Diversity in the workplace remains a challenge in HPC and the computing industry at large. The Women in HPC team at SC12 will host a BoF session on Policies and Practices for Building a Diverse Workforce on Tuesday, Nov. 12 at 5:30pm. To learn more, I caught up with the session leaders to discuss the BoF and why it’s so important for SC12 attendees to support this session.

insideHPC: What is this BOF all about and why did you want it to be part of SC12?

Women in HPC: Studies show that diversity of background in a group translates into superior performance on creative tasks. Unfortunately, the HPC field is largely monolithic — women and underrepresented minorities make up only a small fraction of the community. As HPC professionals (and members of an underrepresented group), we would like to see the field grow to its full potential, so we are trying to make the field more welcoming to everyone by sharing ideas between organizations on successful recruiting and retention policies that help encourage diversity. We’re excited to have two influential members of the HPC community speak at our BOF and share some policies and practices from their organizations: Lucy Nowell from the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) in DOE and Irene Qualters from the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) at NSF. After their talks, we will have a Q&A session.