With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Ethics in HPC

Ethical concerns in science can be traced back for centuries. With accelerating innovation and an increasing impact of HPC on daily life, however, it is more important than ever to have these discussions. The goal of this BoF is to foster this community-wide discussion on ethics in HPC on issues such as what responsibilities we have as practitioners in the field and how best to ensure that ethical concerns are considered in the development and implementation of HPC applications. We do not propose that we can reach answers on any discussed topic, but rather are seeking to foster discussion to encourage the conversations to continue in SC and other venues. The BoF deliberately does not restrict or proscribe particular areas of discussion. However, the following provides suggestions for possible topics. HPC as a widely applied computational tool is ethically neutral, although some applications rest in gray areas, such as oil and gas exploration, maintaining nuclear weapons, mining personal information for targeted ads or mass surveillance. In addition, As a technology that can be abused, we must consider what, if anything, the community should do to ward against this. We should also consider whether HPC is perpetuating inequality. Women and people of color remain greatly underrepresented also within HPC communities, perhaps this lack of diversity is an inhibitor to the field. With many workloads incorporating machine learning directly affecting people’s lives, participants may wish to address some of the ethical issues raised by HPC enabled ML/AI.

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Organizers:

• Jakob Luettgau