WINS honored at SC19 with Workforce Diversity Leadership award

The Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) was honored with the Readers’ Choice Award for Workforce Diversity Leadership in the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, presented at the 2019 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. The list of winners was revealed at the HPCwire booth at the event in Denver.

The coveted annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors. The awards are an annual feature of the publication and constitute prestigious recognition from the HPC community. The awards are revealed each year to kick off the annual supercomputing conference, which showcases high performance computing, networking, storage and data analysis.

“Every year it is our pleasure to connect with and honor the HPC community through our Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, and 2019 marked an exceptional showing of industry innovation,” said Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCwire. “Between our worldwide readership of HPC experts and an unparalleled panel of editors, the Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards represent resounding recognition throughout the industry. Our congratulations goes out to all of the winners.”

“We are honored to be recognized as a leader in workforce diversity,” said Marla Meehl, principal investigator for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and head of CISL’s Network Engineering and Telecommunications Section. “This award showcases WINS’s strong commitment and success addressing the prevalent gender gap that exists in information technology through its hands-on experiences for mid-career women from diverse regions of the U.S.

“Since WINS began in 2015, we have seen an increase in the SCinet male-to-female ratio increase from 13% to 26%. Many of the initial participants now hold leadership roles within SCinet, considered the fastest network in the world. We want to thank the NSF and DOE for supporting the WINS program, which gives participants one of the best hands-on experiences in building during the duration of the conference. The recognition is really the result of the tremendous success of the participants in their roles.”

Initiated in 2015, WINS is a joint effort between the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), the Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER), and University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). WINS is funded through a National Science Foundation grant and ESnet. * NSF 2016 grant #ACI-1640987 and ** NSF 2015 grant #ACI-144064