ISC 2022 Workshop — Creating a Diverse and Inclusive Community

Keynote Speaker

Helena founded her first digital start-up company at the age 18, while still studying Computer Science. She started her Intel career in 2005 as an Application Engineer within the Software and Solutions Group (SSG), developing good understanding of software products and the ISV market. She moved on building a SW lab supporting internal engineering community as well as external customers.

Since 2010 Helena was leading the HPC Market in Germany for almost a decade. Working with the in-country resources as well as collaborating and leveraging off the central enabling, marketing and platform teams to grow German HPC business.

In 2018 Helena received the prestigious Intel Achievement Award, Intel’s highest Honour, for her contribution to HPC. She has Doctorate in Economics (“Strategic change management in post crisis environment”) as well as formal education in Business Administration and Computer Science.

In 2018 Helena received a tenured position as a full Professor of Computer Science at her Alma Mater, the Deggendorf Institute of Technology (DIT), where she build the first European “HPC and Quantum Computing” master program at the DIT in autumn 2021 with a high demand of students followed by a new bachelor Program on “Data Center Management” starting in 2022.

Helena is also the CISO and Director of the IT-Centre in charge of University IT.

Cristin Merritt is a Change Management Specialist focusing on cloud and new technology adoption within HPC.  With over 15 years of experience in Enterprise technology and 6 within HPC she brings to the table a diverse set of skills aimed at assisting clients in balancing the platforms, tools, and technology required to make their HPC service build successful.  At Alces Flight Cristin has focused on subscription-based HPC projects ranging on-premises, mixed and hybrid stacks, open-source, and cloud native HPC. As part of her volunteer work Cristin serves as the Social Media Editor for Women in HPC and the Supercomputing Conference (SC) series.  She is also an active member of the RSE UK community where currently she is learning more about the need for stronger diversity and inclusion in tech.

Cristin graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in Classics and fell into working in tech while living in Houston, Texas.  Currently, she resides in Oxford, England with her husband, son, two cats and – needing more fur in her life – is about to adopt a dog.

Laura Schulz drives strategic development at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany in the fields of future-oriented computer technologies, particularly exascale, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. She is also the acting head of the Quantum Computing and Technologies department at LRZ.  Laura was the lead author on LRZ’s quantum strategic plan and is co-founder of the regional networking and tech scouting entity, Bavarian Quantum Computing eXchange (BQCX). Prior to joining LRZ in August 2017, she was Director of Marketing Communications at the HPC Innovation Center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US.

Werner Janse van Rensburg obtained his PhD (Computational Chemistry) in 2001.  He spent thirteen years in the private sector as an HPC applications scientist within the petrochemical industry in South Africa (SASOL), where he was responsible for applications research programs in catalysis research and the establishment of the HPC capabilities within the company.

In 2014 he took up the position as Research Manager at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) based in Cape Town, South Africa.  At the CHPC he works towards fulfilling the South African government mandate for making the national HPC facility a state of the art research enabling facility for the South African (African partner countries) research communities.

His role is focused on the uptake and productive use CHPC resources, collaboration and engagement with HPC stakeholders, training and development programs and next-generation HPC evaluation and adoption towards future deployments at the CHPC.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/werner-janse-van-rensburg-82235738/

www.chpc.ac.za

Jack Wells is Scientific Program Manager at NVIDIA, where he engages thought leaders across the scientific computing ecosystem, focusing on aligning the NVIDIA computing platform with stakeholder goals and mission. Jack has a PhD in Physics from Vanderbilt University.  He is serving in the chair line of the American Physical Society’s Division of Computational Physics, and President of the OpenACC, a consortium dedicated to helping the research community advance science by expanding their accelerated and parallel computing capabilities.

Chris J. Newburn, who goes by CJ, is a Principal Architect who drives HPC strategy and the SW product roadmap in NVIDIA Compute Software, with a special focus on data center architecture and security, IO, systems, and programming models for scale.  He has a passion for extending the core capabilities of hardware and software platforms from HPC into security, AI, data science, and visualization.  He is a community builder, starting a middle and high school, founding multi-year developer to developer engagements with the DoE, the HPC Containers Advisory Council, and serving in a leadership role of a faith community.