Entries filed under “HPC People”

New assignments, promotions, hirings, and firings in the HPC community.

New Leader for Oak Ridge Scientific Computing Group

By Staff | Published June 9, 2013

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) has welcomed T.P. Straatsma as its new scientific computing group (SCG) leader.

Born and educated in the Netherlands, Straatsma previously worked at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for 18 years, where he served as laboratory fellow and the head of the computational biology and bioinformatics group, and before that as research faculty member in the department of chemistry at the University of Houston.

He is an internationally recognised scientist with more than 30 years of experience in the development, efficient implementation, and application of advanced modelling and simulation methods as key scientific tools in the study of chemical and biomolecular systems.

I’m most fascinated by being able to describe physical systems with mathematical equations on big computers to interrogate these systems, said Straatsma, adding that computing is quickly becoming a necessary component of research and a critical complement to experimental work which can be expensive, dangerous, or impractical.

During his tenure at PNNL, Straatsma has served on the development team for NWChem, a popular quantum and molecular dynamics code that is currently running on Titan, OLCF’s new Cray XK7. For the last five years he has also served as the director of PNNL’s Internal Investment in Extreme Scale Computing.

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

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Bo Ewald Ready to Ride Quantum Computing at D-Wave

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 10, 2013

D-Wave Systems, a commercial quantum computing company, has announced the formal launch of its US business.

Industry expert and supercomputing veteran, Robert “Bo” Ewald will lead the new business as president and will head up global customer operations as the company’s chief revenue officer. New offices and R&D facilities have opened in Palo Alto, California and others are expected in the near future.

Bo Ewald joining us is huge validation of our business,’ said Vern Brownell, CEO of D-Wave Systems. “Bo is a legendary figure in the supercomputing industry. His knowledge and influence reach a wide array of sectors, where he has delivered state-of-the-art high performance solutions for research, defence and intelligence, energy, manufacturing, financial services and genomics. Throughout Bo’s career he has been dedicated to helping organisations solve their most difficult challenges, which perfectly matches the mission of D-Wave. Today we launch our formal presence in the US and will start to expand our business globally. It is gratifying to have Bo at the helm.

Ewald added: “I’ve been in pioneering technology organisations for a long time with companies that did things that had never been done before and that allowed their customers to do the same. The quantum computers being developed by D-Wave and the applications that will be used by our customers will be an even more revolutionary step than I’ve seen in the industry. People will be able to solve problems that they can only dream about today, on systems that are turning science fiction into science fact.”

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

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Gordon Bell Visits Livermore and the HPC Revolution He Helped Create

By Ralph | Published April 29, 2013

Dona Crawford and Gordon Bell with the model of the computer rooms in the lobby of the TSF.

Over at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Donald B Johnston that computing pioneer Gordon Bell paid a visit to LLNL.

It’s hard to understate the importance of Gordon Bell to supercomputing as we know it today. While he was known as an architect and as an entrepreneur, for me personally his great charm and greatest contribution has been his ability to understand and then communicate in a very pithy, often funny and understandable manner very deep or complex trends in computing – for example, comments attributed to him include ‘the network becomes the system’ or ‘the most reliable components are the ones you leave out,’ which often popped into my head this past year as we struggled with integrating a 20PF system,” said Michel McCoy, head of LLNL’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. “He has also been a part of the Lab’s history in supercomputing, showing us today that his passion for supercomputers and his belief in their importance in advancing human civilization is undiminished.”

In a guest lecture, Bell used his own “Bell’s Law of Computer Classes,” the subject of a 1972 article he authored, as the framework for discussing the evolution of supercomputing since the 1960s. The emergence in the 60s of a new, lower cost computer class based on microprocessors formed the basis of Moore’s Law. Bell posited that advances in semiconductor, storage and network technologies brought about a new class of computers every decade to fulfill a new need. Classes include: mainframes (1960s), minicomputers (1970s), networked workstations and personal computers (1980s), browser-web-server structure (1990s), palm computing (1995), web services (2000s), convergence of cell phones and computers (2003), and Wireless Sensor Networks aka motes (2004).

Read the Full Story.

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HPC People on the Move: More Exodus at Tabor Communications

By Lewey | Published March 27, 2013

Hello. It’s me again–Dr. Lewey Anton. I’ve been commissioned by insideHPC to track HPC People on the Move. The personnel landscape in HPC continues to ebb and flow out there. And in a small community like this, the company names on the badges may change, but faces remain the same.

