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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Out of Africa: Exascale HPC

South Africa’s Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) hosted its seventh annual meeting, “Solving industry challenges through HPC and data adoption,” December 2-6, 2013 at the Cape Town Convention Center. CHPC Director Happy Sithole welcomed 350 HPC enthusiasts from universities, computational centers, and industry for a five-day event, including two full days of parallel technical workshops.

Why exascale in Africa?

South Africa was recently awarded the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project: the most powerful telescope ever designed. The iconic endeavor will be installed in the extraordinarily “radio quiet” Karoo region of South Africa in the Northern Cape Province, and will include remote stations in SKA African partner countries such as Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique, Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya and Ghana. The installation includes full dish and dense aperture arrays, associated data center, and enhanced network topology throughout the region. Its sister project, a low-frequency, sparse aperture array, will be built …

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