Interview with Vittoria Rezzonico, Computational Sciences and Engineering Coordinator at EPFL

Vittoria Rezzonico is the new Computational Sciences and Engineering Coordinator at EPFL. In this function Vittoria has become the reference person at EPFL for HPC issues and she is coordinating the deployment of shared HPC systems at the university.

In his function Vittoria meets on a regular basis the researchers of EPFL to learn their needs in supercomputing. Starting with this information she advises them about where they can best get the needed resources. These can be internal pooled HPC systems at EPFL but also external resources like CADMOS, CSCS or Vital-IT.

In the past research groups at EPFL were each running own suppurate clusters. This made very difficult to effectively use the building infrastructure. In addition some clusters were getting old, thus heaving high running costs (electricity, cooling, space) in proportion to the provided FLOPs. Professors have to pay for the compute nodes. The costs like high-performance connectivity and storage, system management, electricity and, cooling are taken over by EPFL.

Previously Vittoria was working at the School of Basic Sciences as facility manager for the data center and as a cluster administrator. Vittoria decided to apply for this new position to broaden her horizons.

We wish Vittoria a great success in her new function and thanks for her big support of hpc-ch activities.