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!
Mike Allen, Kate Hennessy, and Hildegard van Zyl
Verne Global, a provider of sustainable datacenter solutions for high intensity computing, appointed Kate Hennessy as its chief financial officer. Hennessy will manage the finances of Verne Global’s expanding data center portfolio.
In addition, Mike Allen joined Verne Global as its chief operating officer. Allen will be responsible for optimizing the organization’s operational capabilities and implementing business strategies.
Lastly, Verne Global appointed Hildegard van Zyl as the company’s first general counsel. Van Zyl brings a wealth of IT and legal tech experience, having worked for Amazon and later Atos, and having completed a range of multi-million dollar deals across the world, in both public and private sectors.
Jeff Cherrington and Peter Wassel
Open Mainframe Project appointed Peter Wassel and Jeff Cherrington to its governing board. Wassel currently serves as the director of product management for Mainframe DevOps solutions at Broadcom Inc. Cherrington holds the position of vice president of product management and system Z at Rocket Software.
The Governing Board of the Open Mainframe Project plays a key role in leading the ecosystem and continuing to grow it. Founded in 2015, the Open Mainframe Project is a focal point for the deployment and use of Linux and Open Source in a mainframe computing environment.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise appointed former executive vice president and chief financial officer of Pfizer Inc., Frank D’Amelio, to HPE’s board of directors. D’Amelio will also serve as a member of the board’s audit committee.
“HPE’s differentiated edge-to-cloud strategy and portfolio are well-positioned to meet the needs of customers and continue to propel the company’s transformation and success,” D’Amelio said. “I am delighted to join the Board during this exciting period as HPE accelerates its leadership.”
Bronis R. de Supinski, chief technology officer for Livermore Computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was named Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for 2022. de Supinski was recognized for his contributions to the design of large-scale systems and their programming systems and software.
“I am pleased to be elevated to an ACM fellow,” de Supinski said. “This honor validates that LLNL’s LC and its Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) perform world-leading computer science. Throughout my career, I have had the pleasure not only of standing on the shoulders of giants but also of working shoulder-to-shoulder with many outstanding computer scientists and computational scientists — many of whom still work at LLNL, while some now work (or always have) at other institutions. LLNL has provided me the opportunity to pursue interesting work of importance to the nation. I hope others will see this distinction as motivation to consider similar career choices.”
Virginia Tech Professor Wu Feng and co-author Chung-hsing Hsu received the Test of Time Award at the Supercomputing 2022 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis in Dallas. They were recognized for their 2005 energy-efficient computing paper entitled “A Power-Aware Run-Time System for High Performance Computing.”
“At the time, supercomputers were built like Formula 1 race cars,” Feng said. “They were very fast, but they were also inefficient, unreliable, and needed frequent maintenance. Green Destiny was built more like a Nissan 370Z sports car – more energy-efficient, more reliable, but still very fast. Unfortunately, in an era when speed in supercomputing was the priority in the field, suggesting that top-end speed might be even marginally compromised to save energy was practically heresy,” Feng said. “People were walking out during my talk, and by the end of it, there was even booing from the back of the room.”
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory named Robyn Wheeler Grange as its first director of the lab’s Office of Community Engagement. Grange brings to the role a wealth of experience and relationships built 20-plus years working within the Chicago regional community.
“I am excited and honored to serve in this role,” Grange said. “I think this office provides a strong framework for the inclusive and collaborative advancement of science and technology in communities.”
AMD appointed Jean Hu as its executive vice president and chief financial officer. Hu joined AMD from Marvell, where she served as the company’s chief financial officer since 2016 and was responsible for all aspects of financial planning, accounting, reporting, treasury, tax and investor relations.
“I have long admired AMD and I am thrilled to join the company during such an exciting time of growth and diversification,” said Hu. “I look forward to partnering with the leadership team and leading the finance organization as we build on the company’s successful operating model and drive long-term shareholder returns.”
Farinaz Koushanfar, a professor and Henry Booker Faculty Scholar in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California San Diego, was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for 2022. Koushanfar was recognized for her contributions to secure computing and privacy-preserving machine learning.
“I am honored to be acknowledged with this esteemed class of ACM Fellows,” said Koushanfar. “I’m most excited about the long-term prospects and the potential societal impact of my work in security, privacy and AI. I’m grateful for the privileges offered to me by the academic institutions where I have worked and studied, and by the greater scientific community throughout my research career. I would also like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to my mentors, collaborators, post-docs and students for their unwavering support and contributions to our joint projects.”
Willem Meintjes
Marvell Technology, Inc. promoted Willem Meintjes to the role of chief financial officer. Meintjes joined Marvell in 2016 as the company’s senior vice president of finance and was promoted to chief accounting officer and treasurer two years later.
“I am thrilled to step into this role and continue working alongside Matt and the rest of the executive team,” said Meintjes. “We have tremendous momentum in our business as demand for data infrastructure continues to grow, and the opportunity in front of us is enormous. Marvell is on a clear trajectory for success and I look forward to helping the Company execute on its next phase of growth and innovation.”
Mary Puma
Mary Puma, president and chief executive officer of Axcelis Technologies, was elected to SEMI’s board of directors as its new chairperson. Puma has served as Axcelis’ CEO since January 2002 and was instrumental in the company’s spin off from Eaton Corporation in 2000, when she was named president and Chief Operating Officer.
Puma will lead the SEMI International Board of Directors in evolving the association’s operations, programs and services worldwide to support the growth of member companies throughout the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain.
Hammerspace appointed Robert Renzoni as the director of technical sales and will lead the newly created Hammerspace U.S. federal division. Renzoni will be responsible for leading the federal sales team.
