bios
KEYNOTES
Thom H. Dunning, NCSA,
USA
Thom Dunning is the director of the
Dunning previously held leadership positions at the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of North Carolina System, the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was instrumental in creating DOE's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, the federal government's first comprehensive program aimed at developing the software infrastructure needed for leadership-class scientific computing.
He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science as well
as a member of the American Chemical Society. Dunning received
DOE's E. O. Lawrence Award in 1997 and its Distinguished
Associate Award in 2001.
Pete Beckman, ANL,
USA
Peter Beckman
has worked in systems software for parallel computing, operating
systems, and Grid computing for 20 years. After receiving a Ph.D.
in computer science from Indiana University, he helped create
the Extreme Computing Laboratory, which focused on parallel C++,
portable run-time systems, and collaboration technology. In 1997 Peter
joined the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, where he founded the ACL's Linux cluster team and
organized the Extreme Linux series of workshops and activities that
helped catalyze the high-performance Linux computing cluster community. Peter
has also worked in industry. For example, in 2000 he founded
a research laboratory in Santa Fe (sponsored by Turbolinux Inc.),
which developed the world's first dynamic provisioning system for
large clusters and data centers. The following year, Peter became
vice president of Turbolinux's worldwide engineering efforts,
managing development offices in Japan, China, Korea, and Slovenia. Peter
began working at Argonne National Laboratory in 2002. As Director
of Engineering for the TeraGrid, a $150 million effort sponsored
by the National Science Foundation to build the world's largest
open Grid computing environment, he designed and deployed the world's
most advanced Grid system for linking production HPC computing
centers. After the TeraGrid became fully operational, Peter
started a research team focusing on petascale high-performance software
systems, wireless sensor networks, Linux, and the SPRUCE system
to provide urgent computing for critical, time-sensitive decision support. He
became the Chief Architect for the Argonne Leadership Computing
Facility in 2006 and was appointed the ALCF project director
in 2008. The ALCF has deployed the world's largest BG/P,
a 556TF platform for supporting computational science.
Rich Loft, NCAR,
USA
Available soon.
TECHNICAL PRESENTERS
Nicholas Ball, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Available soon.
Jason Cope, University
of Colorado at Boulder, USA
Jason Cope is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the
University of Colorado at Boulder. His research interests include high-performance
computing, Grid computing, and service-oriented architectures.
Anthony
DiGirolamo, Arizona State University, USA
Available soon.
Joshua Dolence, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Joshua Dolence is a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his B.S. degrees
in physics and astronomy at the Florida Institute of Technology where he
did work on simulations of accretion flows in close binary stars. He has
since been involved in research related to outbursts of neutron star accretion
disks, the large-scale structure of the universe, and most recently, parallel
code development for general relativistic radiative transfer.
Ed Hinkel, TotalView
Technologies LLC, USA
Ed Hinkel, pre-sales engineer at TotalView Technologies, has more than 20
years of software development experience spanning the evolution of computing
technology leading to the multi-threaded, parallel, and distributed
multi-core applications of today. His career includes technical and
management positions at Dun & Bradstreet Systems Research and Development,
Electronic Data Systems (EDS), and GTech Inc, the leading provider
of lottery technologies. Ed's role at TotalView Technologies includes providing
presentations, demonstrations, and instruction for tools that provide real
solutions for the challenges facing today's software developers. Ed holds
a Bachelors degree in Mathematics from Indiana Institute of Technology.
Dean Hildebrand, University
of Michigan, USA
Dean Hildebrand recently completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering
at the University of Michigan. His dissertation focused on increasing the
scalability and performance of distributed access to high-performance file
systems. His research includes pNFS, an NFSv4.1 high-performance enhancement
that provides direct storage access to heterogeneous parallel file systems
while preserving NFSv4 operating system and hardware platform independence.
Hildebrand also holds an M.S. from the University of Michigan and a B.S.
from the University of British Columbia. He has worked as a research assistant
at the Sandia National Laboratories and as a software developer at several
companies, including IBM, Nortel Networks, and Scotiabank.
Jeff Keasler, Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, USA
Jeff Keasler is a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
where he contributes to several software projects managed through the Advanced
Simulation and Computing Program.
Gordon Klok, University
of Alberta, Canada
Application Development Analyst for the Department of Computing Science at
the University of Alberta since July 2007, Undergraduate student at the University
of Alberta and Team Alberta cluster challenge team member for the 2007 Cluster
Challenge competition. Kernel developer for the OpenBSD project since 2006.
Rashawn Knapp, Portland
State University, USA
Rashawn Knapp is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Portland State University
(PSU), where she works with Dr. Karen Karavanic in the High Performance Computing
Lab. Rashawn's research is in the area of performance measurement and evaluation
for parallel applications. Her current work concentrates on developing automated
and online methods to correctly diagnose performance problems that are rooted
in a parallel application’s runtime environment. In 2007 she received
the Oregon Sports Lottery Graduate Scholarship. Since 2005, Rashawn has contributed
to the development of PerfTrack, a data store and interface for managing
performance data from large-scale parallel applications. Rashawn earned a
B. A. in Health Care Administration at Oregon State University and an M.
S. in Computer Science at Portland State University.
Dustin Leverman, University
of Colorado at Boulder, USA
Available soon.
