Sólo para Mí!

I joined Queen Mary University three years ago. During the first year, you get to know the know-how of the team, the role and the business. Additionally, you get to know the colleagues in your team, and in other related teams. While doing this, I realised that there were only a few women in the teams at QMUL.  When it came to Women’s Day in  March 2025, I decided to organise an event in recognition of their contribution in the work place.

I was lucky to find great colleagues at QMUL, one of them, is Nicola Redwin. With Nicola, we organised the Women’s Day at QMUL in 2025. We had lots of games related to the progress of Women in society and within the labour market.  One of the questions was related to identifying who is Queen Mary of London. We enjoyed this event during lunch time, from 12 to 2pm and I was glad to hear great Feedback. The Head of Change and Student Experience of IT, Agnieeska Jankowska said: ”This is one of the most enjoyable events I have attended”

In 2026, we decided to expand the invitation to women in other departments at Queen Mary, and I co-organised the ITS-Women Empower HER 2026. One of my favourite talks was giving by Professor Chie Adachi: Leading in a digital era: a Dean’s career journey. She was truly an impressive woman who came from China, to do her studies and worked in Australia, and then she travelled to the UK where she took on  another challenging role at QMUL as a Dean.  Her presentation came after mine, and I was so honoured to hear her great loud feedback in front of the rest of the audience.

My talk was about “Learning to be your best self”. I presented my journey from the warmest Peru to the coldest UK. My professional journey from being a teleoperator to becoming a computational scientist. Some of the mottos I follow include: Big dream, small steps; Internal Monologue; Practice makes the master; Be with great minds, and you will be one; This should pass too, Don’t be afraid of a No, and never stop learning. As humans we do make mistakes, the thing is getting up after you feel that life has beaten you. 

Thanks to the great feedback I received from Julia Hannoblue, she said: “It was a pleasure to meet with you. I came away with a smile and a bit more of an active travel bug!” ︎

On October 5th, 2024, I attended the Data Science event at LSBU hub in London. This enlightening event covered so much more than what I was expecting. It was well organised with a good level of content for the workshops. I learnt about libraries such as openai to manage a dataset.

I worked on the Titanic project, so my heart went on with the following steps:

pip install -qU langchain langchain-openai langchain-community langchain-experimental pandas

2. Make sure you have installed Jupyter, if not, installed and launch it

pip install jupyter

jupyter-notebook

3. Using Pandas

4. Using SQL

5. Working with the SQL agent

Glad to meet new people who made this experience enjoyable.

There are five days each year when Hamburg, Germany will be bursting with cutting-edge technologies activity. Every hotel will be booked, every eatery will be crowded with hungry people. That will be the five days during which the International Super Computer (ISC) High Performance Computing (HPC) conference is being held.
Due to the amazing generosity of my employer, Queen Mary University of London, (QMUL), I was able to attend the conference this year.
Back in time, I attended my first ISC HPC conference in 2016. Just as in 2016 the ISC conference was unique and again I was both surprised and impressed by the personal and professional advances I made in HPC, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Quatum Computing by my attendance.
From ISC HPC 2016 I was privileged to hear the keynote speech of Andrew Ng, the pioneer in Machine Learning and AI. Dr. Ng spoke of the algorithms that make AI reliable in computational processing.
Now in ISC 2024, I was also privileged to attend a workshop conducted by Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith who is the man responsible for the first ecological AI cluster, called Isambard. Not only is Isambard the first of its kind in the UK, but possibly the first of its kind in the world. Professor McIntosh-Smith’s clusters make computational processing and AI simulations possible. Hence, it has been more than 8 years to witness feasible AI improvements. Another great impression I had this year, was the effort of the HPC Latinoamerica community are doing to perform complex calculations at high speeds and to support our science and research talent across LATAM. Thanks Professor Philippe Navaux for sharing it to the world!

