Mentoring the Next Generation of Parallel Processing Researchers at IEEE-CSTCPP Sponsored Conferences

Student mentoring programs play an important role in providing younger attendees with the necessary tools to take advantage of their participation at conferences. From their attendance to conferences, students can benefit from professional connections and establish collaborations, market themselves to potential employers, get exposed to a wider network of mentors, and find inspiration for novel research avenues. Student programs have emerged in several leading conferences, but are still far from being widely adopted. In particular the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) has been hosting a Ph.D. forum and student program for over a decade. This program has evolved into a comprehensive training workshop that includes sessions on career planning and hands on tutorials on writing and presentation skills; it also provides effective opportunities for student networking. This project seeks to expand the IPDPS mentoring and outreach model into other conferences that fall under the broad field of parallel and distributed processing and are sponsored by IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Parallel Processing. Parallel and distributed processing has become increasingly important for a variety of disciplines where traditional computational methods lack the mechanisms to deal with large data volumes or expensive computations. As stated by NSF's mission, this project supports education and diversity, while promoting the progress of science by mentoring the next-generation workforce in the high performance computing discipline. This project has two concrete goals: 1) supporting student participation at the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium. IPDPS is an international conference for engineers and scientists from around the world to present their latest research findings in all aspects of parallel computation. 2) promoting the adoption of student mentoring programs in other IEEE TCPP conferences, such as DS-RT, HiPC, PACT, and PerCom. The beneficiary conferences are required to facilitate an introductory session where students network with peers and mentors. Additionally, conference organizers are provided with the logistic plan of IPDPS's PhD Forum and are encouraged to have similar proven activities; including a poster session and mentoring workshops. Only students currently studying at U.S. universities are eligible to receive support from this NSF-funded project. This project targets especially students that typically cannot attended these conferences without financial support, such as undergraduate students, graduate students in their first years, and students attending their first conference. In order to increase the diversity of attendees, the project strongly encourages the participation of females and other underrepresented groups. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.