HPCwire's TOP PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS TO WATCH As we roll into 2004, 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 "2004 Watch List for HPC." To view the web version with photos, go to; ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ALTIX(TM) FAMILY OF SERVERS AND SUPERCLUSTERS SGI Combines the Industry Leading Performance Of the Intel(TM) Itanium(TM) 2 Processor With a Production-Class Linux(TM) Solution ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ HPCwire's TOP PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS TO WATCH DANIEL REED Director, University of North Carolina Dan is the founding Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), an interdisciplinary activity spanning the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University. RENCI is exploring the interactions of computing technology with the sciences, arts and humanities. Dan also holds the University of North Carolina's first Kenan Eminent Professorship, the largest endowed professorship in the university's history. Before coming to Carolina, he was the director of NCSA and the Alliance, and the Chief Architect of the NSF TeraGrid. He also recently chaired the High-end Computing Revitalization Task Force (HECRTF) workshop and is a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). DR. LARRY P. DAVIS Deputy Director, DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program Larry is employed by the Institute for Defense Analyses as a staff researcher, continuing to provide both technical and acquisition support to the HPCMP. He currently serves as Deputy Director of the HPCMP, and also is responsible for requirements and resource allocation within the program. He instituted and is still responsible for DoD Challenge Projects, a set of mission-critical, computationally intense projects that are producing results crucial to DoD's S&T and T&E communities. He leads the program's Benchmark Team, which is charged with the responsibility of constructing a set of representative synthetic and application benchmarks used in annual HPC system acquisitions. In addition, he is primarily responsible for translating benchmark results into metrics meaningful to system acquisition decision makers and exploring HPC performance prediction methodologies for possible future use in acquisition decisions. Finally, he has pioneered programs to involve DoD institutions of higher learning, primarily the Service Academies, in HPC activities and to award DoD graduate fellowships to U.S. citizens in HPC- related research programs. Larry was instrumental in helping IDC develop their balance rating metric. SURESH SHUKLA HPC Service Manager, Boeing Suresh manages the HPC service for Boeing for the last 13 years, including the first Cray X1 installed at an industrial site in the world in 2004. The Boeing HPC service he manages also encompasses a large ORIGIN, Clusters from LNXI, and IBM equipment at his HPC site for Boeing. Suresh serves on the HPCS committee of the US Council on Competitiveness. He serves on the executive and technical committee of the HPC User Forum. He has developed, has talked about in US and Europe, and has been interviewed about by HPCwire, on his strategic model for acquisition of different HPC architectures. DR. WU-CHUN FENG Director, LANL Dr. Wu-chun Feng -- otherwise known simply as "Wu" -- leads the Research & Development in Advanced Network Technology (RADIANT) team at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While Wu is known for his research in high-performance networking, including his early work on Quadrics QsNet as well as his more recent work on high-speed protocols for grids and 10- Gigabit Ethernet, it is the latter work and its recent use in the smashing of the Internet2 Land Speed Record and the setting of a Guinness World Record that people will likely remember the most. Er, wait a minute, what about Green Destiny, his 240-node supercomputer in the space of a small telephone booth? And what about mpiBLAST, his open-source parallelization of BLAST, a pairwise genome- sequencing program, that delivers super-linear speed-up? So much for being just a network researcher -- with the above achievements occurring in the last 18 months alone, we expect to see more such innovations from this young trailblazer, but the question is "What rabbit will he pull out of his hat next?" STEPHENIE A. MCLEAN Director of the Minority Serving Institutions Consortium, NCSA Stephenie A. McLean of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) facilitates the increased participation of emerging high performance communities in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math. As director of the Minority Serving Institutions Consortium (MSIC), a network of more than 60 institutions, she works with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions and Tribal Colleges and Universities to enhance the capacity of MSIs in the use and awareness of challenging and cutting edge technologies. Stephenie cares about the social relevance of technology and is committed to the building of collaborative partnerships that will assure that access to cyberinfrastructure is available to all. We are lucky to have Stephenie looking out for diversity in HPC! EARL C. JOSEPH II Program Vice president, High Performance Systems and Executive Director HPC@IDC Earl, Research Vice President of IDC's High- Performance Systems, drives research and consulting efforts associated with the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific markets for technical servers and supercomputers. This research includes market sizing, market share, segmentation, tracking, trending, and vendor analysis for the multi-user technical server technology. Earl advises IDC clients on the competitive, managerial, technological, integration and implementation issues for technical servers. Earl also founded and is heading up IDC's HPC user forum activities. Check out IDC's balance rating of top systems in the world. PETER UNGARO Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing, Cray Peter is currently serving as Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Cray Inc, since joining Cray in August 2003. He leads the sales, presales and benchmarking efforts of Cray as well as all marketing functions including segment and product marketing, applications support and marketing communications. Prior to this position, Peter held a number of leadership positions at IBM from 1991 until August 2003, most recently as vice president, worldwide deep computing sales. Peter is a bright guy and was on a fast track at IBM and jumped to Cray... you might want to keep an eye on both Peter and Cray. WILLIAM TURNBULL Deputy CIO and Director, NOAA Bill is Deputy CIO and Director of the HPCC Office at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Bill is active in the Federal IT R&D program recently co-chairing the Procurement Task of the High End Computing Revitalization Task Force and representing NOAA in the development of earlier efforts including IT for the 21st Century, and Next Generation Internet. PAUL C. MUZIO Vice-president, HPC Programs and