Women in HPC (WHPC) unveil SC24 Travel Fellowship Award Winners!
Women in High-Performance Computing is thrilled to announce the recipients of the prestigious SC24 Travel Fellowship Award. Thanks to the generous support of our WHPC Champions, including DoITNow and our joint sponsors AWS and AMD, two outstanding early-career professionals have been selected as Travel Fellows for this year’s SC24 conference, taking place in Atlanta, Georgia.
The WHPC Executive and Workshop Committees, alongside our sponsors, are proud to introduce Divya Joy of Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia, and Vijayalakshmi Saravanan of University of Texas at Tyler, TX, USA, as this year’s fellowship awardees. These two exceptional women have been chosen from a pool of highly competitive applicants who submitted proposals to speak at the Early Career session of the WHPC Workshop on November 18th. The selection process was rigorous, with the final decision based on their stellar technical expertise and inspiring personal statements, each embodying the spirit of innovation and inclusion that WHPC champions.
We are honoured to introduce this year’s Travel Fellows:
Divya is in her penultimate year, studying Software Engineering and Applied and Computational Mathematics at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. Her passion for combining maths and software to solve complex problems was sparked during her time as a vacation research student at QUT, where she worked on using a numerical model to study red blood cell deformation. This experience also introduced her to the world of HPC. Later, as a research assistant at QUT’s Centre for Robotics, she worked with a machine learning model used for computer vision. During two internships at BHP, Divya gained insight into how cloud technology is reshaping the HPC landscape within industry, which sparked her interest in everything cloud. This led her to choose a thesis project focused on using high performance cloud computing for a bioinformatics tool. She is currently in the final stages of completing her thesis.
Divya will be presenting “Event-driven high-performance cloud computing for CRISPR-Cas9 guide RNA design”.
This work describes the use of event-driven cloud computing technologies to address challenges faced by traditional standalone software in designing guide RNA (gRNA) for CRISPR-Cas9 experiments. Within these experiments, selecting good quality guides is a complex task that can only be effectively achieved using high performance computing resources, which are not universally accessible. This talk introduces a cloud-based guide RNA design application, Crackling-Cloud, that any researcher can deploy within their cloud environment through a cloud-native software template. Crackling-Cloud leverages a range of offerings from Amazon Web Services (AWS), including Lambda, S3, SQS, and others to enhance the scalability, flexibility, and accessibility of gRNA design, while reducing infrastructure overhead.
Dr. Saravanan holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering, earned as an exchange student at Mälardalen University in Sweden and Ryerson University in Canada through the Erasmus Mundus fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Tyler and a visiting faculty scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Her journey in STEM, particularly in high-performance computing (HPC), has been significantly enhanced by her participation in the SHI SRP program at BNL, where she explored the intersections of artificial intelligence and HPC. She has also received a U.S. Department of Energy ASCR funding award as Principal Investigator for her project on HPC and machine learning-based storage solutions for multimodal scientific computing. Her accolades include the prestigious Schlumberger Faculty for the Future Postdoctoral Award, the Erasmus Mundus Doctoral Research Award, the University of Texas System’s RISING STAR Research Award, and ACM Distinguished Speaker. Dr. Saravanan is a passionate advocate for women in computer architecture, actively supporting initiatives such as Women in Big Data and HPC.
Dr. Vijayalakshmi Saravanan will be presenting “Containerizing Real-time Streaming of Scientific Data in HPC: Challenges and Solutions.”
This presentation addresses the challenges of containerization in real-time streaming of scientific data for the Exascale Computing Project, focusing on Singularity containers and their applications in HPC for large-scale scientific systems. The research investigates containerization strategies on supercomputers at the NERSC PERLMUTTER facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, comparing Docker and Singularity containers as part of the DOE-funded project ASCR Award No: DE-SC0024492. The project includes a thorough evaluation of Docker implementations on HPC clusters, highlighting their limitations while proposing solutions through Singularity containers. Beyond its technical contributions, this work emphasizes the importance of collaboration and diverse expertise in HPC for innovative analyses of multimodal scientific data and real-time streaming, essential for effective HPC storage solutions in the face of increasing scientific demands.
Continuing Our Commitment to EDIA
As WHPC continues to advocate for equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA) in high-performance computing, we remain dedicated to empowering underrepresented groups through opportunities like these Travel Fellowships. We invite you to join us in celebrating the achievements of our Travel Fellows and their upcoming contributions to SC24, where they will showcase groundbreaking research and innovative solutions.
How the Travel Fellowships Were Awarded
The WHPC Travel Fellowships were offered to applicants selected to speak during the Early Career session of the 20th Annual Women in HPC Workshop at SC24. Candidates were required to submit both a technical presentation and a personal statement, with all applications reviewed anonymously to ensure fairness. Each Travel Fellow will receive up to $3,800 to cover travel expenses, which will be reimbursed after the conference.
WHPC Champions
WHPC extends gratitude to our Champions:
DoITNow is a pioneering collaboration between three European HPC leaders: Do IT from Italy, HPCNow! from Spain, and UCit from France. Together, they are committed to pushing the limits of high-performance computing by delivering cutting-edge solutions for the scientific and engineering communities.
AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centres globally. As a leader in cloud computing, AWS is at the forefront of powering HPC workloads in a scalable, flexible, and cost-effective way.
AMD has been driving innovation in high-performance computing, graphics, and visualisation technologies for over 50 years. Known for their powerful processors and GPUs, AMD enables some of the world’s most advanced supercomputing systems.
We also extend our thanks to the broader WHPC community and all SC24 supporters. Their generosity has enabled us to plan a range of activities and giveaways for attendees. If your organisation is interested in supporting future WHPC events, please contact us at info@womeninhpc.org.
2024 Supporters & Committee
None of this would be possible without the generous support of WHPC’s 2024 sponsors and supporters. Their commitment to our vision enables us to continue creating spaces where diversity thrives, and innovation flourishes. We look forward to celebrating these achievements with all attendees at SC ’24.