Exhibits

There were a plethora of vendors at the conference and consequently there was a very diverse range of exhibits on display. I interacted with almost all the exhibits, but I definitely had my favorites.
One of the most impressive to me was an exhibition presented by IBM in which they created an amazing hologram of a 3D machine. A great Formula 1 simulation I was able to complete gave me the sensation of driving a real car even to the feel of operating the foot petals. The cooling system Liquid-to-Liquid was massively impressive as well, from RITTAL.

Then, the BeeGFS company offered some great temporary Bee tattoos. This one was close to my heart because the mascot of HPC at QMUL is Beasly, the Bee.
Another was the RIKEN Institute. They wore traditional Japanese clothing and presented their material in a very neat elegant way.

Of course many exhibits had stuffed animals bearing their particular logos so I acquired many additions to my personal fluffy zoo collection

Tutorials and Workshops

This year as in previous years leaders of different organizations shared their knowledge of and advances made in emerging technologies.
Although one can find much of this material online there is an added dimension gained through tutorials and workshops.

Every organization has specific requirements. Therefore it is easier to adapt and tailor a technology to meet a particular environment with the help of these experts.
One can gain a more complete understanding of what is happening in many facets of HPC.
I feel like I gained extremely valuable insight into the world of HPC through these tutorials and workshops.

Conference Structure

The structure of this conference was very much as it has been in the past.
Keynote speeches, global presentations that share the efforts of many organizations and countries that become involved in collaborative efforts to achieve best results, the Top 500 award, the Student Cluster Competition, awards for both new and experienced researchers who work in the field of HPC, Women in HPC, poster competitions, and grouping presentations by category are all events that are well orchestrated and conducted efficiently.

Breaks and meal times are scheduled so that they are not occurring simultaneously with an event.

Familiar and friendly HPC faces

Falling into the category of just having fun was the chance to take selfies with many of the leaders at the HPC conference. So a massive thanks to Satoshi Matsuoka and Jack Dongarra. Greetings to Professor Thomas Sterling from Indiana University, and Mateo Valero from Barcelona Center Supercomputer, two big characters I missed this year, greetings to them!

I had the opportunity to hold the Top 1 award given to Frontier in conjunction with my former boss Dr. Mallikarjun (Arjun) Shankar. Thanks to the panel who delve into the transformative potential of HPC.

I had the good fortune of getting to see former colleagues, classmates, bosses and mentors.
Among them I personally was able to spend pleaseant time with my former colleague Sagal Dash, who is new to the ISC conference, and with Matt Williams who is from Bristol and who has explored the many aspects of HPC as I have.

You can tell that the fresh outlook we have in the left picture corresponds to the first days at ISC, and the other picture in the right is for the last hours of the event.

New and friendly HPC faces

It was very thrilling to become acquainted with some wonderful director, manager, and leader Latino women. Some of them live and work in America. They came from Colombia, Brazil and Nicaragua.
Thank you for the amazing friendship you gave me Carla, Paola, and Tania.
Francesco Ruffini who works with Amazon was extremely professional and approachable. Francesco was very kind and had a great deal of willingness to answer my many questions.

My Presentation

Thanks to lead organizer Cristin Merritt the Women in HPC events were possible again this year. As part of that aspect of the conference I was able to give a presentation highlighting my present role as a Research Community Lead at QMUL. As a result of my presentation I was given the opportunity to interact with people I might not have met otherwise.

Social Events

There were many social events attendees of the conference could take advantage of.
Nvidia provided a lovely Dinner Night. It was a great opportunity to foster internal relationships among customers and users of Nvidia. I was sharing the Latin professional table with lot of laughs and warm hearts. OpenHPC also sponsored a very pleasant boat trip where we could interact with other professionals while enjoying a sunny day on a beautiful lake.

The best HPC hug!

A big hug comes each time one sees an old friend.
This year’s longest and warmest hugs came from Shawn Da Witt, (UKAEA), and Jack Wells, (Nvidia). This is my award for you! Thank you guys! You make me feel special every time I see you!

Final thoughts

I was very pleased with the quality of the conference. My final thanks goes to Nages Sieslack for all his help with my personal growth in HPC and of course a heartfelt thanks to QMUL for making it possible for me to attend. A picturesque addition in this conference was *ice-cream*. I enjoyed a lovely icrecream time with Dr. Joy Lofstead gelato’s group.

