Last month, I attended the inaugural PEARC17 conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. PEARC (Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing) was created by merging conferences for communities that support and benefit from research computing. As a result, there was a great variety in the types of sessions offered.

Aside from attending technical training workshops, I made sure to see a few of the researcher talks—including talks that featured work done in the digital humanities—which gave some perspective on the kinds of training researchers are likely to take advantage of. I found the closing discussion on successful cross-disciplinary collaboration very interesting. I’m looking forward to trying out some of the new things I’ve learned in upcoming workshops and researcher engagements at USC.