Former NERSC Intern Honored by the National Center for Women & IT

Elizabeth Wang, a summer intern at NERSC in 2015 and a member of NERSC’s first student cluster competition team at ISC 2016, has been selected as a 2017 National Honorable Mention recipient of the National Center for Women and IT Award for Aspirations in Computing.

Wang, currently a senior at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, Calif., has been programming since she was eight years old and competing in science fair contests since she was in fifth grade. During her internship at NERSC, she was a team member on the Compact Cori project and designed a virtual, distributed cluster made from mobile devices that can join/leave in real time. Wang created two simulations for the virtual cluster: a benchmark to gauge performance speed by estimating the time needed to calculate the value of pi and a molecular dynamics simulation.

As a member of NERSC's all-female student cluster competition team at ISC 2016, Wang competed in the Graph500 benchmark and the Mystery App events with another teammate and practiced on NERSC's Edison cluster. She will participate again this year with the NERSC team at ISC 2017.

During the summer of 2016, Wang interned at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Computing Division, where she benchmarked GPU acceleration and worked with the Hyperion cluster. She is currently working on a self-driving car algorithm that she hopes to patent in the future and is looking forward to earning a bachelor's and a master's degree in computer science and eventually working in high-performance computing at a government laboratory. As an ardent animal lover, one of Wang’s goals is to end animal testing by creating parallel human-cell simulations run on clusters.