Organization: Oak Ridge National Lab
Project: Power Outages and Inequities in Energy Access for Medically Vulnerable Populations
Where did you grow up?
I was born and raised in Chennai, India – a very dense, very hot city in the state of Tamil Nadu where the people are always on the go. I moved to the US for grad school.
What’s your field of study and how did you get into that field?
I studied computer science in undergrad and grad school. Grad school was focused on testing and evaluating containers for HPC to identify the advantages and tradeoffs of different container runtimes in an HPC environment. My school in India had mandatory computer science classes from fourth grade, but I only really fell into it when I discovered Python in high school and how fun it was to program little programs and make the computer do things that I wanted to do.
What fascinates you about HPC?
HPC was not a field I was really aware of till grad school when I met other people who were actively working on creating solutions for problems that could only be solved with an incredible amount of computing power, power you couldn’t possibly get with a single computer even with the best components. People were trying to come up with new formulas and algorithms to calculate answers about the world faster, which let you throw more data at it, which let you have more answers, which moved humans into the future more than they were able to before. Everything can be represented by math, and computers are good at math. Big computers are even better, and you can ask it to test ideas that you couldn’t actually test in real life (not without a lot of expense).
What’s your current title and what do you do?
My current title is HPC Engineer in the User Assistance group in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. My responsibilities are a mix of working the HPC help desk to help users with small and big problems they are running into while using the big systems, developing training and documentation for a variety of topics ranging from “how to create an account and login” to “how to write efficient code for GPUs”, and also testing software before they are made available to users.
What energy justice topic is most important to you and why?
I’m interested in looking at proper access to power to populations that use electrically dependent medical equipment (DMEs) as they are particularly vulnerable during power outages. And considering that climate change can bring more weather hazards that can take out power for long periods of time, it is especially important to examine which regions are vulnerable and protecting and prioritizing power for the DME reliant population in those regions.