Over at the Women in HPC Blog, Daniel Holmes from EPCC writes that the EuroMPI Conference is partnering with Women in HPC to increase diversity in high performance computing.
EuroMPI 2016 is committed to helping broaden diversity in the HPC community and beyond. Our commitment to diversity and in particular to addressing the under-representation of women comes from a recognition that diversity fosters innovation, new ideas and is a benefit to society. By ensuring that everyone is equally able to participate in the extraordinarily exciting field of High Performance Computing, society benefits as a whole. Our partnership with WHPC will help us ensure that the conference is accessible and welcoming to all and will encourage us to challenge the status quo.
Details of Partnership:
- Set goals to encourage the consideration of a broader range of people for keynotes and session chairs. This is often viewed with trepidation as no one wants to damage the integrity of the speaker program. We will not be setting quotas or targets instead the organizing committee is challenging itself to consider new and exciting speakers who may not have been considered before: embracing diversity through the introduction of bright new talent that has perhaps not previously been considered.
- Monitor the demographics of our audience. To date there is no clear baseline measurement of the proportion of women or minority groups in the MPI community. We need to measure the current diversity of our community, including sub-groups such as the keynote speakers, the conference chairs, and the program committee, in order to compare with other communities. As the leading international MPI meeting, we believe gathering the information from this conference will provide a key resource for future years. We will aggregate the information gathered during registration, compile it anonymously and share this information with Women in HPC and on our website so that there is a record of the demographics of our field for future comparisons.
- Actively encourage a diverse audience to attend and participate in EuroMPI 2016.We will actively promote participation from under-represented groups in the EuroMPI program by targeting our advertising. We will work with Women in HPC to encourage women to attend who may not otherwise have considered the program, in particular helping early career women to consider MPI a topic of interest and helping to retain those already in the community.
- Appoint a Diversity Chair. EuroMPI 2016 have appointed Women in HPC’s own Dr Toni Collis as Diversity Chair with a remit to ensure that diversity and inclusion is considered in every aspect of the conference.
According to Daniel Holmes, the collaboration with between Women in HPC and EuroMPI 2016 is the first such agreement of its kind and paves the way to not only a more diverse EuroMPI conference but encourages other conferences to consider taking this step as well.
In related news, the EuroMPI Conference has extended the deadline for their Call for papers, posters, workshops and tutorials to May 15. The event takes place Sept. 25-28 in Edinburgh.