Here it is my gallery of selfies ISC 24, nice to have the chance with Einstein!

with all my heart, God bless you all

On Wednesday, April 24, 2024 I attended the Amazon conference held at The Excel London. I have not attended a conference in a couple of years and I certainly picked an excellent conference for my re-entry into the world of technological conferences. 
This conference featured several opportunities for technological education, many interesting and highly informative presentations, and several educational workshops. 
There was also live music and a wide variety of fun activities. I personally enjoyed participating in Grip and Go and the 360 Booth. 

As there were thousands of attendees there was plenty opportunity to meet others with shared interests, many of whom came from far and wide. I felt very fortunate to get into the auditorium for the keynote presentation as I could see many people still waiting outside. 
One of the presentations I found to be the most impactful was given by Tanuja Randery. Tanuja emphasized the importance of IT training very effectively with one idea. 
An organization can have the finest and most cutting edge tools and technology but will not realize a good return unless people can learn to use them. 

I was most engaged by the workshops. I had the opportunity to interact with Amazon technologies such as EC2, VPC, Cloud Watch, Cloud Security Monitoring and Analytics.  I must congratulate the Amazon documentation team. The material they created 
 was extremely didactic, and intuitive enabling me to complete three courses during the afternoon. 
I enjoy keeping myself updated and well informed in the area of technology. I came away from the Amazon conference having met wonderful people, having established valuable connections, and having been inspired to develop fresh ideas of my own. 

I am so grateful for the support of my leaders at Queen Mary University. It is their forward thinking approach to learning that allows me to attend these excellent conferences. 

YOW London was held on 29-30 Nov 2022 in CodeNode Space & Events, a very convenient location just a few minutes from the Liverpool Street station. Everything was first class, from presenters and stalls to organization and food. As it is seen in the picture, the registration desk and the venue were so modern and everything run very smoothly.

I’ve posted very frequently what had happened during two days at @yulwitter under the tags: #YOWlondon @yow_conf @GOTOCon

Speakers

There were 33 speakers at this event. I could not attend all the talks because they were taking place in three different rooms (CTRL, ALT, and CMD). From the ones I saw, the following six were my favorites:

1. Robert Virding and his experience with Erlang programming language, from how the idea was born until the creation of the ecosystem. His team has faced issues, including concurrency and parallelism.
2. Jeff Williams was in charge of the DevOps part emphasizing the use of IAST to do analysis in a matter of seconds (DevSecOps). I admired the knowledge and experience he shared and his very neat slides.

3. Jessica Kerr and her talk Going Deep on Gamification, she really knows how to engage the audience and she combined all her decades of experience with the principles of participating in a software team.

4. Adam Tornhill with more than 3 decades of experience did an analysis of a healthy code that not only impacts on business but also on the developers health. He focused in identifying ‘risk areas’.

5. Linda Rising gave a talk remotely, focusing on the personal aspect of a developer. She made us think about how our own prejudice impacts on our work. I also think that communication is important in a team, but are we doing it properly? Should we trust anything or anybody, including ourselves?

6. Jesse Anderson has been mentoring several big data projects in his managerial role at the Big Data Institute. His message was basically to align the technical objectives of a project with business values. This will generate a clear plan for choosing the right technology and the right people to complete it.

Attendees

Many developers from all over the world came to the event. I had a brief chat with some of them who introduced me to programming languages such as Typescript and Apex (Salesforce). Below are a couple of photos of visitors from Poland and Sweden. Thank you for your kindness

Lovely connections

Networking is important in order to grow professionally, but in this life you can also have a heart-to-heart conversation in unexpected places. I found these two lovely and experienced professionals: Nicki Watt and Catherine Stenson. Thanks OpenCredo, we loved the souvenirs and the sweeties you gave us.

Impressions

I was pleasantly surprised by many people and organizations that made me feel like Christmas is around the corner. LaunchDarkly, for example, serves more than 20 trillion feature flags a day, having happy customers such as IBM and the Santander Bank! I was also pleased to have a photo with the approachable Dave Farley, who has 149.000 subscribers to his YouTube channel.

