The MEEP project aims to build inclusive communities. Diversity is an added value for the team in order to work effectively in synergy. Consequently, a 'Women in STEM' series of interviews has been created to feature all the amazing female scientists who work in MEEP and their paths into science.
Francelly Cano Ladino is a Junior Research Engineer at BSC. In this interview, Francelly talks about her experience as a woman in STEM and as a member of the MEEP team.
How did you become interested in engineering and HPC? What was your motivation to choose your career path?
I became interested in engineering as a young girl. Since I can remember, I was more interested in playing with tools than with anything else. When I was a teenager, I participated in a school contest to build a robot. For me, this was like a game. Then I won first place, and the rest is history... good times were ahead!
That enthusiasm led me to a graduate degree in Electronic Engineering and motivated me to complete a master’s degree. Engineering is a field where you are constantly learning and improving your skills, and that is one of the primary reasons I love it. The way you see the world changes, you start to ask questions about how things work. The stuff you develop could impact the world, and you are having fun while you are doing it. I think this is the best experience of my life.
Life brought me to the HPC world by working in the MEEP project and I can't be any happier. Working on HPC is one of the most exciting ways to develop a vast and incredible field of the engineering world.
What do you want to learn and develop while working on MEEP?
On one side, I would like to continue working on the FPGA-to-FPGA communication and multi-gigabit transceivers, which is a field with much to explore and not yet deepened. The advantages are many. We can implement different high-bandwidth interfaces in FPGA projects—this kind of implementation for high-bandwidth transfers between devices.
On the other side, I would like to learn more in depth about ACME architecture. There are many options to investigate—for example, the VAS tile cores, Cache hierarchy, NoC, compilers, and many more. I would like to understand better the behavior of scalar and vectorial cores.
In general, the MEEP project can offer many ways to achieve our goals. We are working in many fields. As you go along, in different tasks, we are increasing our personal and teamwork achievements. This is the perfect place to discover new skills in other fields that you didn’t know about yet. I am so proud and happy to belong to the MEEP family and grow professionally and personally.
Where and how do you see MEEP technology been developed in 5 years from now?
In five years, I see the MEEP project being a main reference of the investigation in the emulation platform for Exascale accelerators for HW/SW, thus providing servers to the academic and industries areas. Moreover, the ACME architecture can become a complete chiplet, providing its software tools to different HPC applications.
I also believe that the MEEP Project will be considered as an important developer of new applications for RISC-V processors by increasing the level of investigation and improving new areas and by trying to be at the forefront of the new investigations.