crucially important across diverse research communities from traditional topics in physics and chemistry to new applications in life and social sciences.

The drive to exascale computing, together with new computational paradigms in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data present opportunities for science and society but also significant challenges for both traditional HPC and the new user communities.

This growing community requires increased computing power, new heterogeneous architecture paradigms, new software and new policies for resource access while benchmarks like High-Performance Linpack are becoming less and less representative of the computing ecosystems. Although new hardware solutions are emerging, computers become fatter, not faster, and exploiting the coming exascale systems remains a challenge for many traditional HPC applications.

PASC20 aims to open discussions on these new challenges, explore problems and propose solutions to address them and shape the future of scientific computing.


Conference Chairs
Bastien Chopard
University of Geneva, Switzerland

Bastien Chopard received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Geneva before undertaking postdoctoral studies at MIT and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. He is now a full professor in the computer science department at the University of Geneva and a member of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. His research interests are the modeling and simulation of complex systems, cellular automata, and lattice Boltzmann methods, multiscale applications, as well as parallel computing and HPC. He has published over 200 articles and has received research grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation, FP6-FP7-H2020 European projects, private and industry sources.

Sinéad Ryan
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Sinéad Ryan is Chair of Theoretical High Energy Physics at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focus is the numerical simulation of quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear force, in an approach known as lattice QCD. A particular interest of hers is understanding strong exotic matter and the physics of the early universe. Sinéad's research is supported by grants from the EU and national funding agencies and enabled at leadership HPC resources through the US INCITE and European PRACE programmes. She has served as Chair of the PRACE Scientific Steering Committee and is currently vice-Chair of the EuroHPC Infrastructure Advisory Group.


Important dates
DEADLINES FOR PAPER SUBMISSIONS
Rolling deadlines: 15 June, 15 August, 15 October, 15 December 2019

DEADLINES FOR MINISYMPOSIUM SUBMISSIONS
Deadlines correspond to anywhere on earth ('AoE' or 'UTC-12′)

06 December 2019: Deadline for expressions of interest (NO EXTENSIONS!)
17 December 2019: Decision notifications (invitations to submit full proposals)
17 January 2020: Deadline for full submissions (NO EXTENSIONS!)
21 February 2020: Acceptance notifications
22 March 2020: Deadline for abstracts from presenting speakers

DEADLINES FOR POSTER SUBMISSIONS
Deadlines correspond to anywhere on earth ('AoE' or 'UTC-12′)

24 January 2020: Deadline for submissions
16 March 2020: Acceptance notifications
14 June 2020: Deadline for submission of poster image (PDF) for those wishing to take part in the poster flash session

Paper Submissions
PASC CONFERENCE PAPERS PROGRAM - SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN YEAR ROUND
The PASC Conference welcomes papers submissions throughout the year. The submissions portal (https://submissions.pasc-conference.org) is open continuously, with rolling deadlines falling on the 15th day of even numbered months.

Further information on the rolling submission and review process can be found under Guidelines for Papers.

Guidelines for Papers
The Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) invites research paper submissions for PASC20, co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and SIGHPC, which will be held at University of Geneva, Switzerland, from June 29 to July 1, 2020.

PASC20 is the seventh edition of the PASC Conference series, an international platform for the exchange of competences in scientific computing and computational science, with a strong focus on methods, tools, algorithms, application challenges, and novel techniques and usage of high performance computing.

As in previous years, the technical program of PASC20 is organized around eight scientific domains:

Climate and Weather
Chemistry and Materials
Computer Science and Applied Mathematics
Emerging Application Domains (incl. but not limited to social sciences, finance, …)
Engineering (incl. but not limited to CFD, computational mechanics, computational engineering materials, turbulent flow, …)
Life Sciences (incl. but not limited to biophysics, genomics, bioinformatics, systems biology, neuroscience and computational biology, …)
Physics (incl. but not limited to astrophysics, cosmology, plasma modelling, QCD, …)
Solid Earth Dynamics
PASC20 solicits high-quality contributions of original research related to scientific computing in all of these domains. Papers that engage with the theme of PASC20 – New Challenges, New Computing Paradigms – are particularly welcome, as are submissions that seek to define the state of the art in a particular application area.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Extreme scalable methods in computational science and engineering, such as algorithms and software for scalable multi-scale, multi-physics, and high-fidelity computational science and engineering problems.
Numerical methods, algorithms, or large-scale simulations in computational fluid dynamics, computational mechanics, computational engineering materials, turbulent flow, and computational cosmology.
Effective use of advanced computing systems for large-scale scientific applications, including modern multi- and many-core CPUs and accelerators with deep memory hierarchies, and energy-efficient architectures.
Best practices and tools for productive and sustainable scientific and engineering software development.
The integration of large-scale experimental and observational scientific data and high-performance data analytics and computing.
Reproducibility for computational science and engineering.
Verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification.
Domain specific languages; toolchains for source-to-source translation/adaption.
Runtime systems and middleware, such as task- and data-driven computation on heterogenous architectures.
Algorithms and strategies for effective use of machine learning, deep learning or AI to accelerate computational science.
Unstructured vs structured meshes for computational science applications at exascale
Numerical algorithm development for exascale computing, including, but not limited to, communication avoiding algorithms, use of reduced or mixed precision, and integration of scalable numerical libraries in application software.
Papers accepted for PASC20 will be presented as talks, and published in the Proceedings of the PASC Conference, accessible via the ACM Digital Library. A selection of the highest quality papers may be given the opportunity of a plenary presentation. In selecting papers for plenary presentation, the Papers Committee will place particular weight on impact, interdisciplinarity and interest to a broad audience.

