arianna martin

Kinship and Community at SC21

Arianna Martin (Southwestern Oklahoma State University) 

For many who work in the High-Performance Computing Industry (HPC), answering the question, “What do you do?” is a universal struggle. How do you explain the nature of your vocation to your uncle at Thanksgiving such that his eyes don’t squint in confusion, but rather light up with understanding and interest? Not to mention that HPC is a small (yet global) community, and nearly every time you respond to that question, you are introducing your conversation partner to the idea of a supercomputer.  

Personally, I’ve had that experience many times in the past 18 months. I am a fifth-year undergraduate who switched majors from music performance to computer science during COVID in 2020. I immediately joined my new advisor in his long-term project of increasing HPC resources and education at our university, and ever since, I’ve been on a path to becoming an HPC …

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STEM-Trek: An Entrepreneurial Journey

At the StartupHPC Meetup, November 17, 2014, STEM-Trek Founder Elizabeth Leake described how this global, grassroots, nonprofit organization was formed, and its unique business model that involves crowd-sourcing social capital to solicit donated travel points and other services so that scholars from underrepresented groups and regions can attend high-tech conferences. Beneficiaries are encouraged to pay-it-forward, and can do so in a variety of ways. While some have volunteered to help less fortunate people from their home communities, others have supported STEM-Trek in more creative ways.

STEM-Trek’s first beneficiary, Wa Yuan (Northwestern University, Materials Science PhD) believes that the challenge of finding meaningful employment has as much to do with WHO you know, as WHAT you know. She developed a business networking tool called Scitivate that is being used by the SC14 Broader Engagement (BE) program to pair …

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