I was definitely dazzled by Dylan Beattie, the creator of the Rockstar programming language. Besides giving an excellent talk that involved and combined several disciplines such as maths, AI, physics and music, he gave a live concert with his colleagues at the venue. I enjoyed the geeky concert like a teenager! Another gift I had from the conference was a book from CodeScene. Thanks Matti Hanel!

Organizers

I want to thank the GOTO organizers, and the YOW events team! Especially Oliver Zhao for giving me this great opportunity in London! At every step, I felt that the organizers had made a massive effort and it paid off! This was one of the few conferences at which I have seen most people stay until the very end.

How old is the Internet? Are we aware of the technologies that are behind this concept? What does it mean to be secure while accessing the Internet? How many antivirus programs have been developed to protect GNU/Linux systems? These were some of the questions I had in mind when I decided to attend OSCAL 2022. To my surprise, this event exceeded my expectations. I discovered really interesting topics and workshops, young tech developers, experienced speakers, hardworking organizers, and a very enthusiastic FLOSS community in Tirana, Albania.

Going to the event

My journey started on Platform 5 in Reading from were I got a train to London Gatwick airport. It was a sunny Friday morning in the UK, and it seemed that many people took the day off because the train was completely full! Laughs all around were part of my journey, smartly dressed people, ladies in glamorous dresses and hats, presumably heading for Ascot races.

A direct flight of about 3 hours was on time and, ironically, when I was trying to connect to Internet at the airport, I had to fill in an online form which not only asked for my personal information such as full name, email, and phone number but it also wanted to know my citizenship status. Why do they need to collect this information?

The distance from the Tirana airport to the centre of Tirana was about 30 – 40 minutes by bus or taxi. From there, I was able to walk to almost everywhere as the centre is quite compact. The city was full of activities for youngsters, over the weekend there were dance performances and concerts every night.

The event

Two days of talks, workshops and the exhibitions were held on the second floor of Tirana European Youth Capital HQ. A lovely patisserie was conveniently located on the first floor, so we could enjoy our food in the same building.  

On the first night I was able to attend the PreParty at Hackerspace. I could see how the community decorated its space. It got my attention how they framed the posters of previous events and I really felt it was a very connected and organized team. I was so glad to finally meet face-to-face the young women who run the Hackerlab in Albania. Some of them are FLOSS developers, security administrators, marketers and promoters in Albania.

Talks 

You can see the detailed list of talks here. I listened to the presentations made by OpenSUSE, LibreOffice, Wikipedia and the Fedora community. Pictured below, the talks by Johannes and Mike. Johannes did 5 live demos to create a secure setup for developers. Mike shared the ongoing efforts done by the Libre Office community.

Censorship of Wikipedia was a controversial talk that kept us very concentrated for more than 25 minutes. Good job Lars! There was also a panel to talk about the FLOSS situation over the past 20 years and future opportunities.

Other talks were focused on the laws and regulations regarding the data we publish and the opinions we express online.

Workshops

I attended two workshops that were full and even people were stood up. One by Endri: Digital Forensics and Incident Response, and the other about TOR by Klesti Fetiu.

Exhibitor stands 

One of the projects that caught my eye was CARBONIO which is an alternative to Office365. I tested the software and it was able to do calls, mark calendars, receive and send emails. One novelty of this software was the feature of using and editing in real time LibreOffice files from emails. 

I definitely recommend this free software. It was full functional and it provides a fresh UI.

Fedora 

It has been almost ten years since I joined Fedora as Ambassador in July 2012. It was so nice to meet in person Mariana Balla from Fedora Albania. It was also a pleasure to meet Nefie Shehu who is a very active FLOSS leader in Albania. It was nice to chat with OpenSUSE.

My presentation

I started my presentation paying my respects to Marina Zhurakhinskaya  who has done so much during her lifetime to promote the participation of women in Linux around the world. To see my presentation, please click here.

Curious facts

• We had a workshop to unlock a lock.
• The traffic lights duplicated with long strip-lights
• The touch-screen controls in an elevator
• I saw many more women than men in the city.
• During my flight, for the first time I noticed an aircraft going in an opposite direction – a huge airliner was out of sigh incredibly fast.

Thank you Fedora for sponsoring my traveling to Tirana, Albania! I enjoyed getting around the city!

My adventure of attending the 5-day conference started with “Looks like we have a little bumpiness ahead. Please return to your seat and buckle up” when I took a plane from Heathrow, London.

This year, ISC registered 3007 attendees and 137 exhibitors. Definitely, it is one of the most successful worldwide HPC conferences in the past two decades. And, although I am well aware of the agenda and the structure of the event (because I have attended before), it was still like a box chocolate every single moment.

The HPC world-class conference

I would like to share my personal experience and what this HPC conference means to me:

1. The keynote speakers are in charge of projects that are truly transforming the future of mankind. In my experience, all of them have been approachable to exchange opinions, extremely kind and brilliantly funny. You can only imagine how impressed I was when Prof. Thomas Sterling “the father of HPC” remembered exactly all our conversations we had almost 7 years ago. I was really honoured to talk to him again.
2. You can definitely get hold of the newest technologies if you are thinking of implementing HPC in your company. In exhibitor space, the stalls had both technical specialists and commercial staff to enlighten and support you.
3. If you are in the academia, you have the chance to talk with the top researchers of HPC while they are presenting their posters or making their presentations.
4. The HPC ecosystem is covered by workshops run by teams from the most renowned HPC institutions such as OpenMP, MPI, CUDA/GPU, Amazon and many others. They were really engaged and I literally felt how my brain was being stimulated.
5. Every single detail in the conference was neat and carefully detailed: the registration, the website, the catering, the internet connection, audio, video, photos. It was an A1 event.

We are the champions

One of the most exciting moments of the event is the announcement of the top1 supercomputer in the world. Frontier is the winner this year. It uses AMD hardware infrastructure. Although it is the most powerful supercomputer today, the problems of the present and future need better infrastructure. To this end, Intel is developing Aurora.

In my eyes, a really great way to start in the world of HPC is to set up your own supercomputer and the Student Cluster Competition gives you that opportunity. This year, none of the Chinese teams attended the event in person, but they were still victorious online! They are usually the winners at this competition. I was very pleased to see that my favourite teams were on the stage! The team of my university – the University of Edinburgh! The Spanish team stood out because of their team spirit, and of course, the winners from the University of Heidelberg.

It so happens that guys from Heidelberg helped me with my luggage at the train station when I arrived in Hamburg. When we later bumped into each other during a coffee break, they told me that they have been taking part in the competition for 5 years. Call me a clairvoyant but I told them they were going to win this year. And they did.

Congratulations again to the team Heidelbears from the University of Heidelberg

Marvellous members of the HPC community

What a list of notable HPC people from different organizations around the world! The roller-coaster feeling I experienced throughout the event was definitely due to the interaction with the people I met after COVID years in person. Meeting them was a real birthday present to me. Thanks for the selfies to Jack from Nvidia, Ben from the Uni of Edinburgh, Toby from Intel, Mateo from BSC, Laura from Washington DC uni, Prof. Jack from Tennessee, Prof. Satochi from RIKEN, Richard of PETSc, Hartwig, Ieva, Bastian and Oleg from the math session, and Prof. Sterling from Indiana University.

Thanks for the kind attitude to have my HPC selfies at ISC 2022.

New talents

As the HPC community needs to pass on the knowledge to keep growing, I was so glad to meet new and young talent in the HPC field. Thanks to all for the chats, lunch times, cocktails times, debugging ideas, and for the new gifts received at the conference. Innovative ideas are the best gifts ever!

I was so curious about their work in the field of HPC and why they came to ISC 2022. It was very impressive to hear about the new libraries they are developing using parallel algorithms.

Promoting the Women participation in HPC-Science

I can tell that I was able to picture almost all the women attendees in the event. These extraordinary women had to work hard to be exposed in the event. Some of them were speakers, poster presenters, and volunteers in the ISC organization. Glad to see how their institutions promoted their HPC career progression.

The Women in HPC (WHPC) had a space to discuss the challenge women face in HPC field every day because HPC teams are mostly male-dominated.

I think that the message was that being in the right place helps to find inner peace, happiness, and then you can grow. Thanks again to this group since 2016.

My ISC mentor

Having a top A1 event recognized around the HPC world demanded several years of assiduous work. Ms. Nages Sieslack, the ISC Marketing Communications has been demonstrated dedication and love for her job. She is truly an inspirational mentor. She actively rose me to the top-class HPC universe, since I was a teacher in Peru at UNI, she kindly respected my dreams about developing HPC tech in Peru, and my willingness to spread the HPC word around the world.

An immense appreciation to Nages.

Conference Day

I attended the Mixed Precision in Low-Rank Approximation and Randomization talks. I was very interested in their work that involves the use of preconditioners, Krylov Subspaces, and scalability of direct methods such as LU.

HPC Research Posters

The research posters related to HPC were posted all around the ground and second floor. I found some implementations on HPC cloud and migrations from AWS to Azure. Other interesting research we found was related to the infinite and the Conjugate Gradient.

Women in HPC

Today, we celebrated the reception of Women in HPC, present were all people in favour of the promotion and the development of the careers of women in HPC.

Closing up Keynote

Laura Barba and JeffMcVeigh gave the keynote in the afternoon. Laura highlighted the 10 years of PI Manifiesto and the impact in OpenSience. The Intel CEO presented new sustainable technologies towards the Zetaflops era (The Aurora core, Channel, I/O, storage).

Workshops and Cluster Competition

HPC organisations are still presenting their products and services in their booths.

The students from different universities are still competing with their clusters.

Lovely connections

I had the chance to meet people from Estonia, Arabia Saudita and USA (Laura)!

HPE dinner

Hewlett Packard Enterprise offered tonight an extraordinary dinner by the river.

We keep transforming the future of industry and academia. Thanks to the effort and guidance of many people involved around the world in making it possible. This year, the keynote talks were the charge of NVIDIA leaders, followed by more exciting events. This is how the HPC community celebrated their milestones.

Opening Keynotes

The Vice President of Omniverse and Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, Rev Lebaredian, presented the Digital Work they have been working on using different open-source applications in modern manufacturing industries, a fantastic example was presented shortly afterwards by Michele Melchiorre from BMW presenting digital twins of manufacturing facilities. He also emphasised the importance of AI to get more accurate calculations to simulate real world complexity.

The house was full and I was glad to see that tech was incredibly used when the Q&A through the ISC app. In real time, the best questions were up-voted in order to be asked to the keynote speakers.

The alarm

Immediately after the first break, the fire alarmed rang and we all had to evacuate the building. I think more tweets were posted due to this incident, comments such as “cluster on fire?” were shared on the media.

The Nobel Prize of HPC

I have the sensation the greatest winners of the event were ORNL and Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee! It was a big ovation from the audience. I had the chance to interact with him a couple of times and I think he is an incredible person! Congratulations again!

The top 500 list

Frontier at ORNL beated the exaflops this year! The ORNL director revealed the difficulties they had since 2020 during COVID lockdown to make it. It was challenging to support Frontier and SUMMIT in production at the same time. The top tree supercomputers are reaching the exascale barrier. Neat work also presented by the LUMI team!

The Exhibition

Outstanding stands were ready today at 3pm! HPC industry and organisations offered novelty and useful gifts this time such as luggage tags and personalised mat for coffee cups. Some of them are offering everyday the opportunity to win a Lego Star Wars Helmet :O

Food and icecream

Attendees are still enjoying the delicious food served in “batch containers?”

Chocolate ice-creams were able at any time today!

Networking

Thanks for all the good vibes HPC people! Today was a very long and very excited day!

After two years off due to pandemic, on Sunday 29th the HPC conference, namely the ISC returned.

