Today ISC 2018 announced the winners of the ISC High Performance Travel Grant Program. Designed to enable university students and young researchers to attend the conference in Germany, the ISC Travel Grant was introduced this year to help university students and young researchers who are interested in acquiring high performance computing knowledge and skills, but lack the necessary resources to obtain them.
Raksha Roy, a researcher from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Nepal, and Badisa Mosesane an undergraduate student at the University of Botswana, have been selected as the ISC Travel Grant recipients this year. They have been chosen out of 16 regional and international applications. Both Ms. Roy, 28, and Mr. Mosesane, 26, will each be awarded a grant of 1500 euros. ISC High Performance will also provide the grant recipients free registration for the entire conference, which takes place from June 24 – June 28, at Messe Frankfurt, Germany.
HPC: A new frontier for Nepal
Raksha Roy
High performance computing is a relatively new to Nepal, and even more so among female researchers. Roy, a pioneer in the field focused on “WRF Performance Benchmark using MPI and OpenMPI” in her Master’s thesis. “However, getting started required resources and I requested two Raspberry Pi’s from a friend abroad,” recalls the ambitious Roy.
Now currently an ERP Associate at ICIMOD, Roy sees her participation in ISC 2018 as a chance to network with the HPC community, particularly technologists and researchers around the globe, and expand her knowledge on HPC. She hopes that this experience will help her when she starts pursuing her PhD in an HPC-related field.
When she returns home after ISC 2018, Roy intends to share her freshly-gained knowledge from the conference with her peers through ICIMOD-organized meet-ups for students, do presentations and organize hands-on training sessions using the ISC conference material. She also hopes to encourage more female students to develop an interest for HPC.
Botswana and HPC
Badisa Mosesane
Badisa Mosesane, who is currently pursuing his BSc Computer Science at the University of Botswana, was highly recommended for the ISC Travel Grant Award by his study program coordinator. Mosesane is regarded as a very enthusiastic student, who is constantly sharing his acquired skills with his fellow students. So far, he has received training in programming for parallel systems using MPI and OpenMP at the CHPC in South Africa, as well as some training on coprocessor accelerators. He has also been enrolled in the CERN Summer student program in 2017, working on a project aimed at capturing, storing and analyzing colossal amounts of data.
He believes that the ISC conference is an exciting and stimulating opportunity for him to gain invaluable knowledge and enrich his skills in advanced HPC techniques to solve data and compute-intensive problems,
I am fascinated by the topics to be covered at the conference, specifically exascale systems and artificial intelligence on HPC platforms, which I believe will be relevant and critical to my professional development, explained Mosesane. He hopes to enroll in an international Master’s program in HPC.
Mentorship for HPC
Dr. Julian Kunkel
Dr. Julian Kunkel, of University of Reading, will mentor Roy and Mosesane at the conference, helping them get the most out of the conference by suggesting relevant program sessions and introducing them to experts in their fields of interest.
If any organization would like to meet these two interesting young people onsite or help them advance their HPC ambitions, please get in touch with the ISC Travel Grant program coordinator, Ms. Colleen Sheedy at colleen.sheedy@isc-group.com.
Registration is now open for ISC 2018, which takes place June 24-28 in Frankfurt.
