On April 22, 2026, VA-WHPC hosted 8 students as they gave 3-minute lightning talks on their research to members of the HPC community from across Virginia. Each presenter had 3 minutes and 1-2 slides to showcase their research, and following each presentation, we had a short Q&A to dive deeper into any questions.
We gratefully acknowledge Lenovo for sponsoring the student presentation awards.

Thanks to all who attended this fantastic opportunity to explore a diverse range of topics in High-Performance Computing (HPC), and congratulations to the winners:

• First place: Stephen Tivenan, Virginia Commonwealth University
• Second place: Allyson Morris, College of William & Mary

Watch the recording (TBD)

Presenters

1. Olabisi Bashorun, Student, College of William & Mary

• • Topic: Utilizing Threading for Training ML Models on Biological Data.
  • Volunteer Mentor: Karsten Siller, University of Virginia.

2. Bhavya Goyal, Trainee, Centre of Development of Advanced Computing, India

• Topic: AI vs. Supercomputing: Achieving a 28x Speedup in Climate Modeling.
• Volunteer Mentor: Kirti Patel, Virginia Tech Alumni

3. Allyson Morris, Student, College of William & Mary

• Topic: Efficient Perceptron Implementation in C for Scalable Classification.
• Volunteer Mentor: Parastoo Bybordi, Virginia Commonwealth University.

4. Supraja Naraharisetty, Graduate Student, George Mason University

• Topic: Efficient Resource Utilization Analysis and Optimization in HPC Systems using Grafana and FastAPI.
• Volunteer Mentor: Hadeel Albahar, Virginia Tech & Kuwait University

5. Emmanuel Sampson, Student, College of William & Mary

• Topic: Machine Learning in Atomistic Spin Dynamics.
• Volunteer Mentor: Tejasri Anuboina, George Mason University.

6. Abhinav Sai Tummapudi, Student, George Mason University

• Topic: GPU-Watch: An Autonomous Node-Level GPU Utilization Enforcement Framework for Slurm Clusters.
• Volunteer Mentor: Eric Walter, College of William & Mary.

7. Stephen Tivenan, Graduate Student, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Topic: Spatial Jacobian Neural Network.
• Volunteer Mentor: Lishan Yang, George Mason University.

8. Puqi Zhou, Graduate Student, George Mason University

• Topic: Designing multi-robot ground video sensemaking with public safety professionals.
• Volunteer Mentor: Mary Saville, University of Virginia.