Fernanda Foertter

HPC Programmer, Data Scientist, Physicist, Developer Advocate, Aspiring Humanitarian

Blog

  • GTC24 Recap: From RAGs to Riches

    Following my 15th GTC, I review the week and share a couple of items I found interesting at GTC24. Let’s recap some highlights over the years:– In 2009, I watched with excitement as Jensen announced the GT300– That same year, Leonardo 2.0 painted the Mona Lisa– In 2013 I presented at GTC about the OLCF’s…

  • Using reMarkable for ADHD

    I recently purchased a reMarkable e-ink tablet and it’s done wonders for me and my little “friend” (frenemy?) ADHD. Let me explain.

  • SC23 Retrospect

    TL;DR: There were two buzzwords that caught my attention this supercomputing conference And neither of these are traditional HPC buzzwords. So what’s happening? Everyone is going foundational Let’s tackle the first and get that one out of the way. I remember a time when scientists, who were mostly focused on deterministic simulations, would have scoffed…

  • AI is nothing more than a mirror

    Today some “tech luminaries” asked for a moratorium on large AI models. Kind of like that time that Szilard and a bunch of scientists asked the US Government not to use the atomic bombs they just helped to build. Three weeks later two bombs were dropped on Japan. First of all, ignore the stupid longtermism-based…

  • Pigs and why an “RDBMS is incapable of scaling”

    Fresh out of Gradschool, I landed at this agricultural company called Genus Plc. I was the “HPC Manager and Scientific Programmer” there, but after parallelizing a few of their production applications the first few months, I realized they also had a (big) data problem.

  • Bringing back the blog

    Ever since the music died on Twitter I decided I needed a place to write. Well the truth is my mom has been nagging me for a while to finish this. How long is a while? hmmm circa 4 years at least. She argued that my twitter threads will disappear into the twitter ether and…

  • Dell monitor bad color with MBP closed lid

    I just found this problem and found a fix so Im sharing it in case someone else has this problem too. If you have a Dell U3421WE monitor (isn’t it pretty?) and you’re connecting it to the new (2021) Apple M1 based MacBookPro 17,1 and you want to connect to the monitor while the lid…

  • Raising the anchor weighing HPC

    There are a lot of discussions about how to futureproof science applications in HPC. And a discussion on Twitter prompted me to write this essay. The Problem with HPC Kids Today First, let us clearly define the problem: New hardware come and go Applications outlive hardware Programming models can’t keep up You’ll have to pardon the…

  • She’s so lucky!

    ( What a year it has been. I promise this post is related to Women in STEM but it needs some personal context first. Hang with me.) I should have expected that 2019 would bring major changes.  — 1989 my family moved to America.  — 1999 I had my first child.  — 2009 I got my first job…

  • Doing women’s work: Sewing my life together.

    I sewed something for the first time. Well that’s not entirely true, I poorly hemmed a pair of shorts that were way too long first… but this my first actual project and the parallels with life and even computer programming were not lost on me. My grandmother was a seamstress. I’m not even sure if…