Steering Committee

The HPC User Forum is directed by a voluntary, multinational steering committee of leading HPC experts from government, academia and industry. The steering committee advances the HPC User Forum’s mission to promote the health of the global HPC industry and address issues of common concern to users. The committee establishes the agenda topics for HPC User Forum meetings and the ongoing technical research agenda.

Piyush Mehrotra
Chairman
HPC Expert

Dr. Piyush Mehrotra an expert in HPC systems, retired in December 2023 from NASA Ames Research Center, having served as the Chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division since 2013. As the Division Chief, he oversaw the full range of high-performance computing services for NASA’s premier supercomputing center including in the areas of large-scale simulations, visualization, AI/ML and cloud computing. In addition, he also managed NAS’s modeling and simulation research and development efforts focusing on several domains including computational aerosciences, risk assessment, and heliophysics, which are critical for numerous NASA missions. With over 40 years of R&D experience in Computer Science, working at various research organizations, he has published over 130 articles in journals and conferences on parallel programming languages, including on compilers and runtime systems for parallel and distributed environments, benchmarking and more recently on infrastructure to support science data analysis pipelines in hybrid environments across on-premises and cloud resources.

Rupak Biswas
NASA Ames
Vice Chairman

Dr. Rupak Biswas is currently the Director of Exploration Technology at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and has held this Senior Executive Service (SES) position since January 2016. In this role, he is in charge of planning, directing, and coordinating the technology development and operational activities of the organization that comprises of advanced supercomputing, human systems integration, intelligent systems, and entry systems technology. The directorate consists of approximately 700 employees with an annual budget of $160 million, and includes two of NASA’s critical and consolidated infrastructures: arcjet testing facility and supercomputing facility. He is also the Manager of the High End Computing Capability Project that provides a full range of advanced computational resources and services to numerous NASA programs. In addition, he leads the emerging quantum computing effort for NASA. Dr. Biswas received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rensselaer in 1991, and has been at NASA ever since. During this time, he has received several agency awards, including the Exceptional Achievement Medal and the Outstanding Leadership Medal. He is an internationally recognized expert in high performance computing and has published more than 150 technical papers, received many Best Paper awards, edited several journal special issues, and given numerous lectures around the world.

Earl Joseph
Hyperion Research
Executive Director

Earl Joseph is Executive Director for Hyperion Research and the HPC User Forum. He has 30 years of experience in the computer industry with a focus on technical computing and high performance computing. He conducts research and provides consulting within the United States, European and Asia-Pacific markets for technical servers, supercomputers, grids, visualization and clustering. This research includes market sizing, market share analysis, forecasts, technology assessment, and vendor analysis. Earlier, he led marketing and strategic planning functions for four major U.S. corporations; Cray, UNISYS, SGI and Concurrent. He was instrumental in winning an international anti-dumping case on supercomputers and contributed research and recommendations contributing to the renewed emphasis on supercomputing in the U.S. President’s 2006 state-of-the-union address. He earned a Ph.D. in the strategic management of high technology companies from the University of Minnesota.

Vijay Agarwala
VKA Associates, LLC
Industry Expert

Vijay K. Agarwala leads VKA Associates and is an industry expert in advanced computing infrastructure and healthcare informatics. He previously served as Director of High Performance Computing at Advanced Research Computing, Virginia Tech and Senior Director of Research Computing at the New York Genome Center. Agarwala provided technical and strategic leadership for the groups ‘ advanced computing infrastructure. Prior to these positions and until June 2014, Agarwala had over 28 years of experience in high performance computing, data sciences, and research computing. He was one of the founding members of the high performance computing group at Penn State, and served on the university’s information technology senior leadership team for ten years. Agarwala served as Senior Director of the Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure group and also as a member of the University Research Council at Penn State. Agarwala has successfully advocated at institutional, regional and national levels for advanced computing infrastructure and the competitive edge that it provides to scientists and researchers across many research fields in sciences, engineering, and social sciences.

David Baldwin
Royal Dutch Shell

David Baldwin is the High Performance Computing and Technical Infrastructure Renewal and Strategy Manager at Royal Dutch Shell, defining and delivering the global HPC strategy as program manager and chief architect. He started his association with HPC over twenty years ago as a Geophysicist using mainframes deployed on onboard seismic survey vessels working around Europe, Africa and The Americas. A background in electronics during his service in the military led to a move to the other side of the table delivering HPC to user groups as the regional HPC manager for EAME & NSA, running HPC centers in UK, US, Egypt, Mexico and Brazil before joining Shell in 2013. He holds degrees in both Oceanography and Engineering as well as an MBA. He is a Chartered Member of the British Computer Society and a member of the IEEE.

