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!
Altair, a simulation, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence solutions provider, appointed Jim F. Anderson to its board of directors. Anderson has more than 25 years of IT industry experience. Currently, he works as the managing director for Google Cloud and is a member of the go-to-market advisory board for CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund.
“Altair’s strong culture, technology portfolio, and market position represent a unique opportunity,” said Anderson. “I look forward to contributing to the company’s growth as a member of the board.”
Rebecca Boyden
Cerebras Systems, a company dedicated to accelerating artificial intelligence compute, appointed Rebecca Boyden as vice president and general counsel. Boyden brings more than 20 years of experience advising high-profile public companies and their boards of directors.
“I am honored to join the Cerebras team and lead the company’s legal and compliance organization,” said Boyden. “Cerebras is at an inflection point in terms of customer deployments and technological innovation, and I look forward to helping grow and diversify the company as it continues its fearless pursuit of addressing some of society’s most urgent problems through industry-leading AI compute.”
Rosa M. Badia was named the recipient of the HPDC Achievement Award 2021. Badia – the workflows and distributed computing group manager at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and coordinator of the EuroHPC project eFlows4HPC – was recognized for her innovations in parallel task-based programming models, workflow applications and systems, and leadership in the high performance computing research community.
“I am very pleased to receive this award for the achievements in my research on parallel programming models for distributed computing, as well as for my community activities,” Badia said. “This is for the first time given to a European-based researcher and encourages me to continue my activities in making easier the development of applications for complex computing platforms, as we are doing in the eFlows4HPC project.”
Carol J. Burns was appointed as deputy director for research for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Burns will develop, implement, and steward Berkeley Lab’s research enterprise and serve as the Lab’s chief research liaison with key stakeholders, primarily the DOE Office of Science, the University of California, and the other national labs.
Burns brings more than 25 years of scientific leadership experience in a national laboratory environment. As executive officer to the deputy director for science, technology, and engineering at LANL, Burns helped to oversee research and programmatic efforts in chemistry, earth and life sciences, global security, physical sciences, and simulation and computation.
Jason Coposky and Terrell Russell
Jason Coposky resigned from his post as the executive director of the iRODS Consortium. For 15 years, Coposky has been at RENCI holding multiple leadership roles including as the executive director of the consortium and CT. He has also managed the software development team, directed the full software development lifecycle, and coordinated code hardening, testing, and application of formal software engineering practices.
The Renaissance Computing Institute, the founding member that administers the iRODS Consortium, named Terrell Russell as its interim executive director. Russell has been working on iRODS software since the development team transitioned to RENCI in 2008. He also held the role of chief technologist for the past five and a half years.
Ross Fujii
Quantum Corp. appointed software veteran Ross Fujii as its general manager of emerging markets and product marketing. Fujii brings an extensive background in data management and analytics and creating and implementing modern software distribution models to the company. He will focus on growing Quantum’s reach into emerging markets, primarily video surveillance and advanced driver-assistance systems.
“I’m excited to take on this challenge and utilize my experience in software, data management, and data analysis to guide my new team in providing the data solutions and buying models today’s companies critically need to be competitive,” said Fujii. “Quantum is already on a great trajectory; our demonstrated proficiency in orchestrating massive amounts of data for the media and entertainment industry is a unique differentiator as we apply our expertise to industries with similar data challenges.”
AMAX, a provider of high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and OEM datacenter manufacturing, appointed Paul Jensen as its president. He brings over 25 years of experience in the technology industry across finance, sales, marketing, and business development. Jensen has held multiple leadership roles, both domestic and international during his 20 years at Microsoft.
“I could not be more thrilled to accept the position as President in this well-established and well-trusted organization, with such an incredibly talented team,” Jensen said. “My goal is to bring additional growth and more value to our customer base by building upon the achievements of the past 40 years.”
John LaBry
Data Vortex Technologies welcomed John LaBry to the company as its chief commercial officer. LaBry brings over three decades of experience selling high performance hardware in the federal space. He comes from Micron, where he most recently served as the director of business development for advanced computing systems. He has also worked at technology companies, including Sun Microsystems, Panasas, SGI, Cisco, and Data General.
The Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society named Margaret Martonosi as the recipient of the 2021 Eckert-Mauchly Award. Martonosi, the Hugh Trumbull Adams ’35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, was recognized for her contributions to the design, modeling, and verification of power-efficient computer architecture.
Martonosi has made significant contributions to computer architecture and microarchitecture. In addition, her work has led to new fields of research. She has authored more than 175 publications on parallel architectures, memory hierarchies, compilers, and mobile networks.
Earlier this year, Martonosi was named an HPCwire Person to Watch in 2021.
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ndrew McGettrick, Jennifer Tour Chayes, Chris Hankin, Richard Anderson, and Marc Rotenberg
The Association for Computing Machinery recognized Andrew McGettrick, Jennifer Tour Chayes, Chris Hankin, Richard Anderson, and Marc Rotenberg with awards for their service to the computing field. Their peers selected the 2020 award recipients for their valuable contributions in areas including computing curriculum; increasing the participation of women in computing; strengthening ACM’s presence in Europe; leading technology policy efforts; and bridging the fields of computer science, education, and global health. For more details on each award, click here.