“The ability to free data from vendor-specific storage ‘prisons’ and enable enhanced workflows that can span across various on-prem storage vendors, multiple clouds and agencies will dramatically change the storage paradigm within the public sector,” said Renzoni. “I’m excited to join the Hammerspace team and help bring its unique capabilities to the federal community during this pivotal time when so many agencies are working to modernize data workflows and management.”
The ISC Group appointed Eric Schnepf, the former distinguished engineer and lead solution architect for HPC and AI at Fujitsu Central Europe, as the senior advisor for program development. His focus will be to develop the ISC High Performance conference further to suit the needs of the scientific and engineering community.
“I have watched ISC grow from a local and regional conference to a global event, currently attracting over 3,000 attendees from industry and government-funded agencies,” said Schnepf. “In this advisor role, I look forward to supporting the ISC program chair and the invited program chairs in creating a technical program that benefits attendees across different scientific and commercial sectors. Ideally, ISC should address all stakeholders within the HPC community – researchers in emerging technologies, programmers, users, system administrators, providers, and vendors. I believe we have the capacity and capability to do so. I also look forward to working closely with the core team to finetune the networking opportunities at the event.”
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory materials scientist Daniel Schwalbe-Koda has been named one of Forbes’s “30 under 30” for 2023 in the science category. Schwalbe-Koda started working at the Lab in 2022 as a Lawrence Fellow. He is currently developing new, low-cost, sustainable materials by tasking large supercomputers with finding materials that have the highest probability of being synthesized in practice.
“I am humbled to receive this recognition, and I thank the Forbes 30 Under 30 committee for the consideration,” Schwalbe-Koda said. “This achievement would certainly not be possible without the hard work of all the collaborators that supported my research. The award provides further motivation to keep contributing to the field, which I am particularly excited to do in partnership with my colleagues at LLNL.”
Mateo Valero, director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, was appointed as a visiting professor at the Central University “Marta Abreu” of Las Villas. Valero was also elected as a corresponding Cuban Academy of Sciences member.
Valero holds the Eckert-Mauchly Prize in Computer Architecture, awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), as well as the Seymour Cray Prize in Supercomputing and the Charles Babbage Prize in Parallel Computers, both awarded by the IEEE.
MemVerge appointed Jeffrey Wang as its vice president of engineering. Wang will lead the MemVerge engineering organization as it builds out its big memory management technology for cloud workloads and solutions using the compute express link memory standard.
“In the software-defined transformation of today’s modern compute infrastructure, the last frontier to virtualize is memory,” said Wang. “Memory is now the key to enable data-intensive applications, from analytics to AI and machine learning, to deliver the digital transformation required by data-centric user cases. I’ve always been focused on delivering technology that has a real impact on the customer. MemVerge Big Memory software is a truly game-changing innovation that will alter the shape of tomorrow’s applications. I look forward to contributing to MemVerge’s growth and success as we lead the industry in changing the way applications use memory services to increase processing scale.”
Intel Corp. appointed Frank D. Yeary as an independent chair of the company’s board of directors. Yeary has served as a director of Intel since 2009. He also is a managing member at Darwin Capital Advisors, a private investment firm.
“I am deeply honored to take on this expanded role during such a pivotal time for Intel,” Yeary said. “While the company certainly has big tasks ahead of it, I’m confident we have the right strategy in place. It’s imperative that we execute well and simultaneously deliver value to our stockholders.”
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals, has elected 505 scientists, engineers and innovators from around the world and across all disciplines to the 2022 class of AAAS Fellows, one of the most distinguished honors within the scientific community. The newly elected Fellows are being recognized for their scientific and socially notable achievements spanning their careers. Click here to view the 2022 class of AAAS Fellows.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) named 57 of its members ACM Fellows for wide-ranging and fundamental contributions in disciplines including cybersecurity, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and recommender systems among many other areas. The accomplishments of the 2022 ACM Fellows make possible the computing technologies we use every day. For more on each fellow, click here.
2022-23 CASC Executive Committee Members
The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) elected its executive committee for 2022-23. Jim Wilgenbusch from the University of Minnesota was elected as CASC’s chair. Rich Knepper from Cornell University was elected as the vice chair. Dave Hart from the National Center for Atmospheric Research was named Treasurer. Barr von Oehsen from Rutgers University will serve as CASC’s secretary. Lastly, Wayne Figurelle from Pennsylvania State University was elected past chair.
“The power of CASC lies in the critical mass of research computing and data leadership and expertise that is maximized to address critical issues,” said Kathryn Kelley, CASC executive director. “CASC serves as a hub dedicated to networking solutions to a series of issues that cause concern for RCD organizations and the researchers who depend on them.”
Nicole Brewer from Arizona State University; Myra B. Cohen from Iowa State University; Johannes Doerfert from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; William Hart from Sandia National Laboratories; Helen Kershaw from National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Rafael Mudafort from National Renewable Energy Lab were inducted to the 2023 class of BSSw Fellows. For more on each Fellow, click here.
The BSSw Fellowship Program gives recognition and funding to leaders and advocates of high-quality scientific software. Each 2023 Fellow will receive up to $25,000 for an activity that promotes better scientific software, such as organizing a workshop, preparing a tutorial, or creating content to engage the scientific software community.
2023 Oppenheimer Science and Energy Leadership Program Fellows
Computational physicist Teresa Bailey, physicist Brent Blue, nuclear and mechanical engineer Lance Kim and chemical engineer Elizabeth Wheeler from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were inducted into the Oppenheimer Science and Energy Leadership Program (OSELP) program.
OSELP brings together exceptional leaders to explore the complexities, challenges and opportunities facing the national lab system and the Department of Energy.
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.
