Julie F.

Julie F.

2019 Anita Borg Systers Pass It On Award Winner
Project Title: Empowering Women with Supercomputers
Country: Canada

Women are generally underrepresented in STEM and High Performance Computing (HPC). A series of classes designed specifically to give female graduate students and professors a basic introduction to the world of supercomputers, HPC, and parallel computing will be taught by women to a female audience.  Documentation on the specificity of teaching HPC to women, two conference presentations on findings, and the elaboration of a framework to expand the concept to all Calcul Québec and Compute Canada member universities across the province of Québec and Canada will also be developed.

 

The goal is to create a network of trained females in most universities in the country which will be give the appropriate training within their own institutions. The framework will be presented to CANHEIT 2019.

Julie Faure-Lacroix started working for Calcul Québec while working on her Ph.D. As a scientific liaison agent, her job is to reach out to academic researchers to show them how high-powered computing can help them in their research. The mandate of Calcul Québec and Compute Canada is to lead the acceleration of research and innovation by deploying state-of-the-art advanced research computing (ARC) systems, storage and software solutions, and to give free access to its resources to all academic members across Canada. She works on a variety of projects that range from statistical models in R to geospatial analyses in ArcGIS. Her focus is to predict the needs of the researchers and to make the required software available before it is even requested. She’s also leading the creation of Calcul Québec’s Women in HPC Chapter.