Rory McInerney and Terry Thorn
Ayar Labs appointed Rory McInerney as its executive advisor. McInerney will focus on building engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain units at Ayar Labs. He comes from Intel, where he built a 29-year career serving in leadership roles including as its corporate VP.
Terry Thorn also joined Ayar Labs as its VP of business development. Thorn will be responsible for growing commercial business and accounts. Thorn spent 24 years at Intel, where he served as general manager of global accounts in Intel’s Cloud & Enterprise Sales Group with direct responsibility for some of the company’s largest customers.
SiPearl, the company that is designing the high-performance, low power microprocessor for the European exascale supercomputer, tapped former strategic project manager at BSC, Anna Riverola, to lead SiPearl’s new office in Barcelona. Riverola will be responsible for managing all of the group’s research programs at European level.
“I am delighted to join SiPearl to lead its subsidiary in Catalonia and drive collaborative programs across Europe,” Riverola said. “This challenge is a continuation of my previous responsibilities within the scientific and industrial EPI consortium which is at the origin of SiPearl. Indeed, after having managed the research programs upstream of the project, I will now follow their implementation, the first step of which will be the launch of our first-generation microprocessor.”
Gil Sasson
Lightbits Labs, provider of NVMe over TCP cloud-native storage solutions, welcomed Gil Sasson as its chief research and development officer. Sasson brings over to Lightbits Labs, a vast backgroundin both R&D and cloud-native applications. At Lightbits, he will be responsible for leading all the product development engineering efforts and directing the design and deployment efforts for the company’s private and edge cloud solutions offerings.
Prior to joining Lightbits, Sasson served as vice president of R&D at N2WS, a former Veeam company, and managed R&D and customer support teams in the US and Israel. In that role, he decreased N2WS’ release cycles from 6 months to 2.5 months while growing its R&D productivity by more than 25%.
Richard W. Spinrad was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and the 11th NOAA administrator. He will oversee $7 billion in the proposed FY22 annual spending plan, including advancing U.S. weather modeling and prediction. Spinrad is an internationally renowned scientist with four decades of experience in the ocean, atmosphere, and climate science and policy.
“I am thrilled to be back and am ready to hit the ground running,” said Spinrad. “I am humbled to lead NOAA’s exceptional workforce on a mission so relevant to the daily lives of people across America and to the future health of our planet. And I will ensure that trust and scientific integrity will continue to be the foundation for all of our work.”
Chuck Vallurupalli and Preeti Chalsani
The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago appointed Chuck Vallurupalli as the first senior director of Duality, the first accelerator program dedicated to supporting innovative quantum startup companies. Duality is led by the founding partners, including the Polsky Center, the Chicago Quantum Exchange, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Argonne National Laboratory, and P33.
In addition, Preeti Chalsani will take a joint appointment with the Polsky Center and CQE as the deputy director of Duality along with her current duties as director of industry partnerships for quantum information science. Chalsani will work with Vallurupalli to set the accelerator’s strategic vision while providing the accelerator’s technology context and building relationships with corporate partners, mentors, quantum startups, partners, and stakeholders.
Pavilion Data Systems, a data storage company, announced the appointment of Dario Zamarian as the company’s chief executive officer. The company cited Zamarian’s “successful track record of creating value at all levels of companies, including venture-capital backed startups” and said “the timing of the executive move for Pavilion coincides with a planned period of accelerated product offerings and go-to-market outcomes, building upon a series of breakthrough wins in enterprise and federal accounts.” Previously, Zamarian held roles at Cisco and Dell. Most recently, he was CEO of Space Systems/Loral, a company of Maxar.
Cohort 2021 Activate Fellows
Nonprofit organization Activate Global Inc. announced the 2021 cohort of activate fellows. Twenty-four fellows were selected from nearly 400 applicants from 30 countries and 32 U.S. states. Cohort 2021 brings the total community of fellows supported since 2015 to 104. More than 80% of Activate fellows graduate with at least 12 months of financial runway to build their businesses. Current and alumni fellows have leveraged $26 million in fellowship support to raise nearly $330 million in additional research funding and initial private investments. For the list of the 24 fellows, click here.
2021 DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowships
The U.S. Department of Energy named 32 undergraduate and graduate students to receive the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. The fellows, chosen by a panel of outside experts, receive a stipend of $38,000, payment of full tuition and fees at any accredited U.S. university, and a $1,000 professional development allowance per year, all renewable for up to four years. They also participate in a 12-week research experience at DOE laboratories or sites with access to DOE supercomputers. For the full list of fellows, visit here.
2021-2022 Frontera Computational Science Fellowship Winners
TACC announced the awardees for Liliana Cabrera, Gallegos Gurpreet, Singh Hora, Yui Tik ‘Andrew’ Pang, and Hongyuan Zhang – for the 2021-2022 Frontera Computational Science Fellowship. The program provides a year-long opportunity for graduate students to compute time on the Frontera supercomputer with experts at TACC. For more information on all the winners, visit here.
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.
