June 16, 2020 — ICHEC, the Irish Centre for High-End Computing which manages the national supercomputer and delivers complex compute solutions to Irish HEAs, Enterprises and the Public Sector announced today, Monday, 8th June that it has appointed Dr. Elise Jennings, to the position of Senior Computational Scientist (Research Fellow) with responsibility for the creation of an exascaling team as part of the European High Performance Computing (EuroHPC) Competence Centre for Ireland. The EuroHPC competency centre in Ireland is managed by ICHEC. EuroHPC is a €1 billion Joint Undertaking between the EU and European countries to develop a World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe.

Dr Jennings was formerly, Senior Computational Scientist at the Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at Argonne National Laboratory and an associate fellow at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago. Under her remit, the national competence centre will operate a programme of mentoring and upskilling for the most ambitious and scientifically accomplished academic groups in Ireland. This will enable Irish researchers to migrate from the national Tier-1 system to EuroHPC Tier-0 supercomputers in preparation for European exascale and beyond systems.

J.C.Desplat, Director, ICHEC said, “The significance of this appointment is reflected in Dr. Jennings seniority and expertise and underscores our commitment to EuroHPC. By strengthening our complex computing capabilities and our involvement in leading projects at EuroHPC we will advance Ireland’s engagement in HPC and Supercomputing, widely recognised as essential for the next phase of digital transformation in industry and science.”

European citizens are already benefiting from many supercomputing applications in their everyday lives such as in the development of new medical therapies, advances in cybersecurity and defence, for understanding and responding to cyberattacks and for improving manufacturing processes. Supercomputing is also used to study climate change and for weather prediction,” he continued.

Commenting on her appointment Dr. Jennings said, “It is an exciting time for High Performance Computing (HPC) in science and I look forward to working with ICHEC on developing the national EuroHPC competence centre. My work has focused on a broad range of data-intensive science domains such as cosmology, astronomy, high energy physics and biology. These are active areas of development to exascale under the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. I am excited at the prospect of engaging Irish research groups and industries as they develop competitive proposals for EuroHPC resources, and delivering HPC training for simulations and emerging scientific machine learning and deep learning methods. The significant investment the EU is making in this area more than hints at its future relevance for industry and science.”

In addition to her previous roles at the Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, Dr. Jennings also led simulation and machine learning software development for the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science INCITE program and the Argonne Data Science Program (ADSP) projects. Her experience includes working with industry partners Cray, NVIDIA, Intel, TAE Solutions, General Electric; and researchers at the University of Chicago, MIT, Harvard and the National Centre for Supercomputing (NCSA). Her work focuses on high performance computing (HPC), Bayesian inference, machine learning, deep learning and advanced analytical problem solving to accelerate discovery across scientific disciplines.

About EuroHPC

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking is a 1billion Euro joint initiative between the EU and European countries to develop a World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe. Established under Joint Undertaking (hereinafter “EuroHPC JU”), by Council Regulation (EU) 2018/14882 (hereinafter “Regulation”), the project aims to contribute to the ambition of value creation in the Union with the overall mission to develop, deploy, extend and maintain in the Union an integrated world class supercomputing and data infrastructure and to develop and support a highly competitive and innovative High Performance Computing (HPC) ecosystem. HPC, as described in the Joint Undertaking “is essential to address a wide range of key scientific, industrial and societal applications, such as for example in: earth science and climate change; secure, clean and efficient energy; health, demographic change and wellbeing; food security, sustainable agriculture, marine research and technologies and the bio-economy; pharmaceuticals and chemistry; aerospace and automotive; cybersecurity and defence; smart, green and integrated urban planning; cosmology and astrophysics.”

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Source:  Irish Centre for High-End Computing