December 3, 2018

HPC Career Notes: December 2018 Edition

Oliver Peckham

In this monthly feature, we’ll keep you up-to-date on the latest career developments for individuals in the high performance computing community. Whether it’s a promotion, new company hire, or even an accolade, we’ve got the details. Check in each month for an updated list and you may even come across someone you know, or better yet, yourself!


Tim Cockerill

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has announced that Tim Cockerill is the center’s new director for User Services. Cockerill joined TACC in January 2014 as director of Center Programs. Prior to joining TACC, he was the associate project director for the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment.

“The challenges that lie ahead are quite similar to those of the past — to continue to provide a high level of user support to an ever-growing community of users,” Cockerill said. “The number of users accessing HPC resources via portal and science gateways is rapidly increasing, and we’re adapting our service model to meet this demand. With the addition of Frontera, we will be modifying allocation processes and our interactions with that user community as we anticipate much greater in-depth collaboration with this user community that is pushing the frontiers of science.”

William Gropp

NCSA director and chief scientist William Gropp has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Gropp was elected as a AAAS fellow for his “distinguished contributions to scalable algorithms and software for high performance computing.” The AAAS cites his 40-year career exploring parallel computing, software for scientific computing, numerical methods for partial differential equations, and the development of efficient and scalable parallel algorithms for the solution of linear and nonlinear equations.

“The AAAS is the premier society representing all of science and it is a leader in communicating science to the public. I’m proud to be a member and I am honored by this recognition,” said Gropp. The 2018 AAAS Fellows will be recognized at the Fellows Forum on February 16, 2019, in Washington, D.C.

Art Swift

Wave Computing has appointed Art Swift as president of the company’s MIPS licensing business. Swift has held high-level positions at technology companies, international consortiums, and open-source foundations. Most recently, Swift was the vice chair of the RISC-V Foundation’s Marketing Committee and vice president of marketing and business development for Esperanto Technologies.

“Wave’s strategic vision and compelling roadmap of AI solutions are a true game changer,” said Swift. “Combining Wave’s AI technology with the MIPS RISC architecture will enable new types of semiconductor products, and I’m thrilled to be part of the management team that is driving a new ‘wave’ of innovation.”

Charlie Wuischpard

Ayar Labs Inc. has announced the appointment of Charlie Wuischpard as chief executive officer and a member of its board of directors. Wuischpard previously served as a vice president and manager of HPC at Intel. He succeeds co-founder Alexandra Wright-Gladstein, who will assist with the transition and remain a senior member of management.

“To maintain the incredible computing advances that Moore’s Law has traditionally delivered, new innovations and architectures will be needed,” said Wuischpard. “Optical connectivity will increasingly replace copper in future systems architectures, and I was blown away by the patented technology that the founding team and their research groups have developed over more than a decade. I couldn’t be happier to join this dedicated team and work with them to help realize the full potential of the technology.”

Katherine Yelick

Katherine Yelick, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and a faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab, has also been elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She was honored “for significant research contributions to programming languages, compilers and parallel computing, and for exceptional service to the computing research community.”

Yelick is Berkeley Lab’s associate lab director for Computing Sciences and conducts research in HPC, programming languages, compilers, parallel algorithms and automatic performance tuning. The 2018 AAAS Fellows will be recognized at the Fellows Forum on February 16, 2019, in Washington, D.C.


To read last month’s edition of Career Notes, click here.

Do you know someone that should be included in next month’s list? If so, send us an email at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.