Doug Ball
Aerospace Industry, and HPC Expert

Doug Ball served as enterprise director for computational fluid dynamics within Boeing’s Enterprise Technology Strategy, providing strategic guidance and manages investments into CFD technologies across Boeing’s businesses. Earlier, he was chief engineer for all of aerodynamics within Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Throughout his career, he served as a consultant to NASA, the National Research Council, the U.S. Air Force and The Ohio State University. Before joining Boeing, Ball worked for General Dynamics Corporation as an aerodynamicist. Ball earned a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering and a master of science degree, both from The Ohio State University. In 2006, he received a distinguished alumni award from the university’s College of Engineering, and the Garvin L. Von Eschen award for leadership in aerospace engineering from the mechanical and aerospace engineering department in 2013.

Mike Bernhardt
Exascale Computing Project

Mike Bernhardt leads communications and outreach for the Exascale Computing Project.  Mike is a 30-year veteran of the HPC community with a proven track record in strategic communications, marketing, public relations, branding and advertising. In the early 90s, Mike was the Director of Market Relations and Communications for the Supercomputer Systems Division of Intel Corporation.   In 1994, he formed a strategic marketing firm, The Bernhardt Agency, for the HPC market segment. In 2001, 2002, and 2003, the company was named the top marketing agency to work for by Oregon Business magazine, and in 2003 it took top honors as the #1 small business to work for in Oregon. After selling The Bernhardt Agency in 2004, Bernhardt went on to build and sell two other widely respected, HPC-focused communications agencies, Noblemen Communications and Libra Strategic Communications. In 2010, Bernhardt launched subscription-based The Exascale Report ™,  the first publication to bring an insider perspective to the emerging topic of exascale computing. In 2013, he returned to Intel as an HPC Community Evangelist, and in 2016 he joined the communications staff at ORNL to serve as the communications lead for the Exascale Computing Project Bernhardt has been an active volunteer committee member of the IEEE/ACM SC conferences for more than two decades. He served as the Communications Chair for SC09 and is a member of the informal group known as the “SC Perennials,” one of 17 people who have attended all SC conferences since the first event in 1988. Bernhardt is a U.S. Navy veteran, qualified firearms safety instructor, and a public safety advocate. He previously served as Vice President for the Washington County (OR) Sheriff’s Department Foundation, as Director of Volunteer Services for the Forest Grove (OR) Police Department, and for three years was a City Commissioner on the Forest Grove (OR) Public Safety Commission.

Paul Buerger
Industry Expert

Paul Buerger, HPC industry expert, spent most of his career at Ohio State University and Ohio Supercomputer Center. During those 40 years, he worked with everything from minicomputers to mainframes to vector supercomputers to HPC clusters. He led teams supporting these systems and various computer networks. He recently worked with Avetec on a project evaluating parallel file systems. Dr. Buerger is the author or co-author of several papers and presentations dealing with astronomy and with digital data management. His current interests are parallel file systems and trying to understand what is big about Big Data. He is a member of IEEE and ACM. He currently serves as secretary of the Central Ohio Chapter of ACM and as treasurer of the Columbus Technical Council.

Simon Burbidge
HPC Systems Expert

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Roy Chartier
Digital Research Alliance of Canada

A seasoned technology professional, Roy has held roles in government, industry, startups and non-profit organizations delivering high-value workloads at scale, including HPC, HTC, and HPDA.

In 2021, Roy joined the Digital Research Alliance of Canada as Director of Architecture after spending a year at Laboratories Canada as a senior advisor. In addition, he founded an HPC services company, and a charity called HPC for Humanity (formerly The Supercomputer for Cancer Research, aka “Cancer Computer”) founded in 2015 that has grown to a compute ecosystem with installations at 6 universities and 3 colocation facilities in Canada and the United States. HPC for Humanity currently supports dozens of projects in cancer, neuroscience and other humanitarian research through the generous hardware donations from governments and corporations, and the hard work of a dedicated and talented group of volunteers.

Roy has completed Executive Programs at MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Sloan School of Management. He also has a degree in Philosophy from Carleton University.

Jack Collins
National Cancer Institute

Dr. Collins is the director of the Advanced Biomedical Computing Center at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. Dr. Collins’ research focuses on biomedical computing applications pertaining to cancer. His research group develops and applies high-performance algorithms to solve data-intensive computational biology problems in the areas of genomic analysis, pattern recognition in proteomics and imaging, molecular modeling, and systems biology. He received his BA degree in mathematics from Park College with minors in physics, chemistry, and economics. His Ph.D. is in physical chemistry (theoretical chemistry) from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Prior to joining NCI, Dr. Collins worked at SRI International (1985 to 1989) as a research associate and the Molecular Research Institute (1989 to 1992) as director of Computational Biology. Dr. Collins has over 70 peer-reviewed scientific publications and 3 patents. He has given dozens of invited talks and Webinars at international and national meetings and conferences, and serves on numerous review panels and advisory committees.