Infrastructure Director, AHPCRC Paul is the Vice-president for High Performance Computing Programs, Facility Security Officer and Designated Approval Authority. In this position he directs all technical and high performance computing initiatives, programs, and marketing activities for the company, including government and industry liaison. He directs the Army High Performance Computing Research Center's Support Infrastructure activities including applications development, applications research, and systems environment. He is the Chair of the industry-wide High Performance Computing User Forum, a group consisting of supercomputer users, independent software developers, and hardware/system vendors that works to promote computational science and high performance computing. He establishes the corporate wide information security program and manages corporate compliance thereto. JOHN GROSH Associate Director for Advanced Computing, Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense John is the Associate Director for Advanced Computing in the Information Systems Directorate, Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Science and Technology. In this position, he oversees DoD science and technology activities in computing and software. Over the past four years, he has played a central role in the initiation of programs in computing and software, including the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems Program, DoD Software Protection Initiative, and the DoD High Performance Embedded Computing Software Initiative. In addition, he has been involved in policy issues related to computing, to include export control of computers and microprocessors and open source software. Since February 2003, he has co- chaired the inter-agency High-End Computing Revitalization Task Force, chartered by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to develop the Federal plan for high-end computing. Image unavailable due to security policy. ED SEIDEL Director, Center for Computation and Technology, Louisiana State University Ed, head of Louisiana State University's Center for Computation and Technology in Baton Rouge, is world-renowned for his research on black holes. Ed also maintains a part-time appointment as a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, or the Albert Einstein Institute, in Berlin. Seidel's research is in astrophysics and numerical relativity. DEBORAH ESTRIN,PH.D. Director, CENS, UCLA Deborah is a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA and is Director of the NSF- funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). In 1987, Deborah received the National Science Foundation, Presidential Young Investigator Award for her research in network interconnection and security. During the subsequent 10 years much of her research focused on the design of network and routing protocols for very large, global, networks. Deborah has been a co-PI on the DARPA funded SCADDS, SAMAN, and SCAN projects, and the NSF funded SCOWR project. She was previously PI on The VINT (Virtual Internet Testbed), NSF Routing Arbiter, and RSVP-II projects at ISI. She has been an active participant in the Inter-Domain Multicast Routing WG and End-to-end research group and a member and study-chair for DARPA's ISAT advisory board. She also chaired the 2001 NRC study on Networked Embedded Computing which produced the report Embedded Everywhere. She also serves on the Advisory Committees for the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Environmental Research and Education (ERE) Directorates. MARK GRAFF Chief Cyber Security Officer, LLNL Mark is a frequent speaker at industry workshops and conferences and a Congressional expert witness on Internet security. He has also appeared before the Presidential Commission on Infrastructure Survivability, been active in the Partnership for Critical Infrastructure Security, and has lectured on network security topics at the Pentagon, other key U.S. government facilities, and the American Academy for the Advance of the Sciences. Mark was Chief Scientist at Para-Protect Services for two years. Previously, he was Network Security Architect and Security Coordinator at Sun Microsystems for eight years. BERNARD DAINES CEO, Linux Networx Bernard has more than 30 years of experience in the networking industry and is widely recognized as an expert in Ethernet technology. In 1999, he formed two companies dedicated to utilizing the vast reach of the World Wide Web - World Wide Packets, which develops solutions to bring Gigabit Ethernet technology to the subscriber, and Webiness, which provides Digital Business Solutions to companies involved in Internet commerce. Bernard also founded Packet Engines, a Gigabit Ethernet routing-switch manufacturer that was sold to Paris-based Alcatel in 1998. In 1992, Bernard co- founded Grand Junction Networks, a Fast Ethernet switch manufacturer that was sold to Cisco Systems in 1995. In 1977, he founded Tidewater Associates, a firm specializing in hardware and software engineering consulting to Fortune 50 networking companies in California's Bay Area. Bernard has been instrumental in the development of the IEEE standards and innovative solutions for Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet. APPLE COMPUTERS Apple's entry to HPC came with a bang! Keep watching the pages of HPCwire for future information on Apple and its activities. DR. ANWAR OSSEYRAN Managing Director, SARA Anwar Osseyran was appointed Managing Director of SARA, the Dutch National Supercomputing Center, in 2001. Prior to that he held various senior management assignments in High-Tech companies. Anwar clearly has a strong industry background, which probably explains his keen interest in trying to understand the business value in HPC as opposed to compiling compute power... He's always looking for the ROI concept for within his projects. His tenure at SARA has been marked by a focus on the benefits that the Academic and Research community can obtain from emerging technologies (Grid, Linux, Virtual Reality), a focus on less conventional, but fast growing, application areas (Bioinformatics) and on enhancing the networking infrastructure to allow collaboration and a broader and more effective use of the Supercomputing resources. SARA is now a key hub in the Northern European Grid (NEG) and in the European project called DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications). KIMMO KASKI Managing Director, CSC Kimmo Kaski, beginning September of this year, will be the new Managing Director of CSC, Finnish IT center for science. Before joining CSC 39-year-old Koski has worked as global IT manager at Nokia Research Center. Taking over for Matti Ihamuotila, who had been the previous director for over 20 yrs, Kimmo may be one of the youngest directors of a major HPC center in Europe if not the world. Changes come slowly at this level of management so we have a feeling we'll be watching Kimmo to many, many years! We'd love to know whom you would list as the top people and organizations in HPC. Send your choices and comments to ana@tgc.com. http://www.tgc.com/hpcwire/features/topwatch04.html Ref: hpfli3056