Presenter

Ayesha Afzal is a researcher at the Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU) in Germany. She holds a master’s degree in computational engineering from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. Her PhD research, “A Holistic White-Box Approach to Performance Modeling for Supercomputing,” lies at the intersection of analytic performance models, performance tools, and parallel simulation frameworks in HPC. She also explores multi-core and parallel architectures, parallel algorithms and programming models, and domain-specific languages while teaching tutorials and supervising undergraduate and master’s students. She is actively involved in HPC initiatives such as KONWHIR with the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) on performance optimization, and NHR’s EEC project on enhancing energy efficiency and managing operational costs across NHR centers.

Ayesha contributes to the HPC community through various leadership roles. At the IEEE Computer Society, she serves as vice chair of both the Germany Section Chapter and Region 8 Area 2. She is the founder and lead of the NHR Women in HPC chapter, organizes long-running workshops at international conferences, and actively contributes to the scientific community as a chair, vice chair, program committee member, journal reviewer, panelist, and speaker. She has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, and her work has been recognized through distinctions: the ISC PhD Forum Award (1st place, 2021), IEEE TPDS Best Paper Runner-up Award (2023), SC PMBS Best Short Paper Award (2023), SC Best Research Poster Finalist (2024), and ISC Best Research Poster Award (1st place, 2025). She was named to the Top 100 Future Leaders Role Model List (2022–2025), supported by Yahoo Finance and YouTube, and won WeAreTheCity’s Global Award for Achievement (2023).