2019 saw Pawsey host its inaugural research fellow, Jennifer Yeung from Oshawa, Canada, as part of its new high-performance computing (HPC) research fellowship program. This fellowship provides professional graduates from non-computational or data science backgrounds, with the opportunity to explore the development of their career in the HPC industry.
Jennifer, or Jenn as she prefers, is a qualified aerospace engineer who has worked in aircraft manufacturing and configuration engineering. After five years in this industry, Jenn’s career aspirations shifted to research, as she enrolled in a Masters of Science in Computer Science relating to Health Informatics, at Ontario Tech University. Jenn’s research focuses on applying HPC services and big data analytics for astronaut health monitoring on long-duration space missions.
While undertaking her Masters, Jenn was awarded the prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Research Exchange Scholarship in 2018. With this Scholarship, Jenn found herself in sunny Perth as a Policy Officer with the Department of Health Western Australia (WA). Jenn’s interest in utilising big data analytics shifted from applications in the aerospace industry to the healthcare industry, where she worked with the Department of Health WA. During her time as a Policy Officer, Jenn worked to improve the lives of patients and motivate Precision Public Health, an emerging field in utilising data for accurate medical intervention.
While completing her Scholarship with the Department of Health WA, Jenn’s aerospace engineering experience and her passion for innovative science made her the ideal debut candidate for Pawsey’s Research Fellowship program. This unique program is a research collaboration between the Department of Health WA, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and the Ontario Tech University.
As Pawsey’s first HPC research fellow, Jenn worked on progressing the capability of Artemis.
Named after the Greek goddess who protects child-bearing women and young children, Pawsey’s system is a computer analytics platform that analyses physiological data of neonatal babies.
This system conducts readings per second in real-time, monitoring health indicators like heart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure through bedside monitoring devices. This research forms part of the development of a proof-of-concept that facilitates Artemis in neonatal intensive care units. The Artemis platform is utilised as an advanced tool in medical analysis and to support decision-making by identifying early signs of deterioration in a patients’ condition. Successful implementation of this platform will improve healthcare, increase survival rates for patients, reduce critical care patient transportation, and reduce healthcare costs. Jenn hopes that in continuing to support research projects like Artemis, innovative research can be considered and be developed into Precision Public Health strategies.
While at Pawsey, Jenn also worked on developing a high availability (HA) framework for the Artemis Platform architecture on Nimbus, streaming test data from the Artemis lab in Canada. HPC user operational time can be increased to nearly 100%, however, in doing this comes high expense. Jenn worked on how to increase HA models for HPC architecture, without costly up-scaling, this is an area of research she plans to continue.
Jenn is now back home in Canada completing her Masters. After graduating in the 2020 Canadian spring, she hopes to apply for a PhD in computer science. Jenn may find herself back in Perth following the direction of her PhD – she will hopefully pursue research in computing platform architecture in HA. During her time at Pawsey, Jenn says her exposure during this unique education opportunity has broadened her research horizons, and she hopes to one day return to continue her work with the Pawsey research community.
2019 HPC Research Fellow - Jennifer Yeung
