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!
Ashley Barker
Ashley Barker, the section head for operations for the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Lab, was elected president of the Cray User Group, which is an international corporation of member organizations that own, operate, or utilize Cray HPCs with emphasis on HPC and technical computing.
According to a Twitter post from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Barker “will lead efforts to promote collaboration across the HPC community.”
The U.S. Senate has confirmed Asmeret Asefaw Berhe as the new director of the Office of Science in the federal Department of Energy. She is a professor of soil biogeochemistry in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences in the School of Natural Sciences; the Ted and Jan Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology; and the interim associate dean for Graduate Education at UC Merced.
“It is an incredible honor for me to be nominated, and now confirmed by the U.S. Senate, to serve as President Biden’s director of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy,” Berhe said. “I thank the president and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, for trusting me to help lead the next chapter in the great scientific success story of the Office of Science.”
SandboxAQ appointed Nadia Carlsten as its vice president of product. Carlsten comes to SandboxAQ from the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, where she served as its head of product. She began her career at Amazon helping AWS software partners innovate in security and machine learning.
“SandboxAQ is approaching quantum in a very different way. Its focus on security, sensing, simulation and other AI and quantum solutions goes beyond quantum computing, allowing SandboxAQ to take on some of the world’s biggest computing challenges without relying on quantum hardware itself,” Carlsten said. “SandboxAQ is not building a mass market product for one particular sector or function, it’s looking to leverage AI and quantum to address unique customer needs and challenges to deliver value today. This bigger business vision means a bigger, more robust product vision and deeper customer interactions across a broad range of industries.”
Zapata Computing, an enterprise software company for quantum solutions, appointed Gregg Carman as its chief revenue officer. At Zapata, Carman will oversee all aspects of sales and revenue, customer solutions delivery as well as product. He will also be responsible for building the company’s market share across the quantum computing landscape.
“Throughout my career, I’ve been involved with businesses at nearly every stage of growth – from startup to enterprise – and I see a tremendous opportunity ahead with Zapata Computing in its current growth trajectory,” said Carman. “Quantum computing represents the future of technology and Zapata is directly at the intersection of today and tomorrow – setting up enterprises for the next wave of innovation around the corner.”
Doctor Bipasha Chakraborty, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, received the Joseph Fourier Prize by Atos and the Science and Technology Facilities Council Hartree Centre. Chakraborty was recognized for her research project ‘Quantum Computation of Quantum Field Theories’.
“This is a very welcomed acknowledgment of my innovative research proposal in Quantum Computation of Quantum Field Theories and provides welcome support to push it forward,” Chakraborty said. “The prize also offers a platform to initiate collaboration with industries, which is critical to the success of this interdisciplinary research.”
Nyriad, Inc. appointed Margie Evashenk to its board of directors as an independent director. Evashenk has 30 years of experience in high-tech, from co-founding storage semiconductor start-up Sierra Logic (sold to Emulex Corp. in 2006) to overseeing global engineering for Emulex as senior vice president and chief development executive.
“I am excited and privileged to be joining the Nyriad Board,” said Evashenk. “When I learned about UltraIO’s groundbreaking architecture, which gives customers both performance and resilience with a remarkable value, I wanted to be a part of it. I look forward to contributing to Nyriad’s growth and market leadership.”
NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a provider and integrator of advanced IT, communications, networking, and biometric solutions promoted Marc Hebner to senior vice president and head of enterprise business in the Americas. Hebner will be responsible for achieving NEC’s revenue and operating profit targets for Channel, Direct, Cloud, IT, and Smart Workspace lines of business for the U.S., Canada, and Latin America operations
In addition, NEC promoted Al Kelley to VP of channel sales. During Kelley’s 21-year tenure with NEC, he has led U.S. Channel business supporting partners in the SMB, Enterprise and Distribution channels. Kelley’s expanded responsibilities will now include channel sales throughout the U.S., Canada and Latin America.
Liqid welcomed VMware Cloud CTO Marc Fleischmann as a member of its Board of Directors. Fleischmann’s technology career has included roles in IT infrastructure, cloud and data services, machine learning and analytics, and global IT business services. Liqid says Fleischmann will collaborate with the Liqid Board and the company’s leadership team to expand solutions for its customers and partners with its Liqid Matrix composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) software.
At VMware, Fleischmann is the CTO for business franchises within the organization such as VMware Managed Cloud (VMC – on AWS, Azure, and GCP), the VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP, a $10B ecosystem), Cloud Foundation (VCF) private clouds, HCI, vSphere, and vSAN.