Steve Finn
Onyx Consulting

Steve Finn provides technology assessment and telecommunications support services for a community of HPC users. His background includes vectorization and parallelization of application codes, benchmarking, and HPC system acquisitions. He has performed detailed requirements assessments, identified overall project risks, and created mitigation plans. He has prepared multiple alternative scenarios for data center consolidation, and has developed policies to provide a consistent user environment across heterogeneous systems at multiple HPC centers. Steve is a past Chairman of the HPC User Forum Steering Committee.

Sharan Kalwani
Michigan State University

Sharan Kalwani recently joined the Institute of Cyber-Enabled Research as the Director of the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC), located at Michigan State University., East Lansing, MI. Prior to MSU he was at Fermi National Accelerator Lab, and also did a stint as a Subject Matter Expert/Lead in a start up – the UberCloud project, working on helping to realize HPC in the cloud. With 30 years of experience in scientific and technical computing, Sharan has worked at numerous HPC industry leaders that include Cray Research and Silicon Graphics. He has also spent several years in the automotive industry at General Motors, managing their global engineering HPC centers, as well as in the academic domain, most recently at KAUST. Sharan is a member of the ACM, senior member of IEEE/Computer Society, USENIX/LISA, AAAS and the Union of Concerned Scientists. He was one of the original founders of the michigan!/usr/group (mug.org) back in 1986. He also runs the popular discussion group ‘Innovative Uses of HPC’ on LinkedIn.com

Elizabeth L’Heureux
BP

Elizabeth L’Heureux is the head of the High Performance Computing team at bp. Elizabeth received a B.Sc. in Physics from McGill University in 2002 and a Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of Toronto in 2007. She joined bp as a research geophysicist in 2007, where she made extensive use of HPC resources as a specialist in seismic wavefield simulation, leading a program to develop and deploy innovative modeling technologies for geophysical research. In 2021 she took on a role managing bp’s HPC group, responsible for the team of systems administrators and software developers maintaining the high performance computing center. She is accountable for long-term planning and strategic acquisitions of HPC technology in line with delivering value to the subsurface imaging, applied sciences and low carbon energy research groups in bp.

Jysoo Lee
KAUST

Dr. Jysoo Lee is supercomputing director of KAUST(King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) in Saudi Arabia. He received B.S. from Seoul National University and Ph. D. from Boston University, both in physics. He was visiting scholar at HLRZ, KFA at Julich (which became The John von Neumann Institute for Computing), and was research associate at the Levich Institute of the City College of New York. He joined KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information) in 2001, directed its Supercomputing Center from 2004 to 2006 and again from 2009 to 2012. He became Founding Director General of NISN(National Institute of Supercomputing and Networking) for 2013 to 2014. He led numerous national initiatives such as Korean National Grid Project of K*Grid and Korean National e-Science Project, and has been involved in international organizations such as the Open Grid Forum, Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly, and the Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development. He was the chief professor for the Grid and Supercomputing Program of Korea’s University of Science and Technology.

Alex Loddoch
Chevron Corporation

Alex Loddoch is the Technology Strategist for High Performance Computing (HPC) for Chevron Corporation, leading Chevron’s research and development activities in Advanced Computing. He has worked on the investigation and adoption of new hardware technologies, has led the design of new HPC systems and has developed and deployed new computational applications and workloads in a variety of disciplines across Chevron. Alex holds a Master’s degree in Physics and a PhD in Geophysics from University of Muenster, Germany and since joining Chevron has worked in various roles in Houston, Texas and Perth, Australia with a total of over 20 years of experience in HPC between academia and industry. Alex is a Chevron Distinguished Engineer for High Performance Computing.

David Martin
Argonne National Laboratory

David Martin is Manager, Industry Partnerships and Outreach at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory, where he works with industrial users to harness high performance computing and take advantage of the transformational capabilities of modeling and simulation. David brings broad industry and research experience to ALCF. Prior to joining ALCF, David led IBM’s integration of internet standards, grid and cloud computing into offerings from IBM’s Systems and Technology Group. Before IBM, David managed networks and built network services for the worldwide high-energy physics community at Fermilab. David began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, doing paradigm-changing work in software engineering and high-speed networking. David has a BS from Purdue and an MS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both in Computer Science.