Here are the most recent developments:

  • Richard Brandt has left Tabor Communications, the third editor to exit the company in as many months. Brandt took over as editor of HPCwire in February, replacing Michael Feldman, who had been editor of the publication for seven years or so. Feldman is now an analyst at Intersect360 Research.
  • Nicole Hemsoth is now Director of Editorial Operations and Managing Editor HPCwire. Hemsoth was previously the editor of Datanami and HPC in the Cloud, and with her considerable writing chops, she is well-suited to step in at HPCwire.
  • John Kirkley is now a contributing editor at insideBigData. Kirkley left the Digital Manufacturing Report at Tabor Communications last month to reboot Kirkley Communications.
  • Isaac Lopez is now Managing Editor at Datanami. Previously the publisher of Datanami, Lopez has 11 years in the high technology and publishing industries.
  • Ken Tan has joined Skyera as VP of Operations. Tan is responsible for the worldwide supply chain and manufacturing operations for Skyera as the company ramps its skyHawk series of solid-state storage systems.
  • Susan Lewis has joined Silicon Mechanics as director of product management. Lewis has over 20 years experience in the industry, and her leadership should be a boon for this maker of rackmount servers, storage, and high-performance computing clusters.

Have you moved or know of HPC folks in new positions? Let us know by sending an email to: [email protected] In the meantime, keep up with the HPC community’s movers and shakers by subscribing to insideHPC today.

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ACM Athena Lecturer Katherine Yelick to Present at SC13

By Ralph | Published March 25, 2013

This week SC13 announced that Katherine Yelick of LBNL will address the conference as the 2013-2014 Athena Lecturer. The award honors outstanding women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.

The Athena Lecturer award is a leading award in the computing community, and is a well-deserved honor that recognizes Dr. Yelick’s rich legacy of accomplishments in the field,” said William D. Gropp, the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois and General Chair of SC13. “Kathy’s research has led to fundamental improvements in the ways in which we think about parallelism in complex applications and express it at large scale.”

Yelick’s was recognized for an extensive body of work including the co-creation of Unified Parallel C (UPC) and core contributions to the theory and practice of performance analysis, modeling, and optimization for the field of high performance computing.

For 25 years the SC conference series has served as the focal point of innovation in the HPC community,” said Satoshi Matsuoka, professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and chair of the SC13 Technical Program. “We are proud that Dr. Yelick has chosen this conference for her lecture, and feel it is entirely in keeping with the SC tradition of excellence and leadership in our field. Kathy’s successful research career and her deep commitment to developing the next generation of computing professionals exemplify the core values of this conference.”

Read the Full Story.

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Interview: Thomas Sterling on HPC Achievement and Impact in 2013

By Ralph | Published March 24, 2013

Over at International Science Grid This Week, Nages Sieslack interviews Thomas Sterling from Indiana University. As one of our Rock Stars of HPC, Sterling will be keynoting ISC’13 on the topic of HPC Achievement and Impact – 2013,

At the risk of appearing self-serving, I am really excited about what I perceive as this period of transition between the paradigm of the past and the execution model of the future. This viewpoint is not widely held but I am convinced this it is what we are seeing. We don’t really have a choice. Technology demands it as it has many times in our short history. Indeed, for practical reasons of markets, road maps, and legacy codes we have deferred this too long. Each time this has happened, we find new ways to address in synergy the fundamental problems that have always faced parallel computing: starvation, latency, overhead, and the waiting due to contention for shared resources. Now we need to find ways to exploit the exponential growth of numbers of cores and the heterogeneous mix of their internal structures and external organization. It is likely that we will tap the largely unused runtime information combined with adaptive methods to significantly improve local efficiencies and vastly expand global scalability. After the brilliantly successful Pax-MPI era of the preceding two decades, we may be reformulating the interrelationships across the system layers in a transformative approach embracing dynamic adaptive cooperation and control. Such periods of change in our field are rare and it is inspiring to be a part of it.

Read the Full Story.

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TACC Features 10 Great Minds from HPC User Space

By Ralph | Published March 12, 2013

In the supercomputing world, we often think of things in tens. Over at TACC, Aaron Dubrow has posted a series of interviews with ten of the top HPC minds in Texas. With a focus what on what terascale, petascale, and exascale means to them and their field, the interviews cover a broad base of application user space.