Tyndall National Institute and the Irish Centre for High-End Computing appointed Dr. Venkatesh Kannan as an academic associate at Tyndal. Kannan will be responsible for pursuing synergies for both organizations through project development, collaborative research, and targeting national and European funding opportunities and programs.
Kannan currently serves as the center technical manager of ICHEC, where he is responsible for defining and implementing the technological vision, strategy and roadmap of the Center’s research and development activities.
Mahmut Kandemir
Mahmut Kandemir, a distinguished professor in the computer science and engineering department at the Pennsylvania State University, was named associate director of Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences.
“I believe computation and data are tightly coupled today and the success of many HPC applications of national importance depends strongly on how successfully they can exploit the synergy between the two,” said Kandemir. “Exploiting this synergy is more important and complex today than in the past because of massive datasets, enormous compute, memory and storage capabilities, as well as emerging paradigms based on AI and machine learning. In this setting, cyberinfrastructure is a key component, and how we should design, implement, deploy and manage it to cater to the needs of emerging data and compute intensive workloads is an open research problem.”
Doug Kothe
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory appointed Doug Kothe as the associate laboratory director for its Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate. Kothe will be responsible for setting the vision for one of the world’s most powerful open advanced computing ecosystems.
Kothe will continue to serve as director of the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, a post he has held since September 2017. As director for the last five years, he coordinated efforts to deliver exascale computing capability to the DOE laboratories.
Steven Laub
Rambus Inc., a chip and silicon IP provider making data faster and safer, appointed Steven Laub to its board of directors. Laub brings to Rambus over 25 years of semiconductor industry leadership experience. Prior to his recent board role at IPV Capital, a semiconductor private equity firm, Laub served approximately ten years as president, chief executive officer and member of the board of directors at Atmel Corp.
“Rambus is pushing the frontier of performance and security for the data center and beyond,” said Laub. “I am excited to join the Rambus board and work with the executive team as they continue to advance the company’s market position in critical technology areas.”
Glenn Lockwood
Storage architect Glenn Lockwood announced he joined Microsft Azure in a Twitter post. He comes to the company from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he was a high-performance computing systems architect. Before NERSC, he served at 10X Genomics, a life science technology company building products to interrogate, understand and master biology to advance human health, where he held the role of DevOps engineer.
In a blog post explaining his reasoning for why he left NERSC, Lockwood said, “You can stick a full Cray EX system, identical to what you might find at NERSC or OLCF, inside Azure nowadays and avoid that whole burdensome mess of building out a 50 MW data center… And when it comes to being first to market for risky HPC hardware, the cloud has already caught up in many ways–Microsoft deployed AMD Milan-X CPUs in their data centers before any HPC shop did, and more recently, Microsoft invested in AMD MI-200 GPUs before Frontier had a chance to shake them out.”
SiPearl, the company designing the high-performance, low-power microprocessor for European exascale supercomputers, appointed Pierre Marchal as its chief financial officer. Pierre started with the Saint-Gobain group in 2001, advancing through financial and international positions in the industrial and distribution business units as well as the group’s holding company. He joined Keolis in 2014 as group internal audit manager and was subsequently appointed administrative and financial director of the Retail & Connexions subsidiary of SNCF.
On March 16, Pierre joined SiPearl, which currently has operations in France, Germany and Spain. His mission is to support the accelerated growth strategy and the future commercial challenges of the company by structuring its financial organization and steering capital fundraising. Specifically, Pierre has responsibility for managing all financial components, including cash management, finance, accounting, tax and controlling. He will also secure the financing of manufacturing.
Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) appointed Uwe Naumann as its principal scientist. Naumann, a RWTH Aachen University professor, will help to drive the next generation of technical products at NAG through his extensive knowledge of technical and scientific computing and Automatic Differentiation.
“The close collaboration with NAG has played an outstanding role in my career so far, providing a unique infrastructure for linking academic research with industrial requirements.” Uwe Naumann said. “I look forward to helping shape the future of NAG as one of the world’s leading providers of numerical methods and software, including corresponding education and consultancy. I am honored to be provided with this exceptional opportunity.”
Jean-Philippe Nominé, Thomas Lippert, Sinead Ryan, and Claus Axel Muller
The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) elected Jean-Philippe Nominé, Thomas Lippert, Sinead Ryan, and Claus Axel Muller as its chairs and vice chairs of its advisory boards, and will be responsible for providing independent advice to the governing board of the EuroHPC JU.
Jean-Philippe Nominé was elected as chair of the Research and Innovation Advisory Group (RIAG) for the next two years. Nominé is an HPC strategic collaborations manager at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. The RIAG members also elected Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, as their vice-chair.
