Encouraging Inclusion In Supercomputing

By Allison Proffitt

July 6, 2017 | Toni Collis has a day job she’s passionate about. She consults with academics and companies across Europe on how to better use high-performance computing, how to improve code for platforms, how to design software, and how to optimize software. “Really what I love to do—what epitomizes my job, particularly with academics—is I get them to the point where they can use high performance computing to solve a problem they couldn’t otherwise solve,” she told Bio-IT World. “It’s a grand thing; I help science happen by providing consultancy.”

Collis works at EPCC, the University of Edinburgh Supercomputing Centre, and one of the foremost supercomputing centers in Europe. (It was formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre; they kept the acronym, but not the name.)

But Collis has another passion as well. Four years ago she and some colleagues founded the Women in High Performance Computing group (WHPC) for women in HPC within the UK. “Well that’s what we thought we were going to do,” Collis laughed. “Then it grew legs and took off!”

Collis and her colleagues had identified a need. WHPC now hosts workshops and networking events internationally, and plans sessions on career development at HPC conferences. Connecting women to other women is so important, Collis said. “If you’re the only woman in your organization… sometimes it’s just really nice to meet another women who does high-performance computing. Men don’t have that challenge if they’re in a male-dominated field.”

High-performance computing is a wonderful field, Collis said, in that it “encompasses almost every aspect of life!” Almost every academic field can use HPC, so there are HPC professionals with varied backgrounds. Collis herself earned her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in molecular simulation.

“I did my Ph.D. in physics, and that’s how I got into HPC. A lot of people come into HPC through physics or chemistry. There isn’t an HPC degree you can do; you come into it from one of the other sciences,” she explained. In her own doctoral project, Collis used HPC extensively. “At the end of it I thought, ‘Oh gosh, that’s better than physics!’ It’s the bit that got me going; it’s the bit that I loved about what I did during my Ph.D.—writing high-performance code.”

Inclusion of the Community

In 2017, Collis is the Inclusivity Chair for The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis—Supercomputing—and hopes to use the event to build a community identity. “When we come to this meeting every year, for this week, we are HPC and supercomputing. We’re not biologists and chemists and engineers anymore. This week we are supercomputing people,” she said.

One of the first steps will be to start to quantify how the HPC space is doing in terms of diversity and inclusion.

“Anecdotally, we’re not particularly diverse. But we don’t even know if that’s true! I can’t actually say to you how inclusive or diverse we are. As a scientist I love numbers, but we don’t have the numbers,” she laments. “We know, broadly speaking, that last year we had 13% of attendees [at Supercomputing 2016] that were female. But that’s about as much as we know. We have one snapshot of one conference.”

“Traditional” fields like physics, chemistry, math, and engineering have gathered data in recent years on how diverse and inclusive the pipelines are from early education through to career. But high-performance computing is harder to count. Practitioners don’t necessarily identify as HPC first, making it hard to track and count diversity and inclusion in the field and encourage more of both, she said.

Collis wants to be sure to move past gender, as well. “Gender is an easy target in some aspects because women are 51% of the population, but at SC it’s really important that we look at all aspects of inclusivity,” she said. Supercomputing 2017 is monitoring diversity of ethnicity and educational backgrounds, and considering ways to reach out to students from minority-serving institutions. The committee wants to make sure ever staircase has a ramp available and that there are prayer and parenting rooms available. “It’s embracing the diversity of who we all are, and ensuring that the conference accommodates that,” Collis said.