Brendan McGinty
NCSA University of Illinois

Brendan McGinty leads the industry program for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He connects corporate and government needs and grand challenges with big data and HPC solutions in modeling and simulation, bioinformatics, data analytics, cybersecurity, and visualization. Brendan is also Executive Director for the Center for Digital Agriculture and Director of Industry for the Center for AI Innovation. He has founded and operated several consulting companies providing professional services to businesses and political organizations. Brendan also led education technology for one of the nation’s top 50 hospitals and led the successful privatization and technology transfer of NovaNET, originally PLATO, the world’s first computer-based education and social network.

Ryan Quick
Providentia Worldwide

Ryan Quick is an expert at scale-out systems, UNIX kernel design and profiling, and has been recognized for innovation in hardware, application, marshaling, and high performance computing. His current efforts bring machine learning, real-time eventing, set-selection, and digital signal processing technologies to bear on predictive analytics and self-healing in command and control systems. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, Mr Quick holds patents for messaging middleware systems, and is a pioneer in bridging High-Performance Computing technologies with enterprise best-practice infrastructure.

Stephane Requena
GENCI

Stéphane Requena is chief information officer of GENCI (Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif). GENCI is a legal entity taking the form of a «société civile» under French law, owned 49 % by the French State represented by the Ministry for Higher Education and Research, 20 % by CEA (the French Atomic Energy Commission), 20 % by CNRS, 10 % by universities and 1% by INRIA. Created in 2007, GENCI’s mission is to implement and ensure the coordination of the major equipments of the national HPC centres, by providing funding and by assuming ownership; promote the organization of a European HPC area and participate in its achievements. GENCI is also the French representative in PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). As a PRACE board member, Stéphane Requena set up R&D collaborations in order to optimize HPC facilities and to anticipate novel technologies. He also promotes simulation and high performance computing in both fundamental and industrial research.

Michael Resch
HLRS

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult Michael M. Resch is dean of the faculty for energy-process and biotechnology of the University of Stuttgart, director of the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), the Department for High Performance Computing, and the Information Center (IZUS), all at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He was an invited plenary speaker at SC’07. He chairs the board of the German Gauss Center for Supercomputing (GCS) and serves on the advisory councils for Triangle Venture Capital Group and several foundations. He is on the advisory board of the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC2). Michael Resch holds a degree in Technical Mathematics from the Technical University of Graz, Austria and a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Stuttgart. He was an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Houston and was awarded honorary doctorates by the National Technical University of Donezk (Ukraine) and the Russian Academy of Science.

Mitsuhisa Sato
RIKEN

Mitsuhisa Sato is a deputy Director of RIKEN Center for Computational Science, the research team leader of programming environment research team. From 2014 to 2021, he was working as a deputy project leader and a team leader of architecture development team in FLAGSHIP 2020 project to develop Japanese flagship supercomputer “Fugaku” in RIKEN. He received the M.S. degree and the Ph.D. degree in information science from the University of Tokyo in 1984 and 1990. He was a senior researcher at Electrotechnical Laboratory from 1991 to 1996, and a chief of Parallel and distributed system performance laboratory in Real World Computing Partnership, Japan, from 1996 to 2001. From 2001, he was a professor of Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba. He has been working as a director of Center for computational sciences, University of Tsukuba from 2007 to 2013. Since 2010, he is appointed to the research team leader of programming environment research team in Advanced Institute of Computational Science (AICS), renamed to R-CCS, RIKEN. He is a Professor (Cooperative Graduate School Program) and Professor Emeritus of University of Tsukuba. His research interests Include computer architecture, programming models, compilers and performance evaluation for parallel computer systems, OpenMP and parallel programming languages.

Mark Stickells
Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre

Pawsey is one of two, Tier-1, High Performance Computing facilities in Australia, with a primary function to accelerate scientific research for the benefit of the nation and to support Australia’s participation in the Square Kilometre Array. Pawsey is undergoing a $70m technology refresh and Mark leads a team of 50 HPC, data and visualisation experts, supporting over 2,000 researchers through 400+ projects using Pawsey’s advanced computation and data systems. 

An experienced R&D and technology executive, prior to joining Pawsey, Mark held leadership roles in innovation and industry engagement at The University of WA and was a former CEO of the WA Energy Research Alliance – an industry research joint venture between Australia’s national science organisation, CSIRO, universities, Chevron, Shell and Woodside Energy.  He also chairs the Board of All Saints’ College and its Foundation, and is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and Australian Institute of Management. Mark is a member of CEO’s for Gender Equity, graduated with distinction from his MBA program, and completed graduate studies in governance, educational administration, energy and resource policy.