The goal of the PASC Conference Papers Program is to advance the quality of scientific communication between the various disciplines of computational science and engineering in the context of high performance computing. The program was built from an observation that the computer science community traditionally publishes in the proceedings of major international conferences, while domain science communities publish primarily in disciplinary journals – and neither of which is read regularly by the other. The PASC Conference provides a unique venue that enables interdisciplinary exchange in a manner that bridges the two scientific publishing cultures.


SUBMISSION AND REVIEW
The PASC20 Papers Program Committee is responsible for the paper evaluation process. The committee is chaired by Sunita Chandrasekaran (University of Delaware) and Ümit V. Çatalyürek (Georgia Institute of Technology) and comprised of Domain Chairs who are specialists in their scientific fields. Papers will be evaluated on their significance, technical soundness, originality, and quality of communication.

We employ a rigorous academic peer-review process: most notably, we allow the possibility for provisional acceptance (revision and author rebuttal), and specialized reviewers are solicited for each submission (there is no pre-selected standing committee of reviewers). The paper selection process thus combines the strengths of conference and journal publication schemes to provide an effective, high-impact publication venue in large-scale computational science.

Contributions must be submitted through the PASC Conference online submission portal. Submissions should include the following:

Title: Maximum 20 words
Scientific Domain: Select a primary and optionally secondary scientific domain(s)
Author Details: Full names and contact details of author(s)
Short Abstract: Maximum 200 words
Paper: Maximum 10 pages including figures, tables, and appendices
As submissions are evaluated double blind, authors should not be named in the paper itself (nor should their affiliations or funding bodies), and references to previous own work should be made in the third person. Papers must be submitted in the current ACM Article Template (sigconf proceedings) format [1].

ROLLING SUBMISSION DEADLINES
The PASC Conference uses a rolling submission and review process. There are six submission deadlines every year, on the 15th day of even numbered months. The final deadline for PASC20 will be December 15, 2019. From February 15, 2020, submissions will be considered for PASC21. Deadlines are 11:59 pm anywhere on earth ('AoE' or 'UTC-12').

The submission system is open continuously throughout the year. Manuscripts will be assigned to reviewers at the date of the next submissions deadline; reviews will be returned to authors within 5 weeks with a decision of accept, reject or revision. Revisions will be due 4 weeks after notifications.

15 June 2019: First rolling deadline for new submissions
15 August 2019
15 October 2019
15 December 2019: Final rolling deadline for new submissions (NO EXTENSIONS!)

CONFERENCE PARTICIPATION TERMS
Authors of papers that are accepted for PASC20 will be given 20-30 minute presentation slots at the conference, grouped in topically-focused parallel sessions. A selection of the highest quality papers may be given the opportunity of a plenary presentation. Papers that are presented at PASC20 will be published in the Proceedings of the PASC Conference, accessible via the ACM Digital Library. Please note that speakers must register for the conference and are subject to the corresponding registration fee.


POST-CONFERENCE JOURNAL SUBMISSION
Following the conference, authors will have the opportunity to develop their papers, and, where appropriate, associated open-source software, for publication in a relevant, computationally focused, domain-specific journal. The journal paper should be an expanded version of the conference paper (consistent with the ACM policy for major revisions [2]) presenting a more complete description of the work – a fuller introduction, deeper project description, additional results, etc. and may be accompanied by associated open-source software.

To facilitate post-conference journal publications, the PASC Conference has formed collaborative partnerships with a number of high-quality scientific journals, including Computer Physics Communications (CPC) [3], the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES) [4], and ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (ACM TOMS) [5]. Members of the journals’ editorial boards will work with the Scientific Committee in reviewing PASC papers and in identifying papers to be extended and submitted to partner journals. Authors should communicate their interest in publishing with a partner journal during the submission process.

If you have any questions regarding the submission or reviewing process please email info@pasc-conference.org. We look forward to receiving your submissions.

For questions about the Conference, please contact:
info@pasc-conference.org