Tech Talks by Women in HPC

Dr. Vijeta Sharma is Senior scientist of HPC-AI at the Swedish National AI Factory, Sweden.She previously worked for 3 years at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway and 12 years at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, under the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Government of India, contributing to the National PARAM Supercomputing Facility (NPSF). She has over 16 years of R&D experience in industry and academia.

Her research focuses on AI and supercomputing, with expertise in optimising and parallelising AI models on accelerators (GPU, TPU, and IPU). She earned her Ph.D. in AI on HPC and M.Tech. in Data Science, and has published widely in AI, HPC, edge computing, and embodied intelligence.

She is a recipient of the Top 100 PhD research award (AWSAR-2020), India, and the Global Women Inspiration Award-2022. She is an active member of the Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC). She is the Organiser and General Chair of the workshop “AI on HPC – Performance Engineering, Challenges and Opportunities” at the  ISC 2026 , Hamburg, Germany, and the Supercomputing Conference (SC), USA. In 2026, she is also Chair of the ISC Women in HPC (WHPC) Tech Talk and speaker of the ISC Community Meet-Up (Title: AI factories in Europe).

She has delivered more than 70 invited talks globally, including as a keynote speaker. She is actively engaged in several technical activities under the EuroHPC.

Buket joined Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) in 2012 as a Computational Scientist. At ICHEC, she has contributed to user support activities as part of the National Service and worked on various PRACE and EuroHPC projects within Performance Engineering. She has also participated in graduate-level teaching as part of the Training and Education programme. Before joining ICHEC, she received Ph.D. from the Hamilton Institute, Maynooth University and M.Sc. in Computational Science and Engineering, Istanbul Technical University.

Buket is a member of the Women in HPC Ireland Chapter committee. Her primary interests include performance engineering particularly in optimising complex hybrid HPC workflows.

Petra Dalunde is Head of AI Ecosystem and Policy at Mimer, Sweden’s national AI Factory. With a background in strategic innovation, digital transformation, and cross-sector collaboration, she plays a key role in shaping partnerships that enable inclusive and trustworthy AI development. Petra has extensive experience in leading initiatives at the intersection of technology, policy, regulation and societal impact, and is a frequent speaker on the role of AI in sustainable innovation ecosystems.

Sr. Manager – HPE AI Factories, Nonstop, Liquid Cooling Marketing. Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Tami is the product marketing leader for HPC AI Factories, Nonstop, and Liquid Cooling solutions, based in the US.

From pan-HPE solutions to AI factories at scale, she actively engages with product, GTM, global sales and alliances teams to fully understand customer needs and challenges and delivers AI, mission critical, and cooling solutions to contribute to customer success.

Tami has over 25 years of experience guiding customers in the tech industry from both the customer and provider sides of the table.

Menatallah Samier Saleh is an HPC Application Specialist at NYU Abu Dhabi and an M.S. candidate at Georgia Tech. She architects the software ecosystem for the 47,000-core “Jubail” cluster and pro

vides technical expertise for interdisciplinary research, notably optimizing neuroimaging and MRI pipelines. Her thesis research focuses on dynamic graph optimization and the architectural tuning of large-scale scientific applications.

A graduate of Alexandria University with honors, she previously served as an HPC software engineer at BrightSkies, leading optimization projects for Intel and Saudi Aramco. She is the Founder of the Women in HPC (WHPC) MENA affiliate, a regional initiative she spearheaded to increase visibility, mentorship, and representation for women in high-performance computing across the Middle East and North Africa.

Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mennatallah-samier-saleh-53087aa9/

WHPC MENA: https://www.linkedin.com/company/whpc-mena-middle-east-north-africa/ 

Ayesha Afzal is a researcher at the Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU), Germany. She holds a PhD in Computer Science, an MSc in Computational Engineering, and a BSc in Electrical Engineering. Her PhD, “A Holistic White-Box Approach to Performance Modeling for Supercomputing,” focuses on analytic performance models, performance tools, and parallel simulation frameworks in HPC. She is involved in HPC initiatives including KONWHIR (LRZ), DFG MOD4COMP (TU Dresden and Jülich), and the NHR EEC (NHR centers). Within the IEEE Computer Society, she serves as Vice Chair of both the Germany Section Chapter and Region 8 Area 2, and Secretary of IEEE TCHPC. She founded the NHR Women in HPC chapter and organizes workshops at international conferences (SC, ISC, ACM HPDC, and SCA/HPCAsia). She is a member of professional societies (ACM, IEEE, SIAM, and PRACE), and contributes as chair, vice chair, PC member, Journal reviewer, panelist, and speaker. She was listed among the Top 100 Future Leaders Role Model List (2022–2025) supported by Yahoo Finance and YouTube, and received WeAreTheCity’s Global Award for Achievement (2023). She has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, and her work has been recognized through distinctions: ISC PhD Forum Award (1st place, 2021), IEEE TPDS Best Paper Runner-up Award (2023), SC PMBS Best Short Paper Award (2023), SC Best Research Poster Finalist (2024), ISC Best Research Poster Award (1st place, 2025) and PhD with highest distinction (summa cum laude, 2026).

