Welcome to the 12th annual Rice Oil and Gas High-Performance Computing Conference at Rice University. The theme for this year’s conference is “Meeting the computing-capacity demand in the energy industry for the next decade.” It is always exciting to bring together the brightest minds from across academia, the National Labs, and the energy and IT industries. All share a passion for high-performance computing and a desire to meet our needs and leverage the next wave of technology. We are engineers and scientists, geologists, programmers and industry leaders, but we share common goals that keep this conference relevant and engaging.
At a time when digital transformation is all the buzz, being able to continue innovating at the leading edge of computing remains essential. At the forefront of our endeavors, technology remains the most critical enabler. It will drive the high-performance computing needed for both industry and the world.
To meet the challenges ahead, we must set aside our traditional mindsets and seek alternative solutions, whether in developing the next generation of computational capabilities or the sources of energy we depend on as a society. We must embrace this new era in computing as an opportunity for advancements in systems architectures, and invest in such technologies as AI, IoT, edge computing, and software – these technologies will change, if not drive, the future of energy. We must not wait to embrace their potential.
Our investments in people and technology today will help drive innovation and support systems scalability tomorrow. Highly sophisticated systems architectures will require a diverse workforce that can not only apply high-performance computing technologies at an advanced level, but also be prepared to harness the complexities of the next generation of systems to solve critical societal and industrial problems. To succeed we must train and develop this workforce now. There is a need for new education and training. The time when 20+ years as a student set one up for a 40+ year career is gone. We need to support an agile workforce that will be looking to pivot not once, but possibly many times during their working life.
With this as the backdrop, the future is great and we are excited to bring you a stellar program with speakers from Shell, AMD, Arm, Intel, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, Texas Advanced Computing Center, Women in HPC, NAG, and RIKEN. We invite you to study the program carefully and use the two days as a platform to learn, engage and network. The value you derive from this conference will depend on your investment in connecting and driving the conversation.
We want to thank and acknowledge all of the OGHPC Conference Sponsors and Partners, including those who support the Ken Kennedy Institute’s graduate fellowship programs at Rice University, and the OGHPC Technical Program Committee for their many contributions to this year’s conference.
We encourage you to discuss the various aspects of the challenges at hand, question the risks and investment opportunities involved, and share best practices for driving adoption of the advanced analytics and technologies in industry. Together we can make the energy industry of tomorrow the very best.
Warm regards,
2019 OGHPC Organizing Committee
