HPC People on the Move

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Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. Louis Anton, but you can call me Lewey. I’ve been commissioned by insideHPC to go undercover at HPC conferences and get the scoop on who’s  jumping ship and moving on up in high performance computing.

This year at ISC, I uncovered a number of unexpected moves by some notable HPC people. Even though some of these career moves are not recent, I’m sure they’ll still be a surprise to a large number of people.

  • Update: Mike Stevens left his long-time engineering position at Sun/Oracle to join IBM Federal STG as an HPC Solutions Architect. Mike is also doing Media Outreach this year for the SC11 communications committee.
  • Don Becker, co-founder of Beowulf, and most recently CTO of Penguin Computing has moved to NVIDIA. Yeah – that one surprised a lot of people.
  • David Barkai, most recently an HPC Architect at Intel, is now Technical Director, Strategic Business Development at Appro.
  • Peter ffoulkes, most recently Vice President of Marketing at Adaptive Computing, and a former marketing executive with Scyld Software, Clearspeed Technologies, and Sun Microsystems, has moved to TheInfoPro division of the 451 group.
  • Well known and highly respected HPC evangelist, Fabio Gallo, has exited the French supercomputer company, BULL.
  • Andy Keane has left Nvidia to become CEO of a Bay Area startup.
  • Simon See has left Sun/Oracle to join Nvidia.
  • Thomas Sterling will be leaving LSU to join the faculty of Indiana University as “Professor of Informatics and Computing” with a joint appointment as Distinguished Scientist at the Pervasive Technology Institute.
  • And of course, insideHPC gave this alert about two months ago, Alan Gara, formerly IBM’s chief architect of Blue Gene, has moved over to Intel. Rumor has it that Gara’s responsibility at IBM will be taken over by Don Grice, currently the Chief Engineer for Road Runner. (We’ve had no official confirmation of this from IBM). And the official word from Intel is only to confirm that Dr. Gara is working for Intel – his title is Intel Fellow, and Chief Architect Extreme Energy Efficient Computing. He is currently focused on the Atom and low watt segments. Beyond that Intel has no official comment. However, rumors and unofficial sources at ISC11 have told us that Gara will be leading Intel’s research for an Exascale architecture. But – as they say in New Jersey – that’s just a rumor.

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

Comments

  1. you missed the big ones, with Mark Seager now at Intel, and Brent Gorda having started Whamcloud.