March 16 -- The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has named Dan C. Stanzione Jr. to the newly created position of deputy director at the center. As deputy director, Stanzione will track the center's vision, strategy and planning, ensure effective and efficient operations of center-wide activities and programs, and articulate the center's impact and plans to the broader scientific community. He will also play a key role in funding new activities through proposals and partnerships. He will officially begin in this role in June 2009.

TACC is well known for providing high-end advanced computing resources and services to researchers nationwide; conducting leading research and development projects; and providing training and education for the local and national scientific community.

"The University of Texas at Austin is proud to have emerged as one of the leading computational science institutions in the world," Juan M. Sanchez, vice president for research, said. "TACC is the foundation of that growth. We look forward to hiring more individuals of Dan's national reputation and deep expertise to help the university continue to reinforce and grow its leadership position."

Most recently, Stanzione was the director of the Ira A. Fulton High Performance Computing Institute (HPCI) at Arizona State University (ASU). Over the past four years, he founded and led the development of this new HPC organization from conception to a fully functioning center with the 10th largest system in academia and a staff of 22 people. Prior to his directorship at ASU, Stanzione was a science policy fellow in the Division of Graduate Education at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

"I'm incredibly excited to join TACC and The University of Texas at Austin," Stanzione said. "Certainly, the systems and the facilities are among the best in the world, but what makes TACC special is the enormous talent of the people. I'm thrilled to be joining this team and look forward to what we can accomplish together. Large-scale computation is a crucial element in addressing the enormous challenges facing science and our society, and I can think of no better place in the world to bring these challenges than to the Texas Advanced Computing Center."

TACC Director Jay Boisseau said, "Dan is one of the emerging leaders in the supercomputing community, and has a deep understanding for how researchers and educators use HPC technologies. He's well known and highly respected for his expertise and for his success in building a strong center at ASU. We look forward to having him help us increase TACC's impact as a world-class computing center, and enable more breakthrough discoveries that advance science and society."

Stanzione has led numerous synergistic activities while at ASU, including teaming with TACC and Cornell University to deploy and support Ranger, NSF's first "Path to Petascale" system, as part of the NSF TeraGrid initiative. In this role, Stanzione was instrumental in the training and user support efforts, developing online content, and delivering in-person training as far afield as Coimbra, Portugal. In addition, he completed a project under the Department of Defense (DOD) Programming Environment and Training (PET) to examine programming models for next -- generation DOD systems, and his focus on user productivity has been adopted by a number of new communities through training and advanced user support programs.

Stanzione began his career at Clemson University, where he earned his doctoral and master's degrees in computer engineering, as well as his bachelor of science in electrical engineering. He then directed the supercomputing laboratory at Clemson, and also was an assistant research professor of electrical and computer engineering. His research focuses on the tools, software and architectures to advance scientific research through high-end computing.

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Source: TACC