Amy Apon, University
of Arkansas, USA
Amy Apon received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University
in the area of performance analysis of parallel and distributed computing
systems. She is currently a Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering
at the University of Arkansas. She performs research in the performance modeling
of cluster and grid computing systems, and teaches classes in the CSCE Department.
Apon has been directing high performance computing at the University since
2004.
Martin Margo, San
Diego State University, USA
Martin W. Margo received his BA in mathematics-computer science from the
University of California, San Diego in 2003 and his M.S. in computer science
from San Diego State University. As an HPC systems programmer at the San
Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), he has been working with multi-teraflops
Linux clusters at SDSC. He has been working with SDSC batch scheduler Catalina
and GUR co-scheduler within the TeraGrid community. His current professional
interests include scheduling and meta-scheduling for large grids.
Kenneth Matney,
Sr., Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
Ken Matney is a programmer/analyst with over 20 years of experience in high
performance computing. He has been a staff member of the Center for Computational
Sciences at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory since May 2000. He received
his Ph.D in Nuclear Engineering from Kansas State University in 1983. Prior
to joining ORNL, he was a field analyst with Cray Research/Silicon Graphics
for 12 years.
Prior to coming to LLNL, he worked for Bell Helicopter as a software engineer
and PA Incorporated as a physicist/programmer. He holds a master's degree
in Computer Science from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in Physics
from Southwestern Oklahoma State University.
Michael Oberg, NCAR,
USA
Available soon.
Patrick Ohly, Intel
Corporation, DE
Patrick Ohly is a Senior Software Engineer at Intel GmbH, Bruehl. He is responsible
for development of "Intel Trace Collector", new features binary
instrumentation, fault tolerance, and MPI correctness checking.
Mahesh Rajan, Sandia
National Lab, USA
Dr. Mahesh Rajan is serving as a Distinguished member of the Technical Staff
at Sandia National Laboratory. He has been with Sandia since 2002. Prior
to Sandia Mahesh served as the the on-site computational scientist for HP
at Caltech and JPL for five years. His prior industry experience includes
IBM, Intel SSD, Maspar and Supercomputing Solutions, Inc. Prior to joining
HPC industry he was a tenured faculty at Arizona State University. He has
a PhD in Engineering Science and Mechanics from Virginia Tech.
Geoffroy Vallée, Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, USA
Available soon.
Vivek Venugopal, Virginia
Tech, USA
Vivek Venugopal is a PhD candidate with the Electrical and Computer Engineering
department at Virginia Tech. He is working on reconfigurable communication
and computation aspects of FPGA enabled high-performance reconfigurable computing
(HPReC) systems at the Advanced Research Computing facility. His research
interests include reconfigurable communication synthesis and cluster FPGAs.
Patrick Worley, Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, USA
Dr. Patrick H. Worley is a senior research computer scientist in the Computer
Science and Mathematics Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
He has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, where he studied
numerical analysis and parallel algorithms for scientific computing. His
recent work has been in parallel algorithm design and implementation (especially
as applied to models used in climate and fusion research) and in the performance
evaluation of parallel applications and computer systems. He is a co-chair
of the Software Engineering Working Group for the Community Climate System
Model and is the principal investigator for the Performance Engineering and
Evaluation Consortium End Station, a Department of Energy (DOE) INCITE project
that provides the performance evaluation community with access to DOE leadership
class computing systems. He also serves as a performance researcher and engineer
for climate and fusion computational science projects, and leads the application
engagement activities of the (DOE) SciDAC project in performance engineering.
Recent system evaluation activities have focused on the Cray X1E and XT systems
and the IBM BG/P.
Alexander Younts, Purdue
University, USA
Alexander Younts is a freshman in Computer Science at Purdue University.
Since his junior year in high school, Alex has been working at the Rosen
Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue University as a Student Systems Administrator.
Recently, he participated in the first Cluster Challenge at Super Computing
2007 on Purdue's team.
Burkhard Zink, Louisiana
State University, USA
Burkhard Zink earned a PhD in computational astrophysics from Technical University
of Munich / Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics. He is currently the Distinguished
Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Computation and Technology at
Louisiana State University.
