The 15th annual Energy High Performance Computing Conference, organized by the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University, was held in-person on Rice campus on March 1-3, 2022.
In recent years, the Energy Industry is beset on all sides by important changes, such as growing demand for computational capacity, incorporation of data science and machine learning in the traditional workflow, increasing market volatility, increasing concern on environmental footprint, competition from, and even switching to, renewable energy, as well as the demand for reliable infrastructures. Motivated by all these issues, we bring together the best minds for the annual conference. Recognizing that discovery and innovation happen at interfaces of disciplines and communities, the conference aims to convene a diverse set of people spanning industry, academia, and national labs. To move with the times, we changed the name from the Oil and Gas HPC Conference to the Energy HPC Conference to reflect our evolving world.
This year’s three day conference included four birds of a feather sessions, nine keynotes, 12 technical talks, 17 student poster presentations, and six post-conference workshop sessions (2 in-person and 4 virtual). This was the first year back in person since going virtual during the COVID-19 pandemic. In-person attendees came from 10 countries and 32 states. Virtually, there were attendees from 17 countries.
The Energy HPC conference continues to demonstrate the value the Ken Kennedy Institute brings to external communities. The conference promotes Rice’s leadership role in this space. We are maintaining our role as a leader in the HPC and computational science and engineering space. We are a valued partner with a proven commitment to support the needs of the energy industry ecosystem. As a result, we continue to receive strong support from the IT industry with 35 sponsors present, the who’s-who across the computing and data hardware and software industry, with 12 ecosystem partners.
Keynote speakers included Barbara Burger, Chevron Technical Center, Chevron Technology Ventures; John Etgen, bp; Juliana Garaizar, Greentown Labs; Steven W. Hammond, U.S. Dept. of Energy, National Renewable Energy Laboratory; Eric Meier, Zap Energy Inc.; Grace Rodriguez, Impact Hub Houston; Anshumali Shrivastava, Rice University, ThirdAI Corp; Andrew Siegel, Exascale Computing Project, Argonne National Laboratory; Dan Stanzione, Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Texas at Austin; and Janaki Vamaraju, Shell Global Solutions (US) Inc.
The Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute Lydia Kavraki and Keith Gray with TGS opened the conference. Dr. Kavraki shared the importance of using the conference’s networking sessions to initiate collaboration and partnerships as well as promote technological innovations that will help address the computing and energy needs in our city, regionally, and globally. Dr. Kavraki commented on the historical conference’s distinct ability to create a networking forum for HPC professionals and practitioners to share best practices, explore trends, highlight challenges, and drive computing and data requirements. Keith Gray, one of the conference founders from 2008, welcomed the attendees stating how wonderful it is to be back in person networking and seeing friends back together. The conference supports the importance of forming partnerships to develop a sustainable and diverse high performance computing, computational science, and engineering workforce to address industry needs. The conference helps attendees promote the shared passion for technology and desire to drive innovation that will leverage the next wave of innovation.
In addition to Angela Wilkins, executive director of the Ken Kennedy Institute, the conference committee includes Mauricio Araya-Polo,TotalEnergies; David Baldwin, Shell; Sverre Brandsberg-Dahl, Microsoft; Jesse Chan, Rice University; Mike Cogan, Equinor; Donny Cooper, TotalEnergies; Bosen Du, AMD; Erik Engquist, Rice University; Melyssa Fratkin, TACC; Esthela Gallardo, ExxonMobil; Alex Loddoch, Chevron; David Martin, Argonne National Laboratory; Tom McDonald, Amazon Web Services; Scott Morton, Rice University; Jan E. Odegard, The Ion; Ernesto Prudencio, Schlumberger; Jeremy Singer, ExxonMobil; Noella Soares, Shell; Suzy Tichenor, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Cheng Zhan, Microsoft; Muhong Zhou, NAG.
35 sponsors helped support the conference. One Platinum Sponsor: Intel; Four Gold Sponsors: AMD, Lenovo, Microsoft, Panasas; 16 Silver Sponsors: Arista Networks, Cirrascle, DDN, Dell Technologies, Fraunhofer ITWM, Gigabyte, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Nyriad, Oracle, Penguin Computing, Red Hat, Rescale, Run AI, SambaNova Systems, Silicon Mechanics, Super Micro Computer; and 14 Bronze Sponsors: Arm, Cerebras, CloudyCluster, Cornelius Networks, DUG, Liqid, MemVerge, NEC Corporation, Rockport, SchedMD, Starfish Storage, Stream Data Centers, Summit Funding Group, VAST Data.
After covering operational costs, funds from the conference are used to support the Ken Kennedy Institute computational science & engineering graduate recruiting fellowship program as well as the industry graduate fellowship program that supplements the stipend of highly performing students. With the support of industry and the Energy HPC Conference, the Ken Kennedy Institute has awarded nearly $1.5 million to 172 graduate students since 2001.
The full program can be viewed on the 2022 Energy High Performance Computing Conference website (https://2022energyhpc.blogs.rice.edu/program/).
Recorded presentations can be found on the Ken Kennedy Institute YouTube channel.
The Ken Kennedy Institute looks forward to hosting the 16th annual conference on February 28 – March 2, 2023.
Author: The Ken Kennedy Institute
