HPCwire's TOP PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS TO WATCH

FEATURES AND COMMENTARY

03/21/03

As we roll into 2003, we have been thinking of some of the more interesting and colorful people and organizations in HPC to keep an eye on. From a whimsical perspective, here are some of the names we came up with: our "2003 Watch List for HPC."

Lee Holcomb is Chief Technology Officer for the Department of Homeland Security and also serves as co-chair of the Solution Architects Working Group (SAWG) which is managed by the Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office. SAWG is chartered to help Federal agencies with activities surrounding the technical design of their E-Gov initiatives, all part of the Federal government's $52 billion IT budget. In business street- computer sales slang, the US Fed Govt is often referred to as Fortune #1 (as in #1 on the Fortune 100 list of companies) and is working on standardizing IT systems throughout. That's a big task and Lee is just the person to drive this.

Director-General Dr. Tetsuya Satoh - Overnight celebrity! The NEC supercomputer installed early last year at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, posted a whopping Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86 Tflop/s and holds the #1 position as the fastest computer in the world... by everyone's standards. The #2 and #3 positions are held by two identical ASCI Q systems at Los Alamos National Laboratory (7.73 Tflop/s each). Not much else to add...

Ken Neves, formerly of Boeing, is now the CIO for Lawrence Livermore Nat'l Labs. Being from Boeing, an early adopter of HPC and sophisticated business systems, Ken has a lot of experience in merging and managing, business computing and sci/tech computing technologies. He has the potential to make a big impact on LLNL.

Winston Prather, Hewlett Packard, VP & GM of the newly formed High Performance Technical Computing Division, within the Business Critical Systems global business unit. This organization brings together the efforts of both HP and Compaq in the global HPC market. Winston joined HP in '84 and has been on the move (up) ever since. Most recently, Winston led the Business Critical Systems HP/Compaq merger integration team. Now that the merger stuff is nearly out of the way, we'd sure like to see and hear more from Winston.

Tom Coleman, Director, Cornell Theory Center. Not only is CTC the world's largest Windows high-performance computing cluster complex, but what many don't know, it also has a remote location on Wall Street; CTC-Manhattan. To our knowledge, CTC-Manhattan is the first Wall Street located effort by an HPC research center specifically targeting large financial problems. Along with Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management and academic departments including Computer Science, Operations Research, Economics, and Mathematics, Tom and his team just might be the folks to call for buy/sell stock tips!

Dr. Bill Appelbe is CEO of Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) in Australia. Previously he was the Head of the Computer Science Department at RMIT. Bill has years of experience in Computer Science and has been all over the world as a guest speaker.

Ralph Roskies and Michael Levine are Co-Scientific Directors of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Several years ago when the NSF abandoned them in a funding re-compete, many assumed this center would loose its luster. The vision and tenacity of these two have not only kept the center at the forefront of Sci/Tech research, but it sure seems that they've actually grown!

Mark Seager manages the Platforms Program for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASCI) Program at LLNL. Mark has successfully managed partnership architectures such as ASCI Blue Pacific, ASCI Purple, and the unclassified powerful LLNL Linux cluster... Very high profile projects and position.

Dr. Chaitanya (Chaitan) Baru leads the Data-intensive computing (DICE) team at the San Diego Supercomputing Center. He won the large-scale GEON ITR award and is helping create a cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences. Chaitan is a real rising star who many have not heard of. Ergo he's on this list!

Alan Blatecky is the new Executive Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Pardon us for a moment for having two members of the SDSC team on this year's list, but they are both must watches! As a program director at the NSF, Alan was incredibly effective at starting the very successful NMI program and co-leading the inter-agency MAGIC group. Prior to that, Alan served as executive director of the North Carolina Networking Initiative, and as vice president of both Information Technologies and Networking and Supercomputing at MCNC (Microelectronics Center of North Carolina) Corp. He brings a skill set that will greatly assist Fran Berman (HPCwire's People to Watch 2002) who says, "SDSC is very fortunate to have him as our new ED, and we believe that he will make a great impact."

Dr. John (Jay) R. Boisseau is the Director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Jay's mission is for TACC to have a strong research and development program and developing a campus Grid. Many consider this Center one of the top 5 in the US with lots of upside growth and potential.

Dr. Russ Miller is the Director of the Center for Computational Research at the Univ of Buffalo, NY. CCR is a small operation that has carved out a very nice niche in supporting computation and visualization.

Bob Graybill is Program Director at DARPA's HPCS program. DARPA is leading the charge for regaining the US's position as a leader in HPC while at the same time revitalizing interest in HPC in Washington... and Bob is at the helm. (See The Earth Simulator above.) - Photo unavailable due to DARPA security policy.

Christian Bischof is the Executive Director at Aachen University of Technology in Germany. Christian established one of the largest university owned and operated centers for HPC in Europe. This center is making significant headway in Germany with regard to attracting new communities (including industry) to HPC. Balanced industrial participation is the envy of many HPC centers.

Jim Rottsolk and Cray. Jim is the only carry over from last year's list, but there's always something "interesting" going with him and his company. For instance, when recent news came out about Oak Ridge Nat'l Labs cutting their budget, Cray's stock dropped 33%... And there wasn't a single mention of Cray in the announcement. Ouch! Cray is always a "must watch" in supercomputing.

Shahin Kahn, Sun Microsystems -- A well respected HPC veteran, Shahin has been named as a new executive to consolidate an effort that currently spans the entire company. Formerly Sun's chief competitive officer, he is the VP charged with bringing high-performance and technical computing products under one umbrella. Many believe that Sun's HPC focus has been a bit scattered recently and that Shahin's appointment is just in the nick of time.

IDC's high performance computing Balanced Ratings - Looking to buy an HPC system? This is a great starting point for looking at how systems rate across multiple dimensions. It's "fun" to know you're #1 or #500, but what good is that as it relates to your specific system environment? With this rating service, you tell it what you'll be doing, and it'll give you a list of systems based on your criteria!

Ron Graham, chief scientist at Cal-(IT)2... the vaunted California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. In his role at Cal-(IT)2, Ron oversees research into optical computing and next-generation networking technologies. He is the treasurer of the National Academy of Sciences, president of the Mathematical Association of America, and he sits on the editorial boards of more than 40 mathematics and computer science journals. He has learned to speak Mandarin so well that he can pass himself off as Chinese in telephone conversations. AND he can juggle six balls consistently, sometimes seven. Only an elite group of jugglers in the world have mastered nine.