People to Watch 2015

Merle Giles
Director of Business and Economic Development at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

Merle GilesMerle Giles is Director of Business and Economic Development at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Supercomputer Centers Program.

As the leader of NCSA’s Private Sector Program (PSP) and economic development initiatives, Giles helps companies across all sectors find competitive advantages through better application performance. With its already high profile, PSP partners played a leading role in the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute proposal – a $300 million collaboration between government and industry that aims to transform the whole of US manufacturing through digital innovation.

PSP manufacturing partners include Caterpillar, John Deere, Dow, GE, Rolls Royce, and Procter & Gamble. Life sciences companies include Syngenta and Mayo Clinic, and oil & gas companies BP, ExxonMobil Upstream Research, and BhP Billiton partner with NCSA through the Private Sector Program. Furthermore, key IT vendors have chosen to partner on a strategic level with PSP, including Dell, Intel, Cray, Microsoft, Adaptive Computing, Allinea, and The HDF Group.

NCSA’s PSP has worked with nearly one-half of the companies in the U.S. FORTUNE 50 and nearly two-thirds of the manufacturers in the U.S. FORTUNE 100.

Giles is also a co-founder of a rather exclusive group of HPC center providers that serve industry directly, known as the International Industrial Supercomputing Workshop. Key members include centers in Germany, The Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Spain, France, Italy, and the UK.

Due this Spring is a co-authored and co-edited book by Giles and Anwar Osseyran of SURFsara in The Netherlands entitled Industrial Applications of High-Performance Computing, with contributed chapters from 11 countries.

Giles and his PSP team won 3 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ awards this past year for their work with manufacturers, vendors, and engineering application codes.

HPCwire: Hi Merle. Congratulations on being selected as an HPCwire 2015 Person to Watch. As you know, HPC has a long history in government and academia, but the crown jewel for the technology has always been the commercial sector, where HPC proponents believe the competitive advantages of HPC will equate to economic advantages. What are the key challenges that you’re facing in 2015 in your efforts to bring HPC fire down from Mt. Olympus to the masses?

Key challenges today are application software performance and persistent access to modern HPC for industry. Our HPCwire awards last year showed that collaborations with software developers work, and we achieved world records with LS-Dyna, ANSYS Fluent, and Alya, a multiphysics code from Barcelona. The commercial ISVs identified key bottlenecks and improved their code performance dramatically, without sharing source code with us. We need more of this kind of attention and we desperately need persistent enough access to productize these achievements.

HPCwire: One of the challenges of bringing HPC to a broader commercial user-base is the perception that “HPC” is for academics and elite branches of government, and that “we (a private commercial organization) don’t do HPC,” despite the fact that they might well be. Is the term “HPC” generally off limits in private sector discussions, or is the ice melting a little bit around it? 

The ice has melted quite a bit within the world’s largest corporations over the past 10 years. Large companies are well positioned to identify key gaps in science and engineering, and have sufficient scale to benefit from the ROI that only HPC can give. The best companies are seeing double and triple-digit ROI through HPC, which is not common with classical IT. Code success often begins with academia, but HPC is also a critical asset for achieving commercial success by de-risking and demonstrating how things can actually be made to work.

HPCwire: What trends in 2015 do you see as important for the march of bringing more sophisticated and powerful computing power to the private sector? What winds are blowing to carry the momentum forwards?

Trend 1 is high demand for multiphysics and multiscale applications. The Holy Grail in engineering is full-component virtual 3D simulations prior to bending and cutting metal. This will reduce costs of physical prototyping substantially, while also reducing uncertainty.

Trend 2 is code modernization. As processors move from multicore to manycore, the pressing need for parallelization will become palpable. In order for this computing revolution to take hold, the gap between hardware and software performance must be narrowed. Attention to and funding for code modernization is central to continued advancements in performance.

Trend 3 is a need to blend HPC and data. Most companies don’t keep enough data today because they don’t have adequate tools for storage and analysis. HPC must think outside the compute node to truly affect analytical behavior.

HPCwire: On a more intimate level, what can you tell us about yourself – personal life, family, background, hobbies?

My wife and I life in Champaign County, Illinois, and by summer we will have married off 3 of our 4 children. We remain a busy family with a 15-year-old who is involved in both music and sports. My background is in business having earned a CPA and an MBA. I was a leader in banking, trucking, and B-school executive MBA programs prior to joining NCSA nearly 8 years ago. On a personal level, I enjoy motorcycling. Favorite trip was riding in the Alps following ISC’13.

HPCwire: One last question – What can you share about yourself that you can share that you think your colleagues would be surprised to learn?

I was an exchange student to Sweden when I was 16, which immediately made the world a smaller place. Ever since, I’ve had a deep interest in understanding the historical and cultural reasons for human behavior. Business is exceedingly cultural, whether it is the business of manufacturing, academia or HPC. Many, if not most, of the challenges to HPC adoption are cultural. I am learning that a business background can help cut through some of the barriers posed by today’s business and access models.

 

Katie Antypas Buddy Bland Merle Giles
Katie Antypas
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Buddy Bland
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Merle Giles
NCSA
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Eng Lim Goh
SGI
Michael Heroux
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Ken King
IBM
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Bernd Mohr
Jülich Supercomputing Centre
Jason Stowe
Cycle Computing
Scott Tease
Lenovo
Ryan Waite Charles Wuischpard Mike Yang
Ryan Waite
Cray
Charles Wuischpard
Intel
Mike Yang
Quanta

 

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