As an early bird I arrived at our venue first thing this morning. This is how the entrance of our home for the next few days, the CCH, and the registration desk, look like, :

Tutorial Day

There were many tutorials to choose from during the first day. Following German punctuality, all talks followed the agenda and were on time. Personally, it was a very hard to decide whether to attend the GPU day or the half day of OpenMP and the other half for MPI parallel programming. Pictured here is the OpenMP team that had planned to release OpenMP 6.0 in November 2023. In the right side of the picture, you can see a lady running an HPC tutorial. It was so great to see a woman presenting her expertise.

HPC people

Meeting HPC people I already know was fantastic! I am very glad to have had warm greetings from them.

And of course, such conferences are a wonderful opportunity to meet many new, friendly people.

The HPC Community

HPC companies stalls

People from all over the world are working hard to make everything perfect for the exhibition booths.

Student Cluster Competition

Students from related HPC programs at many universities have arrived today and prepare their clusters to boost them up for the student cluster competition.

Bytes Size Food

Food came well prepared in perfectly sized individual portions (or bytes?)

The breakfast, the lunch and the breakfast were all first class.

An ISC Team

I was delighted to meet the ladies who are so important behind the scenes of one of the prominent HPC conferences in the world such as ISC which has been held since 1986.

The AMD night celebration

The partnership of Hewlett Packard and AMD organised the exquisite dinner.

Overall, I am enjoying the event. Many thanks to the ISC committee 2022 for the welcoming tweet!

Homeworking was one of the challenges we faced during the lock-down (2020 – 2022). During that period, I was also adapting to my first professional job in the UK as well as to a new society rules in England. As a single woman from overseas, my resilience was tested by cultural barriers and obstacles. Then, I was so excited to see my profile at the @Womeninfusion page.
At that moment I realized that all my struggles had only strengthened my resolve to stay true to my objective: to become an HPC Software Specialist.

Here are some of the HPC events I participated during the lockdown period in the UK:

HPC Webinar 2020

The first HPC event I organised was namely HPC webinar 2020 during the lunch time. I was quite new employee, so I was thrilled to see Prof. Ian Chapman announcing it!

Spanish Fusion HPC Workshop

In 2020, I presented a work I did to benchmark preconditioners on basic multiphysics. You can see my talk recorded here.

In 2021, a deep studying of the preconditioners scaling was presented, I only focused this time in the displacement 3D problem. You can see my talk recorded here.

DevConf.cz 2022

I presented my work of preconditioners using different mesh sizes in the online conference sponsored by RedHat.

Using MOOSE and HPC

Internally, in the UK 2022, my team lead by Helen Brooks organized a MOOSE Workshop were I gave a talk in regards to the HPC performance on MOOSE.

Going back onsite after around two years of lock-down brought me some nice surprises. Here are some of the activities I attended this year at UKAEA.

STEP Showcase

On May 12th, I was able to present what our team in STEP has done in the past two years. The team is leaded by Andrew Davis. Under his supervision, I work on the digitalization of the divertor monoblock. I had a sparkling day! I met Adamos Lukenskas who is working on the optimization of the design of the divertor monoblock in real life!

During the showcase, I’ve encountered more nice STEP people. I was glad to find a rainbow of diversity. Here are some pictures of people from Italy, Bermuda Island, Chile, Brasil, and of course… me from Peru!

Let’s talk about gender

“Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”. UKAEA is aware about, then an event to promote the women networking as part of our health and wellbeing in our daily. This event was hold on Wednesday 27 April.

It was great connecting with outstanding women in the fusion field and those who work in support of other women rights.

Star Makers

On April 13th, an informative movie was presented during our break. This documentary film highlighted the record energy produced over five seconds at UKAEA. This world record-breaking fusion energy demonstration was the work of several years as well as the effort of passionate and dedicated employees. I was pleased to meet in person one of the starmakers: Damian King!

In my eyes, this movie evidences the work of a great woman and professional: Ferrnanda Rimini

From 28 March 2022 to 1st April 2022, N8 CIR organized the Digital Research Infrastructure(DRI) Retreat in the University of Manchester. You might find more about the N8 partnership here.

