SC10 BOF: Developing, Recruiting, and Retaining Women in HPC

Join us this year at SC10 in New Orleans, LA.

SEE RESULTS FROM THE BOFTuesday, November 16, 2010ABSTRACT: Despite the fact that women comprise more than half the world's population, they are underrepresented as a group in high-performance computing. In this BOF, we will discuss how the HPC community can improve the representation of women. We will begin with a discussion of the challenges faced in attracting women into the HPC field, and develop some ideas that can be implemented to improve recruitment and retention of women along the educational pipeline and in entry-level positions. Then, we will discuss the challenges in retaining women in HPC careers, including challenges unique to the field, and examine the practices of organizations that have been successful in recruitment and retention, with an eye toward how HPC organizations can incorporate these practices into their corporate culture in order to retain employees of all types.

The session will begin with the perspectives of women in successful careers on the academic, industrial, and laboratory sides of high-performance computing, and continue with an open discussion among the BOF attendees. In this session, we hope to foster a community to aid in the development, recruitment, and retention of women in HPC.

TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Rebecca J. Hartman-Baker, Judith C. Hill, Hai Ah Nam

ROOM:391-392

MEET THE PANELISTS

Nanette J. BodenNan Boden, President and Chief Executive Officer at Myricom, grew up in the Huntsville, Alabama area. She earned her BS degree from the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa) in Applied Mathematics, and her MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Computer Science graduate program at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 1994 Nan helped found Myricom, a startup with the mission to commercialize high-performance interconnect technology originally developed at Caltech. Nan's PhD research in Runtime systems for fine-grain multicomputers led directly into her work at Myricom, where she wrote the earliest version of the software that controlled the company's first products.During her sixteen years with Myricom, Nan has served in several sales and operations positions within the company, including Executive Vice President and CFO. Nan has been a member of the Myricom Board of Directors since 2001. In 2010, Nan was named President and Chief Executive Officer.She is presently pursuing her MBA degree at UCLA's Anderson School of Management (degree expected summer 2011).

Lois Curfman McInnesLois Curfman McInnes is a Computational Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory. She received a B.S. (summa cum laude) in mathematics and physics from Muhlenberg College. She received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Virginia in 1993 (advisor James M. Ortega). Her research focuses on numerical algorithms and software for the parallel solution of large-scale scientific applications involving nonlinear partial differential equations and related optimization problems. In particular, she develops such software tools within the PETSc and TAO libraries. Both libraries are used in a broad range of high-performance applications, and PETSc received a R&D100 Award in 2009. Lois enjoys collaborating with a variety of multidisciplinary teams on large-scale computational science research. She is a member of the Towards Optimal Petascale Simulations (TOPS), Framework Application for Core-Edge Transport Simulations (FACETS), and Community Petascale Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation (ComPASS) projects funded by the Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC). She leads research on nonlinear solvers in FACETS and coordinates math/cs research in ComPASS. Also, she is PI of a newly established SciDAC-e project to develop algorithms and software for large-scale differential variational inequalities for heterogeneous materials, which is a partnership with the Center for Materials Science of Nuclear Fuel, a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center.