Cristina Manzano studied Telecommunications Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) in Spain and received her Master’s degree from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. Since 2009, she has been working at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany as a data and file system expert in the division Technical Systems and Services of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. She has contributed to several European projects (EUDAT, DEEP projects), is part of the core team that developed and operates the LOFAR Long Term Archive, and currently leads the ODT Technical Services. Cristina has long been interested in the problem of the underrepresentation of women in science and the balance between work and family life, and co-founded the German WHPC chapter JuWinHPC. She is also involved in the local women’s network Female Voice, which aims to strengthen women’s networking and support gender equality at Forschungszentrum Jülich through various activities.

Katie O’Connor is a research associate and performance engineer at the Irish Centre for High End Computing, University of Galway. They graduated with a B.A. in mathematics from Trinity College Dublin in 2020 and with an M.Sc. in High Performance Computing in 2021, before starting as a performance engineer in ICHEC in 2022. Alongside their technical work, they are the chair of the EDI committee in ICHEC and co-founded the Women in HPC Ireland chapter in 2024. Outside of work, they are an amateur artist experimenting in textured paintings and an occasional gamer.

Taylor is an Associate Research Solutions Hardware Engineer at Purdue University, specializing in high-performance computing (HPC) server hardware and infrastructure. With a strong interest in growing on the compute side, Taylor is actively building skills in Linux, Bash, and system administration to deepen her impact across the HPC stack. She is also engaged in community-building and outreach efforts, including initiatives that support diversity, education, and professional development in computing. Taylor loves learning new technologies and continually expanding her skill set to better support scalable, reliable research computing systems.

A Faster Universe, No Big Bang Required: GPU Acceleration for CPU-based Astronomy Codes

Sarah is a final-year astronomy PhD student in the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University in the UK. Her research focuses on GPU offloading for gravity operations in the SWIFT cosmology code and analysis tools for simulations of mixed dark matter models. She holds an MPhys in Astrophysics from University of St Andrews, and is passionate about engaging in HPC and loves exploring the intersection of astronomy and computing. Beyond her research she is passionate about EDI initiatives, especially getting girls and young women into science, and enjoys working with young people to encourage their curiosity for astrophysics and computing.

Adaptive Mixed Precision for Energy-Efficient High-Performance Computing

Safae Bourhnane is a High-Performance Computing researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI) in Sankt Augustin, Germany. In this role, she develops and evaluates energy-efficient HPC frameworks, with a focus on code optimization and hardware-aware acceleration methods to improve performance and reduce resource consumption.

She holds a PhD in Computer Science; her doctoral research investigated energy-efficient HPC alternatives based on Raspberry Pi clusters, demonstrating how low-power, commodity hardware can be orchestrated to support scientific computing workloads. Prior to joining Fraunhofer SCAI, Safae was an HPC specialist at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology (Leibniz-HKI). There, she designed and deployed a medium-sized HPC cluster and provided expert support to bioinformatics research groups, enabling scalable analysis pipelines on both on-premises and supercomputing systems.

As founder of the MoroccoHPC initiative, she has worked to cultivate and connect Morocco’s emerging HPC community. Since its launch, MoroccoHPC has organized a number of interactive webinars and workshops, drawing participants from universities, research institutes, and industry across North Africa and Europe. Topics have ranged from parallel programming and GPU acceleration to workflow automation and cyber-security for HPC systems. The initiative also hosts hackathons and mentorship sessions, providing hands-on training and encouraging collaborations between junior researchers and seasoned practitioners. Through partnerships with academic institutions and national research centers, MoroccoHPC has helped establish a centralized forum for sharing best practices, open-source tools, and case studies—advancing local capacity for large-scale computational science.

