School students' supercomputing sojourn in Seattle
SC11 speaker Professor Robert Panoff with Diane Salim and Melissa McClintock
Monash University has given two high school girls the opportunity of a lifetime to attend a major international supercomputing conference in Seattle.
Diane Salim and Melissa McClintock, both aged 16, won a John Monash Science School competition to attend the SC11 (supercomputing) conference in Seattle in November last year.
The pair reported back about the conference and their enthusiasm for supercomputing’s applications to their peers at a school assembly last Thursday.
Supercomputers (or high performance computing) are powerful machines that can solve complex problems more quickly than desktop computers.
The girls were sponsored by the University's Faculty of Information Technology and the Monash e-Research Centre (MERC).
MERC Science Director Professor David Abramson said computational science and supercomputing were critical for the future of science.
“We want to attract the best and brightest scientists, and I can't think of a better way to do that than to start when they are young.”
Diane and Melissa were the only non-US high school students at SC11, which was attended by about 10,000 people from industry, government and academia.
“People were really willing to explain their research to us, and interested in how we got there and why we were there,” said Melissa.
Diane and Melissa were chosen for their interest in scientific fields in which supercomputing can be applied – astronomy and astrophysics in Diane’s case, and biology in Melissa’s.
“I realise now I could be better at what I do, and have more opportunities if I incorporate biology with computational science and high performance computing. When you put the two together, the possibilities become almost infinite,” said Melissa.