The Infrastructure Advisory Group (INFRAG) elected Sinead Ryan as its chair for the next two years. Ryan is a physicist and professor of Theoretical High Energy Physics at Trinity College Dublin. The INFRAG members also elected Claus Axel Muller, managing director at the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing, as their vice-chair.
Intel Corp. appointed Matt Poirier as its senior vice president of corporate development. Poirier brings to Intel more than 20 years of leadership, finance and corporate development experience with a focus on mergers, acquisitions and integration, including most recently as senior vice president of strategy and corporate development at AMD.
“For decades, Intel has played an essential role in the global technology ecosystem and is now embarking on a historic transformation that will improve its leadership position supporting customers and partners around the world,” Poirier said. “I’m excited to join Intel‘s phenomenal leadership team and to partner with Pat and our board of directors to deliver significant long-term value for our shareholders as we advance our IDM 2.0 strategy and reshape the semiconductor industry.”
Dan Reed and Victor McCrary
Dan Reed was elected to lead the National Science Board (NSB) for the next two years as its chair. Reed is a member of the NSB class of 2018-2024. Over the last two years, Reed chaired the Board’s Committee on Awards and Facilities, which provides oversight of and makes recommendations to the Board on NSF awards and facilities.
In addition, Victor McCrary was re-elected to NSB for another two years as its vice-chair. McCrary currently serves as vice president for research and professor of chemistry at the University of the District of Columbia. Previously, he was vice chancellor for research at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the first VP for research and economic development and professor of chemistry at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland.
Quadric, a processor technology intellectual property licensor, appointed Steve Roddy as its chief marketing officer. Roddy, a former vice president with Arm’s machine learning group, brings more than 30 years of marketing and product management expertise across the machine learning, neural network processor, microprocessor, digital signal processor and semiconductor IP industries.
“Joining Quadric presents a tremendous opportunity to apply my NPU and DSP expertise to what lies ahead for both Quadric and the overall industry,” said Roddy. “Quadric’s architecture—already proven in silicon—is the only new processor that can efficiently run both DSP code and machine learning graph inference on the same core. The massive increase in software developer productivity gained by having only one toolchain and one core to program, manage and debug is market changing. I am excited to join the highly accomplished and committed Quadric team at a time when on-device AI computing is catapulting the processor market forward.”
SEMI, the global industry association that unites the entire electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, appointed Joe Stockunas as president of its SEMI Americas business unit. Stockunas will lead SEMI Americas and will advocate for the microelectronics industry as part of the SEMI Global Leadership Team.
“SEMI’s work to connect the global semiconductor ecosystem to the broader electronics supply chain is critical in driving digital transformation and addressing the industry’s most pressing challenges,” Stockunas said. “I’m eager to collaborate with the SEMI leadership team, staff and members to help the organization and the industry fulfill their extraordinary potential. I look forward to meeting with members and key industry stakeholders at SEMICON West this July.”
Madhu Srinivasan
Madhu Srinivasan joined AMD as manager of its research business unit, AMD Research. Srinivasan comes to AMD from HPE Cray, where he was the lead scientist in visualization and machine learning providing technical leadership at Cray’s Alexandria Center of Excellence. Before HPE Cray, he served as team lead at KAUST Visualization Core Lab in Saudi Arabia.
“I am thrilled to share that I will be starting a new position as Manager at AMD Research this month,” Srinivasan said in a Twitter announcement. “I look forward to the privilege of working with a great team at AMD.”
Paul M. Sutter is the recipient of the 2022 James Corones Award in Leadership, Community Building and Communication from the Krell Institute. Sutter is a research professor at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute.
Sutter was recognized for his contributions to cosmology and popularized science. His research includes computational astrophysics, the use of high-performance computers to understand the universe and our observations of it. He has made especially significant advances in the study of cosmic voids, vast empty regions in the universe.
2022-23 Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowships
The Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship named 33 new graduate students to the 2022-23 program. The new fellows will attend a total of 19 universities across the country as they learn to apply high-performance computing to research across a range of fields, including atmospheric science, condensed matter physics, quantum information and computational neuroscience. For more, click here.
“[The] Office of Science is proud to support the training of a diverse and accomplished group of students to become leaders among the next generation of computational scientists,” said Barbara Helland, DOE Associate Director of Science for Advanced Scientific Computing Research. “As evidenced by the success of the current CSGF alumni, the new fellows’ research will advance efforts in a wide range of science and engineering topics that benefit Administration priorities and the American people.”
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.