Recently, a mouse with diminished interferon (proteins made and released by host cells in response to the presence of pathogens such as viruses, bacteria, parasites or tumor cells) was identified in our laboratory, said Bruce Beutler, Regental Professor and Director, Center for Genetics of Host Defense, UT Southwestern Medical Center. “Because we had sequenced the genomic DNA of its grandfather, we knew that the mouse likely had a mutation in a gene coding for the protein kinase TBK1. Without any mapping, we determined the exact cause of the phenotype. In former times, before it was possible to routinely sequence the genome of these mice, we would have spent months and thousands of dollars arriving at this same conclusion. This is a hint of the speed and dexterity that advanced computing can provide. It permits us to exclude obvious causes of phenotype and concentrate on what is new. Our research would be impossible without enormous computational resources.

Read the Full Story including all ten interviews.


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Tommy Minyard Elected Community Representative Director of OpenSFS

By Rich Brueckner | Published March 11, 2013

Today OpenSFS announced that Tommy Minyard from TACC has been elected the Community Representative Director for the 2013 term. The term runs from March to March each year.

From the early days, TACC has been a major supporter of the work OpenSFS has done leading Lustre and other open source file systems development. I thank the OpenSFS board for this vote of confidence. I really look forward to contributing in this role, squarely focused on the community,” said Tommy Minyard, Director of Advanced Computing Systems at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). “Lustre has come a long way in the past two years, but we need to continue to keep the community in the forefront. The more involvement, the stronger the community gets.”

Minyard replaces Stephen Simms from Indiana University who has served as Community Representative Director for an extremely successful 2012 term. Read the Full Story.

In related news, the Lustre User Group 2013 conference will take place in San Diego April 16-18.

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HPC Industry Veteran John Kirkley Joins insideBigData Staff

By Rich Brueckner | Published March 4, 2013

It is my pleasure to announced that John Kirkley has joined our sister publication insideBigData as contributing editor. Most recently at the Digital Manufacturing Report, John is one of the most experienced HPC writers in the business and I’m really looking forward to working with him as we ramp up the publication in the coming year.

We used to call it the “information explosion,” said Kirkley. “Now it’s Big Data. Whatever term we use in the future, I’m very pleased to be associated with a publication that explores this fascinating phenomena, especially as it relates to HPC. Big Data is only going to get bigger, and insideBigData will keep you up to date. In addition to working on insideBigData, I’m back at the helm of Kirkley Communications, my 25 year-old marketing communications company specializing in high tech editing and writing with an emphasis on HPC and Advanced Manufacturing. I’m available for a wide variety of projects – everything from success stories and by-lined articles to web content and white papers. You can reach me at [email protected]

Launched in August 2011, insideBigData provides News without the Noise on Big Data Analytics. As a new frontier in information technology, Big Data is only getting started and we hope you’ll join us as we continue to track its fascinating journey.

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Professor Marc Snir Recognized with TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing

By Rich Brueckner | Published February 27, 2013

This week the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing announced that the 2013 IEEE Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing has been awarded to Professor Marc Snir for outstanding contributions to scalable computing. As one of Rock Stars of HPC, Marc Snir currently serves as Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory and Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing is awarded for significant and sustained contributions to the scalable computing community through the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC), coupled with an outstanding record of high quality and high impact research.

Read the Full Story.

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Interview: Gerhard Wellein Looks Forward to ISC’13 Keynote

By Rich Brueckner | Published February 22, 2013

Over at International Science Grid this Week, Nages Sieslack interviews Prof. Dr. Gerhard Wellein, who will keynote ISC’13 on Fooling the Masses with Performance Results: Old Classics & Some New Ideas. As a professor for computer science, Wellein teaches HPC at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and also leads the HPC group at the Erlangen Regional Computing Center, where he fulfils his passion for solving large, sparse eigenvalue problems.

Young people need to understand that supercomputing is not just a single specific field. They need to be interested in various aspects of the business, for example, the hardware, software layers, the application codes, numerical methods and finally the problem itself. This sounds complicated and exhaustive, but this is also a lot of fun and kind of ensures that working with supercomputers will never be boring. It also leads you to a career that allows you to meet many people, often from completely different backgrounds – which I personally find very exciting still today.

Read the Full Story.

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Bill Gropp Named Siebel Chair

By Ralph | Published February 13, 2013

Computer Science Professor Bill Gropp has been appointed the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of only two such chairs in the United States. The chair is the result of a $2 million gift from the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation.

Gropp, along with collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory, pioneered the design of the Message Passing Interface (MPI). This standard—and its software implementation, also developed by Gropp and company—is essential to the parallel processing at the heart of supercomputing today.

