The WHPC session is a dedicated Euro-Par 2026 session aimed at highlighting the research and technical contributions of women in high-performance computing and parallel and distributed computing. The session is designed to build an engaging, high-quality technical program while also fostering broader participation and visibility within the Euro-Par community.

Format 

The session features invited technical talks covering a range of topics in high-performance computing, parallel and distributed systems, and related application domains. The program brings together speakers from different institutions, countries, and career stages, offering a broad view of current research directions and perspectives across the field.

Invited Speakers

The confirmed speakers for the WHPC session are:

• Claudia Fohry, University of Kassel, Germany

  Talk title: A Brief Survey of Task-Level Resilience Techniques.  

  Bio:  Claudia Fohry is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kassel, Germany, where she leads the research group on Programming Languages/Methodologies. She received a Diploma in Mathematics in 1990 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1992, both from Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin, Germany. In 2003, she habilitated in Computer Science at Friedrich-Schiller-Universitaet Jena, Germany. Her main research interests are parallel programming and parallel algorithms. In recent years, she focused on task-based parallel programming, runtime systems, and resilience.
   

• Ivona Brandic, TU Wien, Austria

  Talk title: Bridging Classical High‑Performance and Quantum Computing: Lessons, Challenges, and Opportunities

  Bio:  Ivona Brandic is a Full Professor for High Performance Computing Systems at the Institute of Computer Engineering, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria, where she leads the Research Unit for Computational Sustainability, her current research focuses on cloud computing, edge intelligence, and hybrid quantum-classical systems, with key contributions to sustainable and adaptive resource management as well as green AI.

• Maria Fazio, University of Messina, Italy

  Talk title: Intelligent resource management in distributed infrastructures

  Bio:  Maria Fazio is Associate Professor in Computer Science. She is a member of the Editorial Review Board of several international journals, coordinator of the e-Health Continuum Research Lab and a senior member of the Future Computing Research Lab at the University of Messina. She is currently the Coordinator of the Master's course in Data Science at the University of Messina. She is co-founder of Alma Digit, which is an SME and academic Spin-Off at the University of Messina aimed at process automation in the Cloud. Her research interests are focused on Compute Continuum, with particular reference to intelligent microservice orchestration, security in IoT-Edge ecosystems. 

• Doriana Medic, University of Turin, Italy

  Talk title: An Intermediate Representation for Heterogeneous Environments

  Bio: Doriana Medić earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Systems Engineering from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, where her research focused on the expressiveness of calculi for reversible concurrency. Now she is an Assistant Professor (RTDA) of Computer Science at the University of Turin. Her current research interests are focused on workflow languages for hybrid execution across heterogeneous computing environments, including cloud, HPC, and quantum platforms. More broadly, her work explores quantum computing and the development of practical applications for emerging quantum technologies.

• Sara Royuela, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain

  Talk title: Lost in Translation? Experiences Building an LLM for Compiler IR Interoperability

  Bio:  Sara Royuela is an established researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS). Her research interests include high-performance computing, compiler and runtime technologies, resilience, and performance portability for heterogeneous computing platforms. She has contributed and led to numerous European and national research projects, spanning HPC, embedded and real-time systems, and dependable computing. In addition to her technical contributions, Sara is actively engaged in mentoring, outreach, and initiatives that encourage greater participation of women in computing, helping to foster the next generation of researchers and engineers. She is a member of the MAR WHPC chapter.

• Denisa Constantinescu, EPFL, Switzerland

  Talk title: Co-Designing AI & HPC Supercomputers as Grid-Responsive, Carbon-Aware Citizens

  Bio: Dr. Denisa Constantinescu leads research at EPFL in Lausanne on AI, sustainable computing, and climate-resilient urban systems. In the UrbanTwin project, she develops scalable ICT methods for urban digital twins, including privacy-preserving environmental sensing, to support decision-making for the energy transition and climate adaptation in Swiss cities. Her research focuses on urban sensing and livability. She is Project Manager and lead scientist of the SEAMS consortium (Sustainable and Energy Aware Methods for SKA), advancing sustainable scientific computing for the SKA Observatory. She earned her PhD in Mechatronics from the University of Málaga in 2022, summa cum laude with international mention. She also holds a Master's in Computer Engineering from Málaga and a B.Eng. from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest. During her doctoral training, she completed research stays at EPFL and at Northeastern University in Boston. As co-PI and project manager, she has helped secure over €5M in competitive funding. Her work has been recognized with the Intel oneAPI Innovator Award in 2020 and the SCIE-ZONTA Prize in 2021. She is a dedicated mentor to early-career researchers though the IMFAHE international mentor program and a long-standing advocate for expanding equitable access to education.

• Sophie Cerf, Inria, France

  Talk title: Beyond efficiency: feedback-based resource management to limit computing impacts

  Bio:  Sophie Cerf is a research scientist at Inria center of University of Grenoble Alpes, France. Her expertise is at the intersection of control theory and distributed systems. She is particularly interested in the dynamic management of computing systems to fit into planetary limits.

• Elisabetta Boella, E4 Computer Engineering, Italy

  Talk title: RISC-V for HPC: How Ready Are We?

  Bio: Elisabetta Boella received her M.Sc. degree in Energy and Nuclear Engineering in 2009 and her Ph.D. in Computational Plasma Physics in 2014, both from Politecnico di Torino (Turin, Italy). She is currently an HPC Product Specialist at E4 Computer Engineering (Scandiano, Italy), where she coordinates and leads the company’s contributions to several European research projects, including MaX, SPACE, and EoCoE. Her professional expertise lies at the intersection of high-performance computing and scientific applications, with research interests including numerical modelling, parallel programming, and hardware–software co-design for emerging architectures. She has extensive experience in the development and optimisation of large-scale parallel applications and is one of the main developers of ECsim, a massively parallel plasma simulation code. In addition, she has significant expertise in GPU programming and in porting legacy applications to heterogeneous computing architectures.

Session schedule 

The WHPC session is scheduled for Thursday, 27 August 2026, and will be split into two afternoon slots:

• Session 8D: 14:00 - 15:40
• Session 9D: 16:30 - 17:45

Each invited talk will have a 20-minute slot, consisting of 15 minutes for the presentation, followed by 5 minutes for Q&A. The detailed program for Thursday, 27 August, is available here.

Proceedings 

Invited speakers have the opportunity to submit a paper for inclusion in the Euro-Par 2026 workshop proceedings. Papers should be 10 to 12 pages long, including references, and prepared in LNCS format. Submissions are handled through a dedicated WHPC track in EasyChair. 

• Paper Submission Deadline:  5 May 2026 (AoE)  28 May 2026 (AoE) (extended deadline)
• Author Notification:  19 June 2026  22 June 2026 
• Camera-Ready Papers:  10 July 2026
• Submission Link:  Submissions are handled through EasyChair (please selectWomen in HPC Session): https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=europar2026workshops

All accepted WHPC papers will be published in the workshop proceedings volume after the conference.

• Ayesha Afzal (FAU)
• Marta Garcia Gasulla (BSC)
• Diana Goehringer (TU Dresden)