2018 SEA conference wrap-up

The 2018 SEA conference has been a good success, with many interesting talks, great keynotes, lots of well attended tutorials. Many conference-goers expressed satisfaction about it. A survey has been sent to everybody and so far shows about 1/3 of the attendees rating it excellent, 1/3 very good and 1/3 good. All the involved admins did a fantastic job in making sure everything went smoothly.

There has been a total of 121 attendees, about 40% from NCAR. In 5 days there have been 31 talks, 14 tutorials, two symposia and one panel.

The greatest success of the event has been the symposia. Both of them covered important topics not addressed anywhere else (containers in an HPC environment and overlapping communication with computation in parallel computing). Participants to both asked to make them a yearly event, and we will be glad to do so. They also requested to engage more application developers since they have not properly represented. We will work with them to have a larger representation next year.

Given the success of the symposia, we will also experiment with a call for more of them from the community.