Through its large member support, the HPC-AI Advisory Council, a for community benefit organization promoting HPC and AI education, hosts a number of conferences and workshops worldwide, and performs a number of student competitions and challenges to help empower young, up and coming HPC pioneers. As with other conferences and organization events, the Council has made the move to take these activities online due to COVD-19. We recently wrapped up our virtual 2-day 10^th Annual HPC-AI Advisory Council Stanford Conference (download the slides today) and we were very happy to see the great online participation from the HPC community, and we are grateful to our speakers for being able to continue their talks in the new format.

As part of this year’s updated student competitions, the 3^rd Annual APAC HPC-AI Competition (registration open until May 17) and the 9^th Annual ISC-HPCAIC Student Cluster Competition have added applications that address education and applied learning towards accelerating bioscience research and discovery. The student teams are tasked to test several applications that are being used by scientists and researchers for finding cures against the virus. By training our young aspiring programmers using real-world scenarios, such as COVID-19, we can better prepare them to provide solutions to future global issues – from pandemics to climate change. More than that, we hope that this will give our youth a better appreciation for the significant role that HPC and AI can play, and how they can use the skills learned in these competitions to contribute more meaningfully to society.

Through the generous support of the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) Singapore, both of our student competitions will utilize the supercomputing platforms at NSCC Singapore to remotely configure, code and benchmark the applications. We are deeply grateful to NSCC Singapore for the supercomputing resources and support and we look forward to announcing the winners of the ISC-HPCAIC SCC on June 24 during the ISC Digital Event.

Finally, Folding@home has received some very overdue attention during this COVID-19 crisis. As a global organization, a key element of the HPC-AI Advisory Council is to further scientific research. We always have provided resources via our Cluster Center, thanks to hardware donations from our members, for researchers to understand technology and evaluate how they might take advantage of it. We want to help evangelize the Folding@home project and have been contributing some of our Cluster Center resources for this worthwhile endeavor to help accelerate the development for potential lifesaving treatments and hopefully a vaccine. We can’t think of a better endeavor during this crisis and many of our members appear on the list with teams already – and we thank you! If not on a team yet – your welcome to join our team. Let’s beat this together!

During these times we hope everyone is safe and continue to remain healthy. Let’s continue to pull together as a community and do what we can during these difficult times.

Contributing Authors: Gilad Shainer, Chairman, HPC-AI Advisory Council, and Brian Sparks, Director of Worldwide Operations, HPC-AI Advisory Council.