Presenter

Suzanne Parete-Koon is a high performance computing engineer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She is responsible for supporting scientific applications running on Frontier and other HPC resources at ORNL.

After earning her PhD in astrophysics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2008, Suzanne embarked on a unique career journey. She spent a year as a foreign affairs officer with the U.S. Department of State, thanks to an American Institute of Physics diplomacy fellowship. In 2009, she joined the Scientific Computing Group at OLCF as a post-doc. During this period, her work primarily involved developing computational simulations of the nuclear reactions that power stars and stellar explosions.

Suzanne's passion for fostering collaboration and support in computational science eventually led her to a different role. She now serves as an OLCF user support specialist and HPC engineer, actively collaborating with OLCF staff to innovate and enhance user experiences.

Currently, Suzanne leads the training programs for the Frontier exascale supercomputer and also CASS HPC Workforce Development Action Group, which focuses on building inclusive and equitable workforce development and retention for high performance computing in the Department of Energy National Labs.