About SIGHPC

SIG Statement on Our Mission Commitment

SIGHPC mission is to help spread the adoption of HPC, raise the standards of the profession, and ensure a rich and rewarding career for all people who want to be part of our field – regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, identity, or where they are from. Our global members encompass a wide variety of perspectives, cultures, and priorities.

As part of ACM, SIGHPC is nonpartisan. Our volunteers, members, students, award winners, and supporters hold many viewpoints. We value this diversity and derive enormous benefit as a service organization from including perspectives that represent the breadth of our community.

At the same time, SIGHPC must focus our collective passion and efforts on our mission. As an organization, we do not enter public debates, make statements, or take positions on issues unrelated to high performance and technical computing.

That focus has enabled us to make significant progress. Since our founding just over 10 years ago, we have helped to raise the visibility of women leaders in our field, provided nearly $2.5M in direct financial support to over 70 women and students from historically excluded communities who are pursuing graduate degrees in HPC, established new awards to recognize the rising stars of HPC research and leaders in HPC education, defrayed costs for students and new professionals to attend our conferences, taken new steps to make our conferences safe and welcoming for all, and supported programs to introduce hundreds of undergraduate students to HPC.

And there is much more to come. We thank you for supporting our mission and encourage you to become involved as a member or volunteer.

Your Profession, Your Organization

Part of the excitement of a career in HPC is its multi-disciplinary nature: HPC brings together computational techniques, algorithms, system software, computer architecture, parallel programming, and system administration. SIGHPC focuses on high performance computing in the broadest sense, spanning the full range of high-performance technologies, systems, and applications.

Finding your way among the choices and career paths can be challenging. SIGHPC helps by:

• disseminating research and experiences by those using computing resources to tackle our society's toughest problems;

• promoting the mentoring and education of the next generation of HPC professionals; and

• serving as a source of information about the field to the larger computing and scientific communities.

Your Personal Resource for HPC

Over time, www.SIGHPC.org will serve as a home base for a number of activities that currently do not exist or are run on an ad-hoc basis, including the following:

• developing a comprehensive online "community calendar" publicizing information about conferences, meetings, proposal solicitations, working groups, etc. of interest to people in HPC

• publishing a regular online newsletter promoting activities and opportunities of interest to SIGHPC members

• promoting regional interactions among people in HPC, especially in countries outside the US

• developing online repositories for HPC training materials, archives of workshop materials, dissertation clearinghouses, etc.

• sponsoring/co-sponsoring workshops and meetings

• disseminating information about groups developing standards or curricula related to HPC

• nominating HPC people for awards and honors (including ACM Fellow)

• sponsoring fellowships for students in HPC-related studies

• providing travel support for students or underrepresented groups to attend HPC conferences/workshops

SIGHPC and Diversity

SIGHPC believes that HPC can only reach its full potential through the efforts of people from all backgrounds, organizations, and disciplines. The organizers of all SIGHPC-related activities are asked to: 

• structure their committees to include diverse backgrounds and opinions 

• establish rigorously fair review/selection processes to ensure there is no explicit or implicit bias against newcomers 

• choose speaker lineups that include diverse representation 

• track their progress in improving diversity by gathering and disseminating statistics on the gender/geographical/organizational makeup of committees, reviewers, authors, and speakers