NERSC receives many high school and college students as interns, which is a great source of talent, especially if one is thinking of building a team for a competition. And that’s exactly what computational scientist Rebecca Hartman-Baker did. She pulled together six capable and accomplished high school and university students and built the NERSC Team for the 2016 ISC Student Cluster Competition.

This collaboration is unique from a couple of different perspectives. To begin with, this is the first time NERSC is sending a team to compete in a cluster competition. Perhaps even more noteworthy: it is an all-girls team! Rebecca will be there guiding HPC wannabes Kristi Arroyo, Yong Li Dich, Davida Ngai, Grace M. Rodríguez Gomez, Elizabeth Wang and Ruoyun Zheng, who are set to compete against 11 other international student teams. The competition will start Monday, June 20, and the winners will be determined two days later.

We will be streaming the ISC Student Cluster Awarding ceremony live over our YouTube channel, so don’t forget to tune in on Wednesday, June 22, at 5:15 pm CET.

What prompted NERSC to assemble an all-girls team, or was it just a coincidence?

We decided to form a team of former NERSC interns, and when we thought about the best interns we’d had the previous summer, it turns out they were mostly female. We had a lot of good interns, but since six of the best ones were women, we decided to see if we could assemble an all-female team.

What did the selection process involve? Did you reach out to all educational institutions in the Bay Area?

We reached out to these former interns and asked if they were interested in joining the team. We got five right away that way, but we still needed one more team member. So one of the founding members of the team asked her high school classmate to join us, and that’s how we got the sixth team member.

Do you think there any particular advantages in having both high-school and college students on the team?

I think the best thing about the high school and college students is that we have a diversity of experience. I am amazed by how advanced my high schoolers are — they are in charge of two of the hardest tasks, the Graph500 and the Mystery Application — and they really love to write code. And then the college students are majoring in different things — we have a civil engineer, for example — and have such excellent leadership skills in addition to technical skills.

Is the team receiving any special training at the NERSC lab? If so, what does it entail?

During the school year, we met once a week over Zoom. We did sort of a flipped class format, where they would read and study up outside of the meeting, and then we would discuss and do hands-on together during the Zoom session. We set up a special allocation on NERSC’s supercomputers for the team, and they used that for running jobs. I brought in other colleagues to teach them about things I don’t know as much about, such as system administration.

Why did you choose to participate in the ISC 2016 SCC, when there is SC in the US?

I used to work at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Australia, and I coached two teams that competed in the SCC at SC in 2013 and 2014. I really love that competition, which was co-founded by my former boss at ORNL, the late Ricky Kendall, so when I came back to the US, I joined the committee for the competition. This year I am serving on the committee again, so I’m unable to enter a team into the competition. I can’t wait to see how the competition works at ISC, and in fact I hope that the two competitions, along with ASC, can collaborate somehow in the future, because cluster competitions are a great way to get young people excited about high-performance computing.

What do you expect to achieve?

The main purpose of bringing a team to the competition is to expose them to this great field of HPC. I think they will really be amazed to go to this conference and see all these people who are really interested in powerful computers and how they can transform scientific discovery and make people’s lives better. As for winning — well, if there are N teams of smart young people participating, then we have a one-in-N chance of winning. But to me, the experience is the focus. This is something they won’t get anywhere else.

Here are the names of the girls and their institutions:

1. Kristi Arroyo, a sophomore in computer science at the Missouri University of Science and Technology
2. Yong Li Dich, a freshman at Harvard University who plans to pursue computer science
3. Davina Ngai, a second year civil engineering student at Queen’s University, Canada
4. Grace M. Rodríguez Gomez, a computer science student at the University of Puerto Rico
5. Elizabeth Wang, a junior at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, Calif.
6. Ruoyun Zheng, a junior at Monta Vista High School