Inside Track: Mark Seager Resigns from Livermore, On to Intel

Mark Seager, leader of the Hyperion project at Livermore and one of the most vocal figures in the Lustre community, has reportedly resigned from LLNL and is headed for a new position at Intel.

Dr. Seager received his B.S. Degree in Mathematics and Astrophysics at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque in 1979 and received his PhD in Numerical Analysis from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. Mark started working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1983 and has been working in the field of parallel processing ever since. He manages the Platforms Program for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASCI) Program at LLNL and has successfully managed partnership to successfully deploy architectures such as ASCI Blue Pacific (3.9 TF/s in 1998), ASCI White (12.3 TF/s in 2000) and the powerful LLNL Linux clusters (MCR at 11.3 TF/s in 2002 and Thunder at 23 TF/s in 2004). He then went on to manage the IBM contract for ASCI Purple (100 TF/s in 2H05) and BlueGene/L (180/360 TF/s in 1H2005). In his most recent position as principal investigator for ASCI platforms, Seager was the head of the Hyperion project at Livermore.

Mark is a Board member of OpenSFS, a technical organization focused on Lustre and other high-end open-source file system technologies. As to what Seager’s departure means, my guess is that we will see some changes in OpenSFS, which has been criticized by members of the community for not being open enough.

Where will Seager go next? Word has it that he will take on the role as Supercomputing Architect at Intel, which would seem to be a great fit. We wish him well with his new opportunity.

You can check out my interview with Mark Seager from September, 2010.