John West
Director of Strategic Initiatives, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
General Chair, SC16 Supercomputing Conference
John West is Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, part of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC provides HPC services and expertise to the open science community, and is the largest provider of HPC resources in the NSF XSEDE community. He is also the general chair of SC16, the HPC community’s largest research conference.
Prior to joining TACC in late 2014, West was Director of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program, a DoD-wide program that provides high performance computing expertise, computing, storage, and a nation-wide research network for the Defense acquisition, science, engineering, and test communities. Prior to that he held a number of positions in private industry and the federal government, including a tour as Director of the Scientific Computing Research Center at the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC). West is a recipient of the Department of the Army’s R&D Award, a founding officer of the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC), a Distinguished Fellow of the Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State University, and past chair of the High End Computing working group of the National IT R&D Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC) Committee on Technology. He serves and has served on a variety of review boards for Universities, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy.