September 1, 2020

HPC Career Notes: September 2020 Edition

Mariana Iriarte

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!


Allan Cantle

Allan Cantle, chief executive officer of Nallasway Inc., joins the OpenCAPI Consortium under the newly created role of OpenCAPI Consortium technical director and board advisor. Cantle founded hardware and software firm Nallatech, which focused on developing field-programmable gate array technology.

At Nallatech, he held the position of CEO with absolute P&L responsibility.  He helped to grow the company’s revenue at a 50% CAGR.  As president, he was responsible for the product roadmap. Cantle also serves on standard bodies workgroups.

ColdQuanta Strategic Advisory Board

ColdQuanta appointed five U.S. government and industry executives as board members to its newly created strategic advisory board. The board chair will be held by Donald Kerr, chairman of the Board of Trustees of The MITRE Corp. Fran Fleisch, Sue Gordon, Jeffrey K. Harris, and John Johnson were also selected for the board. For more on each member, click here.

“ColdQuanta’s new strategic advisory board will help guide our business strategy and technology roadmap, and provide important input on how cold atom quantum technology can best be applied to solve problems of national and global importance,” said Bo Ewald, CEO of ColdQuanta. “We are truly honored that each of these distinguished individuals has agreed to join our board and bring their expertise and experience to contribute to the success of ColdQuanta.”

Victoria Coleman

Victoria Coleman joins the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as its new director. She is the third woman to hold the role and will oversee DARPA’s $3.5 billion annual budget. Since 2015, Coleman has served on DARPA’s Microsystems Exploratory Board and the Defense Science Board and has served as the chief executive officer at Atlas AI prior to being appointed as DARPA’s director.

Coleman is a member of the technology advisory board at Lockheed Martin Corp. and has held executive roles at the former Hewlett-Packard, Intel Corp., Samsung Electronics, and SRI International.

James Davis

Former vice president and manufacturing operations of Boeing, James B. Davis joins Quantum Computing Inc.’s technical advisory board. At Boeing, he managed the industrial engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing teams, who were responsible for the production of 42 aircraft per month.

“I’m fortunate to join QCI at this very exciting time as it begins the commercial launch of Mukai,” said Davis. “Commercial and government investment in quantum computing continues to gain momentum, as industrial manufacturers discover that adopting quantum technologies could help them maintain a competitive edge. Mukai enables companies like Boeing and others to leverage the power of quantum technologies with its best-in-class performance.”

Terry Denzer and Gerhard Esterhuizen

Rescale announced the addition of Terry Denzer and Gerhard Esterhuizen as chief revenue officer and vice president of engineering, respectively. Denzer is a 25-year executive with sales leadership experience. He will be responsible for the company’s field operations, sales, and partner initiatives.

Esterhuizen will manage Rescale’s HPC platform technologies. He brings over more than 20 years of engineering experience. Before Rescale, he held the role of senior director of engineering at Segment and was Cloudflare’s first engineering manager.

Bill Dorland

Bill Dorland was selected for the role of associate laboratory director for computational science at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Dorland, a computational physicist at the University of Maryland, will be responsible for PPPL’s initiative to develop computational science into a new fundamental capability that delivers high-performance computing support.

“Princeton is the premier national lab in fusion energy and the premier plasma physics program in the U.S., so the invitation to be part of that was very exciting,” Dorland said. “PPPL has decades of success in computational physics, science, and engineering. This is more about reenergizing that capability.”

Lynn Dugle

Micron Technology, Inc. appointed Lynn Dugle to its board of directors. Dugle has over a 30-year career in defense, intelligence, and high-tech industries. Dugle has served as chief executive officer, president, and chair of the board of directors at Engility. In 2019, She also led the sale of the company to Science Applications International Corporation.

Before Engility, she had several leadership roles at Raytheon. Dugle currently serves on the board of directors at State Street Corporation, TE Connectivity, and KBR.

Hiromasa Ebi

Cerebras Systems appointed Hiromasa Ebi as country manager to head the newly created subsidiary named Cerebras Systems G.K. in Tokyo, Japan. Ebi is has a 30-year career in IT, especially in data management infrastructure. Before joining the company, he was the chief executive officer of Cohesity Japan KK.

“I am honored to join the Cerebras team and bring world-class AI compute to industries and companies across Japan,” said Ebi. “The Cerebras CS-1 is one of the fastest AI computers in existence. I look forward to helping bring this pioneering technology to the Japanese market and solving some of the largest AI problems in Japan.”

Mark Menezes

The U.S. Senate confirmed Mark W. Menezes as the next deputy secretary of Energy with a bipartisan vote of 79-16. Mark W. Menezes served as the under secretary of Energy under Secretary Dan Brouillette and former Secretary Rick Perry before he was appointed to the role deputy secretary of Energy.

“I am honored that President Trump and the members of the U.S. Senate have placed their confidence in me to serve as the Deputy Secretary of Energy,” Menezes said. “I will continue to work alongside Secretary Brouillette to advocate for the use of all of America’s abundant energy resources, broadening our supercomputing capabilities and innovation at our National Labs, and providing a strong national defense through a modern and dynamic National Nuclear Security Administration.”

Paul Mockapetris

Paul Mockapetris received the 2019 Association for Computing Machinery Software System Award for developing the Domain Name System, which delivers the global distributed directory service. In 1972, Mockapetris joined the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute and had held several roles, including director of the High Performance Computing and Communications Division.

ACM recognizes individuals from an institution that create a software system that has lasting effects. Mockapetris will receive a price of $35, 000.

National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. Department of Energy announced the members of the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee. Committee members will be responsible for advising the Administration in quantum information science.

Dr. Charles Tahan and Dr. Kathryn Ann Moler will co-chair the NQIAC. Tahas currently serves as the OSTP assistant director for Quantum Information Science and director of the National Quantum Coordination Office. Moler is the dean of research at Stanford University. For the full list of members, click here.

O’Donnell Fellows

The Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences selected Georgia Stuart, Dr. Ahmed Abdelkader, Dr. Joshua A. Leveillee, and Dr. Rudy Geelen as fellows for the Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Engineering and Sciences.

Each fellow will receive annual stipends of $65,000, UT Austin employee benefits, and relocation expenses. For more on each fellow, click here.

Clinton O’ Leary

Submer announced the addition of Clinton O’ Leary as regional director of the Middle East and Africa. O’ Leary brings more than 12 years of experience working in the Middle East and Africa and has 22 years in the technology industry.

O’ Leary has represented various IT organizations, including Dimension Data, Dell, Microsoft, Citrix, Red Hat, and Cisco as an advisor and consultant. Most recently, he has represented Lenovo Data Center Group in the Middle East.

George Scalise

George M. Scalise received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater Purdue University for his contributions to the semiconductor industry. Scalise has been a leader in the industry for over 45 years, developing products for companies including Motorola Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices, Maxtor Corp., National Semiconductor Corp., and Apple Computer. He also was a founding member of the Semiconductor Research Corp.

Scalise received the award via a videoconference on August 17. Mark Lundstrom, acting dean of the College of Engineering, and Eckhard Groll, the William E. and Florence E. Perry Head of Mechanical Engineering, presented the award.

Larry Smarr

Dr. Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, joins Kazuhm as the company’s technology evangelist.

“Capital investments in on-premise computers are often underutilized in many organizations because of the lack of a secure and flexible software infrastructure that can make full use of the capability of today’s distributed systems,” said Dr. Smarr. “I am looking forward to partnering with Kazuhm to help the IT community across sectors more fully utilize the hardware assets they have paid for, as well as to extend to external cloud resources to meet the growing demand for compute capacity.”

See our feature coverage.

Krishna Thatipelli

Tachyum Inc. promoted Krishna Thatipelli to senior director of Hardware Design Engineering. Thatipelli has a 20-year career in developing high performance microprocessros and ASICs. He was selected for his contributions to the company’s Prodigy solution.

“I feel very fortunate to have a strong and talented team backing my work as we take on the challenge of bringing the world’s first universal processor to life,” said Thatipelli. “It is indeed a unique opportunity as I have never seen anything like Prodigy in my 20 years working in the industry, even when working at some of the biggest names in processors like Intel, AMD, ARM and SPARC. I’m appreciative of the fact that my value has been seen here at Tachyum and am please to have been recognized in this way with a promotion. I have high confidence that we will complete our remaining asks on schedule to ensure Prodigy comes to market on time.”

David Turek

David Turek joins CATALOG as its chief technology officer. Turek comes from IBM and brings over 25 years of executive experience. At IBM, he held the vice president roles for IBM’s Technical Computing OpenPOWER and Exascale Computing divisions. Turek assisted with the launch of IBM’s Grid Computing unit. He also founded and led IBM’s Linux Cluster division.

“I am thrilled to join the team at Catalog,” Turek said. “While there is justifiable excitement about the innovations pioneered by Catalog to efficiently write data in DNA, we believe this is just the beginning as we vigorously push towards product commercialization. Our intention is to be the marketplace leader for the application of synthetic DNA for both storage and computation.”

Peter Uelen

Peter Uelen joins Asperitas as its chief commercial officer. Uelen has held leadership positions at IBM, Lucent Technologies, Schneider Electric, and Vertiv. He brings over a 30-year career in IT, telecommunications, and data center industries.

“The Asperitas Immersed Computing technology is very innovative,” Uelen said. “It’s not only an enabler for next generations of IT hardware, but it will also strongly contribute to a more sustainable data center industry. We are in a position to continue our leadership in the immersion cooling market, with a strong and focused product portfolio validated by enterprise-level users and strategic partners like Shell to enable carbon-neutral data centers globally.”

Barbara Whye

Intel Corp. promoted Barbara Whye from chief diversity and inclusion officer and vice president of Social Impact and Human Resources to corporate vice president. Whye has been at Intel since 1995 when she joined the company as an engineer.

She is responsible for Intel’s programs that produce a positive impact on society. She led the company’s $300 million Diversity in Technology initiative, which led to Intel being recognized for having full representation across its U.S. workforce in October 2018.

Todd Younkin

Todd Younkin has been promoted to the role of president and chief executive officer at Semiconductor Research Corp. Younkin serves as executive director of SRC’s Joint University Microelectronics Program. Before SRC, Younkin served senior technical positions at Intel Corp.

“I am honored to lead SRC, a one-of-a-kind consortium with incredible potential and exceptionally talented people. Together, we will deliver on SRC’s mission to bring the best minds together to achieve the unimaginable,” said Younkin. “SRC is well-positioned to meet our commitment to SRC members, employees, and stakeholders by paving the way for the semiconductor industry. Our strong values, unique innovation model, and unflinching commitment to our members are core SRC principles that we will maintain as we move forward.”


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.