Entries filed under “HPC People on the Move”

Abrahamson to Take CIO Role at PNNL

By Staff | Published January 7, 2013

Brian Abrahamson, an IT veteran with experience in the public and private energy sectors, has been named chief information officer (CIO) for the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The CIO reports to the laboratory director and directs the deployment, use, management and protection of information technology to increase PNNL’s research productivity and operational effectiveness. Abrahamson is replacing Jerry Johnson, who will take on a new role with the Department of Energy.

Abrahamson joined PNNL in 2011 and has served as chief enterprise architect, responsible for leading a laboratory-wide improvement agenda that enhanced PNNL’s information technology systems.

Prior to joining PNNL, Abrahamson acted as CIO and chief architect for San Francisco-based Pacific Gas and Electric Company, one of the nation’s largest investor-owned utilities. He also spent 10 years with the management consulting organisation Accenture and has several years’ experience working in industry.

Commenting on Johnson’s move, PNNL director Mike Kluse said, “This is a win for DOE, PNNL and all of the national laboratories. DOE is getting a senior advisor with recent, relevant experience in cyber security, and he will help provide solutions that will guide DOE’s future information technology environment.”

This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

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Cray Brings on Bill Boas and System Fabrics Works Engineering Team

By Rich Brueckner | Published October 18, 2012

This week Cray announced it has strengthened its storage and data management team with the addition of key individuals from SystemFabricWorks (SFW), a recognized leader in storage interconnect solutions and software. Through an agreement with SFW, Cray has hired the majority of SFW’s employees as Cray continues its leadership in developing and deploying high-performance production parallel file system solutions for the HPC and Big Data marketplaces.

Expanding our team with some of the top storage and Infiniband engineering experts is an important step in continuing to drive Cray’s growth in the storage market,” said Barry Bolding, Cray’s vice president of storage and data management. “Our expanding base of HPC storage customers have demanding integration and deployment requirements and are looking for vendors like Cray that have experience in both storage and storage interconnects such as Infiniband. At Cray, we are creating a storage team with the design expertise and best practices that are critical to the performance, management and scalability of parallel storage systems over time.”

Among the SFW employees now working at Cray are Robert (Bob) Pearson, the former CEO of SFW, and Bill Boas, previously the vice president of business development for SFW and a co-founder of the Open Fabric Alliance. A number of highly-skilled engineers from SFW have also joined Cray’s storage and data management team, significantly enhancing Cray’s expertise in Lustre-based storage solutions. SFW is continuing its operations with a new management team. Read the Full Story.

Update: Bill Boas called to let us know that SFW is still going strong with Kevin J. Moran as President & CEO. The company has a number of interesting projects ongoing in the HPC and Cloud space, including a new server based on the Calxeda EnergyCore platform. Boas will continue on at SFW on a part-time basis.

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Zacharia Leaves ORNL for Qatar Foundation

By Rich Brueckner | Published August 1, 2012

After 26 years of service, Thomas Zacharia is leaving Oak Ridge National Laboratory to take a leadership position at a science and education foundation based in Doha, Qatar. In his new position starting Sept. 1, Zacharia will become executive vice president of research and development for the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.

Zacharia will help the foundation make the most of a historic investment in “transformational” scientific research,” said Faisal Al-Suwaidi, Qatar Foundation president of research and development. “As a world-class scientist who has already made a mark in the research community, Dr. Zacharia brings tremendous experience in managing and operating a major national research enterprise, developing multidisciplinary research and development programs at the national and international scale, and the broad international research network.”

Read the Full Story.

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Rick McMullen Appointed Director of the Arkansas HPC Center

By Rich Brueckner | Published July 31, 2012

Rick McMullen, former director of research computing at the University of Kansas, has been appointed director of the Arkansas High Performance Computing Center. His appointment begins Aug. 13.

McMullen has devoted much attention during his career to setting the agenda for adoption and deployment of new technologies and services for research and teaching based on emerging technologies. He has been heavily involved in state and regional high-performance networks for research and education and has helped build state and regional high-performance computing centers to support multi-institutional collaborations for economic growth.

Read the Full Story.

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Bo Ewald Takes the Helm at LiquidCool Solutions

By Rich Brueckner | Published July 27, 2012

Former SGI CEO Bo Ewald has taken over as CEO of LiquidCool Solutions, formerly known as HardCore Computer.

In what is being described as a reboot of the company, Ewald will transition the company from being a direct manufacturer of high-end, liquid-cooled desktop computers and servers. Instead, the company will focus on selling its liquid cooling technology to other system vendors. And while LiquidCool will continue to service the Hardcore machines being the used by customers, it is no longer in the computer manufacturing business.

Ewald has a storied history in HPC with leadership roles at LANL, Cray Research, Linux Networks, and of course SGI, which he left in 2009 before the company was acquired by Rackable. His experience and wide industry network will undoubtedly be key to getting the best possible partners for LiquidCool. Read the Full Story.

On behalf of insideHPC, I’d like to say, “Good luck, Bo. And welcome back!”

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Steve Scott Joins Nvidia as CTO for Tesla Business Unit

By Rich Brueckner | Published August 10, 2011

Today NVIDIA announced it plans to appoint Steve Scott, a longtime Cray Inc. executive, to help spearhead the company’s high performance computing initiative. As chief technology officer (CTO) for NVIDIA’s Tesla™ business unit, Scott will be responsible for the Tesla roadmap and architecture.

There are few people on the planet that have Steve’s deep system level understanding of high performance computing,” said Bill Dally, NVIDIA’s chief scientist. “Steve’s decision to join NVIDIA is a resounding endorsement that GPU accelerated computing is the future of HPC. He will play a central role in architecting the world’s most powerful supercomputers.”

Read the Full Story.

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David Brown Takes Over Horst Simon’s Former Spot at LBNL

By Rich Brueckner | Published July 7, 2011

This week LBNL announced that David Brown, who is currently the Deputy Associate Director for Science and Technology in Lawrence Livermore’s Computation Directorate has been named as the new director for the Computational Research Division (CRD). Brown will fill the seat vacated by Horst Simon, who stepped down recently to become Deputy Director of Berkeley Lab.

As computational science plays an increasingly important role in meeting DOE’s research mission, the Computational Research Division Director is a key position at Berkeley Lab,” said Berkeley Lab Director Paul Alivisatos. “With the appointment of David Brown, CRD will be well positioned to maintain and grow our successful programs in applied math, computer science, computational science and networking. We are fortunate to have someone of David’s caliber lead our efforts in these critical fields.”

Brown’s research expertise and interests lie in the development and analysis of algorithms for the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs). At LLNL, he led the highly successful Overture project, which in 2001 was named one of the 100 “most important discoveries in the past 25 years” by the DOE Office of Science.