The goal of N8 CIR is to create a Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research, sharing methods, skills and facilities to underpin the strategic research objectives of the N8 universities.

Topics and Panelists

One of my favorites discussions was about the academia. I met Dr. Sarah Harris who is a passionate biologist who also is a user of High Performance Computing (HPC) resources, and RSE services.

Unconference Activities

One of the activities I enjoyed the most was the unconference. We listed in an online document our ideas of how to improve different issues such as sustainable learning, interaction in a team, as others.

Networking

I was able to meet a great mathematician who helped me with some Linear Algebra concepts. Felt good in using again chalkboard at the university. Really appreciate the kind help received during the event.

Exquisite Food and Impeccable Service

The organization arranged our stay at Hyatt, and we all enjoyed fine catering and dinners.

Getting around the city

Manchester is definitely a jam-packed city with ancient and modern architectures. I was so happy to walk again in this marvelous place!

Great organization! Again… Congratulations! I was very happy to meet great people and professionals within the UK!

Today, we offered an online talk in the University of Edinburgh for free.

Last week, Bella, Lorenzo and myself were able to outline the main points of the talk. We did an online rehearsal to anticipate some questions and answers.

Last week, Bella, Lorenzo and myself were able to outline the main points of the talk. We did an online rehearsal to anticipate some questions and answers.

Bella is a well-informed educator in the fusion field and she explained the process of getting and releasing the energy source using a lithium blanket in a tokamak. I particular liked how she explained the physics behind the scenes of the purple colour of a plasma in simple words to the students.

Lorenzo gave an overview about fusion and the role of Artificial Intelligence to make fusion possible for everyone is the upcoming years. Hopefully in 2040s.

Julita (me) was trying to emphasized the digitalization of a tokamak, and the effort done for around 100 years for several scientists around the world.

I was very glad to see that we reached an audience of about of 52 people.

Some curious questions were raised after our presentations, such as how many tokamaks are in the world, when it will be possible to have sustainable fusion, how IA contributes to this challenge, among other numerical accuracy questions.

Other questions were solved in the box Q/A online by others such as Gulio:

Thanks to Xinran and all the organizers for the opportunity to share our knowledge with more students and future scientists!

A group of enthusiastic employees of UKAEA attended to an event organized by the TYC in the Queen Mary University located in London, UK on May 10th.

UKAEA talents

Michelle Tindall traveled to London from South Yorkshire where UKAEA has a new site with scientists allied to achieve the commercial fusion in upcoming years. She shared her fusion’s experience with the PhD students.

Priti and Bella are two inspirational women involved in the fusion field. They emphasized the importance of the studies of materials, and their behavior at nano-scale level at extreme temperatures. Most of the students at the event have expertise in this matter.

Jacob and Sam are the two scientists working for the STEP project. They have more than five years experience and know-how of prototyping and integration of components in a tokamak (JET and ITER).

Julita (myself) recently joined STEP and the tokamak digitalisation challenge. I am striving for simulating different components of a tokamak. I shared my knowledge with the students.

The talks

I was very pleased to hear that most of the studies involved the application of IA with GPUs and Tensor Flow, as well as HPC cluster Tier 1 such as ARCHER, and some other chemical researches that use Tier 3 clusters that London Universities own. Some projects are still using local cores in their studies, that is the case of the lovely chair: Chengcheng Xiao. Congratulations also to Fabian, who won the poster competition by doing a study of the graphene deformation.

Latino American Scientist in the UK

I was thrilled to speak face-to-face in Spanish (my mother tongue) with successful scientists in the UK: Jorge Ontaneda and Rachel Crespo Otero.

Event Catering

We enjoyed an extensive range of the finest and delicious coffee breaks, lunch, and our happy ending with wine and snacks. Thank you very much to the organizers for the invitation and kindness received throughout the event.

Personally, I had nostalgic feelings towards parts of university in Edinburgh by hearing about CP2K on ARCHER. I can say that this conference somehow took me to the past at uni moments, and oddly also to the future, I had the opportunity to talk more with colleagues about the fusion business. Thanks UKAEA for this!