I attended Supercomputing (SC) 2017 for the first time with the support of ACM-W Student Fellowship. SC is the top notch conference in the area of High-Performance Computing. I have a background in energy-aware distributed computing and have recently developed interest in HPC. At SC, I had the opportunity to talk to several national labs and firms that are developing cutting edge solutions for energy-efficiency in data centers. I dedicated my first two days to the two workshops on energy efficiency in computing. It was amazing to hear the work of top leaders in HPC from across 21 countries. The highlight of the conference for me was the keynote session – Life, the Universe and Computing. I love space and astrophysics and this talk was about using HPC to build the world’s largest radio telescope to better understand the outer space. I also spent a considerable amount of time talking to various firms about their projects and have applied for a few positions for next year. If I land a job from this exhibit experience, it would be a dream come true for me. SCinet was another aspect of SC that was very exciting for me.

The theme of SC 17 was HPC Connects and I was certainly able to leverage the idea by attending workshops, exhibit, two keynotes, poster sessions and networking sessions like Women in HPC. Overall, it was an amazing experience from my perspective. I could not thank ACM-W enough for awarding me this scholarship and funding my trip to the conference. Without this scholarship, it would not be attending Supercomputing this year.