Women in HPC showcase their project knowledge at HPCKP23
Executive Board Member, Cristin Merritt, and Chapter member for Barcelona, Elisabeth Ortega presented on open source and quantum computing at this non-profit initiative for increasing knowledge, inclusion, and sustainability in the field of supercomputing.
The UK and EU volunteers of WHPC came together with members of the HPC community May 17th and 18th to celebrate the progress and achievements of supercomputing at the HPCKP23 conference held in Barcelona, Spain. This two day event focused on a variety of topics aimed at covering everything from the latest projects, to future concepts, to the very important lessons learned in the field.
Elisabeth Ortega queues up her presentation on quantum emulators
This event, organised by HPCNow!, brought in a variety of speakers representing everything from Tier 1 supercomputing facilities and corporations to medium and small-scale academic institutions and businesses. The event started with concepts that are rapidly moving to reality, with Elisabeth Ortega presenting on quantum emulators. Her talk initiated an excellent discussion on how technology which is often deemed ‘far future’ can be utilised to develop the systems and workloads of today.
The afternoon of day one moved to the cloud – namely the impact cloud computing has had on the development of current and future HPC systems, and included a presentation on Flux from WHPC members from LLNL and IBM. The evening ended with a trip to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and a tour of MareNostrum 5 (which is currently being integrated) and MareNostrum 4, which is housed within a former chapel located on the BSC campus.
MareNostrum 4 is housed within a former chapel at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
Day two brought about discussions on what is happening in HPC today, and included coveted “lessons learned” presentations on integration and management from Petrobras and Meteomatics AG. These talks set the tone for the speakers that followed, namely in opening up the floor to create a space for honest discussions around experiences with hardware and software. Cristin Merritt’s presentation on open source incorporated much of these exchanges as she walked through the evolution of the OpenFlightHPC project, which included a brief demonstration. Her talk also included her volunteer experiences for Women in HPC and how – thanks to Chapters and Affiliates such as Barcelona – we have been able to expand our reach with hosting local mixed events that include technical and career training.
Cristin Merritt gives and overview of Women in HPC prior to launching her open source demonstration.
Women in HPC want to extend a massive thank you to the volunteers and staff who came together to make HPCKP23 a success. This team took immense care in planning their program and did so inline with the evolving needs of the HPC community. Currently they are compiling all session recordings – once they are completed we will include a link to their 2023 channel. Until then, you can visit their prior year talks here and read the 2023 abstract book here.