Diversity

EuroMPI 2016 is committed to helping broaden diversity in the HPC community and beyond.  Our commitment to diversity and in particular to addressing the under-representation of women comes from a recognition that diversity fosters innovation, new ideas and is a benefit to society. By ensuring that everyone is equally able to participate in the extraordinarily exciting field of High Performance Computing, society benefits as a whole.

Our partnership with WHPC will help us ensure that the conference is accessible and welcoming to all and will encourage us to challenge the status quo. In particular we will:

• Set goals to encourage the consideration of a broader range of people for keynotes and session chairs. This is often viewed with trepidation as no one wants to damage the integrity of the speaker programme. We will not be setting quotas or targets instead the organising committee is challenging itself to consider new and exciting speakers who may not have been considered before: embracing diversity through the introduction of bright new talent that has perhaps not previously been considered.
• Monitor the demographics of our audience. To date there is no clear baseline measurement of the proportion of women or minority groups in the MPI community. We need to measure the current diversity of our community, including sub-groups such as the keynote speakers, the conference chairs, and the programme committee, in order to compare with other communities. As the leading international MPI meeting, we believe gathering the information from this conference will provide a key resource for future years. We will aggregate the information gathered during registration, compile it anonymously and share this information with Women in HPC and on our website so that there is a record of the demographics of our field for future comparisons.
• Actively encourage a diverse audience to attend and participate in EuroMPI 2016. We will actively promote participation from under-represented groups in the EuroMPI program by targeting our advertising. We will work with Women in HPC to encourage women to attend who may not otherwise have considered the programme, in particular helping early career women to consider MPI a topic of interest and helping to retain those already in the community.
• Appoint a Diversity Chair. We have appointed a diversity chair to challenge the committee at all stages to engage in broadening participation.

For more information about Women in HPC and their activities please visit www.womeninhpc.org.

If you would like to know more about our these activities please contact us by email at eurompi-info [at] ed [dot] ac [dot] uk (eurompi-info [at] ed [dot] ac [dot] uk.)