SPEAKERS
Buddy Bland, ORNL,
USA
Buddy Bland is the director for the Leadership Computing Facility project,
which is tasked with installing a Cray petaflop supercomputer by the end
of 2008. He previously served as director of operations for the National
Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) from 1996 until June 2006. Buddy
has worked in high-performance computing his entire career. He joined the
staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 1984 as the system programmer/administrator
for the Cray X-MP system. He managed the Supercomputing Systems Section,
which later became the UNIX System Section, until 1992, when he moved to
the newly formed Center for Computational Sciences as the computing resources
manager. In that position he installed the Kendall Square KSR-1 and Intel
Paragons and oversaw the development and installation of the file storage
systems and networks to support the NCCS. In 1996 Buddy was appointed director
of operations of the NCCS. In that role he has managed the operation of the
computer center through the life of a series of computers, including the
IBM Power3, IBM Power4, Compaq AlphaServer SC, SGI Altix, Cray XD1, Cray
X1, Cray X1E, and Cray XT3. He is the ORNL representative on the High Performance
Storage System Executive Committee.
Prior to joining ORNL, Buddy was a captain in the U.S. Air Force, serving
at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico
and at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. He has B.S. and M.S. degrees
in computer science from the University of Southern Mississippi.
Andrew White,
LANL, USA
Andrew White is the Deputy Associate Laboratory Director of the Theory, Simulation
and Computation Directorate. He is also the Project Director for the
Roadrunner Project and the Los Alamos Institutional Computing Project Director. From
1989 to 1998, he was founder and Director of the Advanced Computing Laboratory
at Los Alamos, as well as the Program Manager for DOE's HPCC (High Performance
Computing and Communications) program. He has been an Associate Director
of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Research on Parallel Computation
(CRPC); a member of the ad hoc Task Force on the Future of the NSF Supercomputing
Centers (Hayes Committee); Principal Investigator for the DOE High Performance
Computing Research Center at Los Alamos and at various times assistant, deputy
and acting Division Leader of the Laboratory's computing divisions. His research
interests are applied mathematics, high performance computing, simulation
and modeling, predictive computational capabilities and data corruption in
simulations.
PANELISTS
William Gropp, NCSA,
USA
Bill Kramer,
NERSC, USA
Bill Kramer is the founding member of NERSC at LBNL where he is the General
Manager responsible for all aspects of NERSC. He led the implementation of
16 HPC systems — some of the world's largest at the time — five
major storage systems and the largest national networking testbed of its
time.
Tony Mezzacappa,
ORNL/UTK, USA
Dr. Tony Mezzacappa is a Corporate Fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
Group Leader for Theoretical Astrophysics in the Physics Division, Group
Leader for Computational Astrophysics in the Computer Science and Mathematics
Division, and has been on staff at ORNL since 1996. He is also Adjunct Professor
in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Tennessee.
Dr. Mezzacappa held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Pennsylvania
and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a Research Assistant
Professor at the University of Tennessee prior to joining the ORNL staff.
He completed his B.S. degree in physics at M.I.T. in 1980 and his Ph.D. in
physics at the Center for Relativity at the University of Texas at Austin
in 1988. He has worked in the areas of astrophysics and cosmology and specializes
in the theory of core collapse supernovae. Dr. Mezzacappa received a DOE
Young Scientist Award from Secretary of Energy Richardson and a Presidential
Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Clinton in
1999 for his contributions to core collapse supernova theory. He was elected
a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2004 and a UT-Battelle Corporate
Fellow in 2005 in recognition of his supernova research and his role in the
development of computational science in the U.S. He was the Principal Investigator
of the Department of Energy's SciDAC TeraScale Supernova Initiative, a national
initiative that involved nearly four dozen researchers from a dozen institutions
throughout the U.S. Dr. Mezzacappa has served on numerous national committees,
including the APS Bethe Prize Committee, has chaired or served as an organizing
committee member for a number of international conferences, including SciDAC
2005 and the 2004 INT Program on Supernovae and Gamma Ray Bursts, and has
served as a reviewer for a number of journals and programs, including the
DOE ASCI Program. He is the scientific editor-in-chief of Computational
Science and Discovery, a new computational science journal that will
be launched this year. Dr. Mezzacappa has authored or coauthored approximately
one hundred scientific publications, edited five volumes in his field, and
has given well over one hundred invited talks internationally. He has also
been active in communicating science to the general public. He and his work
have been featured, for example, on the National Geographic Channel and as
part of 2005 World Year of Physics. He was among a select group of researchers
across the U.S. who participated in the American Physical Society’s
Centennial Public Face for Physics initiative, and his work has been featured
in the national and local media on a number of occasions. Dr. Mezzacappa
is a member of the Board of Trustees of the East Tennessee Discovery Center,
a childrens’ discovery center in Knoxville, and has been active in
the development of science education and the use of information technology
for instruction at Sequoyah Elementary School of Knoxville as a board member
of the Sequoyah Elementary Foundation.
Rob Pennington,
NCSA, USA
Rob Pennington oversees the activities in all of NCSA's directorates to ensure
that the scientists and engineers using NCSA's resources and services see
a unified, seamless environment that brings the most advanced technologies
to bear on their problems. He is also responsible for coordinating major
campus- and region-wide efforts to build an integrated cyberinfrastructure
and he continues to lead the center's Innovative
Systems Laboratory.
