Communications of the ACM
A Celebration of Women in Hpc
The Women in High-Performance Computing network seeks to widen the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in supercomputing conferences, and to address bias and discrimination regarding women's HPC-related interests and capabilities.
Credit: Julita Inca
Recent events held by the Women in High-Performance Computing (WHPC) network focused on resolving the lack of gender diversity in HPC, with the organization estimating women constitute between 5% and 17% of HPC users, researchers, and conference attendees, and only about 25% of technology jobs.
WHPC founder Toni Collis says the group seeks to widen the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in supercomputing conferences and to address bias and discrimination regarding women's HPC-related interests and capabilities. "We made an effort to target early career women, but universities send far fewer women to ISC (ISC High Performance, formerly the International Supercomputing Conference) than SC (the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis)," Collis says. "I think they send their senior people to ISC and those are still primarily men. It's a problem that we need to change."
Intel Exascale Lab director Marie-Christine Sawley says HPC has come increasingly closer to affecting people's daily lives over the last decade, a fact that makes broader gender representation vital. "The world is made of 51-percent females and the numbers show that in HPC and in technology, we are not close to even half of what the statistics would show," she says.
Sawley notes areas in which HPC innovations are having significant impact include parcel delivery, pediatric cancer research, and improved genetic disease prenatal screening diagnostics.
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