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!
Bill Gropp
Bill Gropp has been named Acting Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He has served as NCSA’s chief scientist since 2015 and joined the Urbana-Champaign faculty in 2007. Gropp is a co-principal investigator of the Blue Waters supercomputer and is well known in the advanced computing community for his contributions to the development of the MPICH implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI).
“I am honored to have been asked to drive NCSA’s continuing mission as a world-class, integrative center for transdisciplinary convergent research, education, and innovation,” said Gropp. “Embracing advanced computing and domain collaborations across the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus and ensuring scientific communities have access to advanced digital resources will be at the heart of these efforts.”
Trenton Baker
RAID has hired Trenton Baker as VP of Marketing. He most recently served as chief marketing advisor at Cerebreate, a company that he founded. Baker has nearly 20 years of hardware and storage experience.
“RAID Inc. is ideally positioned to build on our record 50% revenue growth in the HPC market by providing focused and unbiased technically sound storage solutions,” states Bob Picardi, CEO of RAID. “Trenton joins RAID at a great time, bringing with him solid industry partner relationships and experience with hyperconverged and cloud installations, that will raise our success in these markets to a new level.”
Jill Hruby and Christine Coverdale
The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) has honored Jill Hruby, President and Laboratories Director of Sandia National Laboratories, with the 2016 Suzanne Jenniches Upward Mobility Award. The award recognizes a woman who has succeeded in rising within her organization to a significant management position such that she is able to influence the decision-making process and has created a nurturing environment for other women in the workplace. Hruby has been at Sandia since 1983 and is the first woman to lead a national security laboratory.
“I am honored to receive this award on behalf of Sandia, where I was encouraged every step of the way,” Hruby said. “It is the kind of inclusive and supportive environment where future leaders will be developed.”
Christine Coverdale, Plasma Physicist at Sandia, was also honored by the SWE with the Prism Award. The award recognizes a woman who has charted her own path throughout her career, providing leadership in technology fields and professional organizations along the way. Coverdale also recently won the IEEE Plasma Science and Applications Committee Award. She joined Sandia in 1997.
“These awards mean a lot to me,” Coverdale said. “I have been lucky to have had many opportunities at Sandia to lead interesting and challenging projects, be mentored by highly capable people and ultimately give back and mentor students and newer staff members.”
Eric Lançon
Eric Lançon has been named Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Scientific Data and Computing Center. In this position he will oversee an integrated infrastructure that includes computing, data storage, and networking as part of the Lab’s Computational Science Initiative. Prior to joining the Lab, Lançon served as elected computing coordinator of the ATLAS experiment and also spent time working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He is taking over for Michael Ernst who retired from the Lab in June.
“I look forward to expanding the Scientific Data and Computing Center to accommodate new computing capabilities, such as high-performance computers with GPUs that accelerate computations and single computer chips with more and more processors,” said Lançon. “Integrating these capabilities into the center while continuing to host state-of-the-art computing hardware for the RHIC and ATLAS experiments at the same level of efficiency will be a challenge—one that I am excited to take on.”
Gerry McCartney
Indianapolis Business Journal and Techpoint have named Gerry McCartney CTO of the Year in the category of “not-for-profit/government.” McCartney is Purdue University’s CIO, a position that he’s held since 2007. Since then, Purdue has had six supercomputers listed on the Top500 List and has developed the nation’s largest cyberinfrastructure for research. McCartney also holds the titles of VP for Information Technology and System Chief Information Officer.
“This award is especially gratifying because Indiana has a booming and successful tech community,” McCartney said. “To be honored within that community is very rewarding.”
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.