Fast mass-parallel simulation of discrete-event systems on GPU

Tatiana R. Shmeleva received an Eng. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Moscow Railroad Engineering Institute in 1990; a Ph.D. degree (2008) and a Dr.Sci. (2019) degree in Telecommunications from the A.S. Popov Odessa National Academy of Telecommunications (ONAT), Ukraine; an Associate Professor diploma of the Switching Systems department from the ONAT, Ukraine, in 2011; August 2020, Professor of Computer Science department ONAT. Her research work domains are verification of communication protocols and performance evaluation of networks, parallel and distributed software design in particular for GPU. She developed the analysis of infinite Petri nets with regular structure and reenterable coloured Petri net models of networks. 2005-2022, the A.S. Popov Odessa National Academy of Telecommunications, Ukraine. August 2022-2023, invited Professor, laboratory I3S CNRS, Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France. December 2023-2024, invited Research Professor, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Kaiserslautern and Saarbrucken, Germany. 2025, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, School of Computing, University of Derby, UK. Tatiana is a Senior member of ACM.

Scaling Genomics on HPC systems: Reproducible Workflows in Practice

Sara El jadid is a bioinformatician at the Genomics Core Technology Unit at Queen’s University Belfast, where she develops scalable and reproducible workflows for high-throughput data analysis using high-performance computing. She holds a PhD in Bioinformatics, with a background in computer science and applied mathematics.

Her work supports a wide range of research areas, including cancer, microbial, and single-cell genomics, with a focus on optimizing performance through workflow design, parallelization, and GPU acceleration. She is particularly interested in how HPC can enable collaboration across disciplines and advocates for greater diversity and inclusion within computational science.

Building Bridges: Optimal Performance and Sustainable HPC

Ayesha Afzal is a researcher at the Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU), Germany. She holds a PhD in Computer Science, an MSc in Computational Engineering, and a BSc in Electrical Engineering. Her PhD, “A Holistic White-Box Approach to Performance Modeling for Supercomputing,” focuses on analytic performance models, performance tools, and parallel simulation frameworks in HPC. She is involved in HPC initiatives including KONWHIR (LRZ), DFG MOD4COMP (TU Dresden and Jülich), and the NHR EEC (NHR centers). Within the IEEE Computer Society, she serves as Vice Chair of both the Germany Section Chapter and Region 8 Area 2, and Secretary of IEEE TCHPC. She founded the NHR Women in HPC chapter and organizes workshops at international conferences (SC, ISC, ACM HPDC, and SCA/HPCAsia). She is a member of professional societies (ACM, IEEE, SIAM, and PRACE), and contributes as chair, vice chair, PC member, Journal reviewer, panelist, and speaker. She was listed among the Top 100 Future Leaders Role Model List (2022–2025) supported by Yahoo Finance and YouTube, and received WeAreTheCity’s Global Award for Achievement (2023). She has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, and her work has been recognized through distinctions: ISC PhD Forum Award (1st place, 2021), IEEE TPDS Best Paper Runner-up Award (2023), SC PMBS Best Short Paper Award (2023), SC Best Research Poster Finalist (2024), ISC Best Research Poster Award (1st place, 2025) and PhD with highest distinction (summa cum laude, 2026).

Words from a Technician with no Background in IT

Astrid Scott-Bennett started working for Research Computing Services at the University of Cambridge as a temporary employee in 2018, becoming a permanent member of staff just under a year later in a technician role. With no prior background in IT, she developed skills in cabling, fault troubleshooting, and other aspects of physical HPC management while learning on the job. Over this time, they have earned a certification, led their own procurement and installation projects, and contributed to the build of the Dawn AI supercomputer in 2023 and its successor, Zenith, earlier this year.

In 2024, Astrid helped co-found the WHPC Cambridge and East Anglia chapter, with a personal goal of creating an outreach programme to introduce HPC and WHPC to GCSE and A-level students.

This is Astrid’s first time attending ISC, and she is incredibly grateful for the opportunity to moderate at the event.

From petaflops to people: Putting communications at the core of HPC

Olivia is Impact and Communications Lead at the STFC Hartree Centre, a leading UK supercomputing centre dedicated to industry engagement with digital technologies. A purpose-driven communications leader, Olivia is passionate about demonstrating the impacts and benefits of digital technologies for society.

With an MSc in Science Communication and an Executive MBA, Olivia combines deep communications expertise with a strong foundation in people leadership and organisational strategy and applies this across public sector research infrastructures, ensuring that the value of research and innovation is communicated with clarity, integrity and purpose.

Committed to ethical and responsible communications leadership, Olivia champions the responsible use of emerging technologies and brings both creativity and collaboration to engaging diverse stake

holders across industry, academia and the public sector. She leads a team of skilled impact and engagement professionals, with a shared commitment to raising the profile of their profession and ensuring that research and innovation make a real difference to daily lives.

Olivia has authored articles for leading academic publications and developed award-winning public engagement and patient involvement initiatives in biomedical research. She has also delivered and contributed to international conference workshops on professional brand and combatting AI misinformation.