There’s no better place than the University of Illinois to advance the revolution in computational science. You need people who understand computing, math, and the particular problem area you’re studying—whether its drugs interacting with our body or black holes interacting with each other. Illinois’ College of Engineering brings those people together, and they’re really ready to collaborate,” said Gropp. I’m lucky to be here, and it’s an honor to be Illinois’ first Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science.”

Read the Full Story.

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HPC People on the Move: Michael Feldman and John Kirkley Leave Tabor Communications

By Lewey | Published February 11, 2013

It’s me again–Dr. Lewey Anton. I’ve been commissioned by insideHPC to track HPC People on the Move. It has been a while since I’ve posted, but there are some interesting developments today.

Michael Feldman, long-time editor of HPCWire has joined Intersect360 Research as a Senior Analyst.

Having worked closely with Michael for the past six years, I can say with confidence what great insights he brings to the HPC community,” said Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research. “Michael is already well-respected across the industry. He’s going to add a lot of value for our clients.”

Intersect360 put out this Press Release on their new analyst today. As you may recall, Intersect360 Research was formed when Addison Snell and Chris Willard left Tabor Research, a division of Tabor Communications, to form their new independent analyst research group.

Feldman leaves HPCWire in the capable hands of Richard Brandt, a seasoned Silicon Valley journalist who is new to the HPC space.

In related news, John Kirkley, former editor of the Digital Manufacturing Report, has left Tabor Communications to reboot Kirkley Communications.

I’m back at the helm of Kirkley Communications, my 25 year-old marketing communications company specializing in high tech editing and writing with an emphasis on HPC and Advanced Manufacturing.”

We wish Feldman and Kirkley the best in their new roles.

Have you moved or know of HPC folks in new positions? Let us know by sending an email to: [email protected] In the meantime, keep up with the HPC community’s movers and shakers by subscribing to insideHPC today.

Also posted in People on the Move | 1 Comment

SDSC Mourns the Loss of Dr. Robert P. Harkness

By Rich Brueckner | Published February 1, 2013

The HPC community lost one of its own this week. Dr. Robert P. Harkness, a computational astrophysicist with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), died on Sunday, January 27, after a brief bout with cancer. He was 56.

Harkness joined SDSC in 2001 as a member of SDSC’s Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics. With a total of more than 30 years’ experience in computational science and high-performance computing, he focused much of his research on the dynamics of exploding stars (novae and supernovae), but also specialized in writing new applications that allowed researchers worldwide to perform ever-larger computer simulations. A native of the United Kingdom, Harkness received his D. Phil at Oxford University in 1981.

Robert’s extensive experience, knowledge, and eagerness to push the technological boundaries made him a stalwart of the entire high-performance computing community, not just SDSC,” said SDSC Director Michael Norman, Harkness’ colleague and head of SDSC’s Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics. “As one of the first researchers to use each new system as it came online, he ‘stress tested’ every major supercomputer, and ultimately, every supercomputer center in the U.S. benefited from his contributions. He was instrumental in the push from terascale to petascale computing, and was what I would call a supercomputer power-user – always climbing the power curve for Moore’s Law and massive parallelism.”

During the last two years, Harkness divided his research time between SDSC and the National Institute for Computational Science (NICS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he was working on advanced application development targeting prototype hardware for the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor.

A series of videos describing Harkness’ research and computer simulations can be viewed here at insideHPC. Read the Full Story.

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Dona Crawford on Why Big Science Requires Big Computers

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 22, 2013

Over at the ISC Blog, one of our HPC Rock Stars, Dona Crawford writes that Big Science requires Big Computers.

LLNL’s cutting-edge Cardioid simulation, developed in collaboration with scientists at IBM Research, is a prime example of the groundbreaking, globally significant science that can be accomplished on big machines. Run on the 20-petaFLOP/s Sequoia supercomputer (#2 on the TOP500), Cardioid is a highly scalable code that models in exquisite detail the electrophysiology of the human heart, including activation of heart muscle cells and cell-to-cell electrical coupling. Developed to run with high efficiency in the extreme strong-scaling limit, LLNL scientists were able to model a highly resolved whole heart beating in nearly real time, representing a greater than 1,200-time improvement in time-to-solution from the previous state of the art and performing to within 12% of real-time simulation.

In a political climate today where science funding is facing dramatic cuts, this kind of story is important for all of us to communicate. The science is too important to push aside. Read the Full Story.

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