Ciao, Bella!! Greetings from Catania and the DEISA-TeraGrid Summer School on HPC Challenges

I’m thrilled to be in Catania, Italy for the DEISA/TeraGrid Summer School on High Performance Computing Challenges. This is the first DEISA/TeraGrid collaboration of its kind--hopefully the first of many more to follow. Among the 60 students present, there are 25 from US and 35 from EU institutions. A vast range of scientific domains and research areas are represented by graduate and postdoctoral scholars from more than 20 different nations!

On the heels of Catherine Gater’s September 29 GridCast blog post regarding the EU’s efforts to encourage women to choose technical careers, I am thrilled to report that about 20 percent of the workshop attendees are female! Catherine and I know that in most science and technology arenas, female conference attendees often represent fewer than five percent. This morning I read that the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference held this week in Palo Alto, California, reported a 37 percent increase in attendance over last year. It seems as though collective international efforts to recruit more women to STEM careers are working--but we still have a long way to go.

For more information, see: http://www.deisa.eu/Summer-School/