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!

Peter Chapman

IonQ has announced that Peter Chapman will join the company as president and CEO. Chapman was recently director of engineering for Amazon Prime and brings more than 40 years of experience in software engineering to the company. “Peter’s role as CEO is imperative to bringing those advancements to life for markets such as chemistry, medicine, finance, logistics and others that we have yet to identify,” said current CEO and co-founder Christopher Monroe.

“IonQ has transformed from a theoretical concept into a tangible computing option for innovative enterprises,” said Chapman. “This year, IonQ’s universal quantum computers will provide a path to deliver business value by solving difficult subsets of problems in entirely new ways. IonQ’s trapped-ion technology will drive innovation in material science, drug discovery, advancements in artificial intelligence and much more. I am delighted to pursue my new role at IonQ, as they lead the charge during this critical turning point for the field of quantum computing.”

Tom Ellery

DataDirect Networks has announced that Tom Ellery has been appointed to general manager and senior vice president of field operations for the Tintri by DDN division. “Tom has a very impressive track record as a senior executive in the field of technology,” said Paul Bloch, president and co-founder at DDN. “The Tintri by DDN division is in high growth mode, and we are putting in place a pair of experienced hands to take the business to the next level of success and execute on our vision.”

“I am very excited for the amazing opportunity of ‘re-joining’ the Tintri family under the DDN product family and expanding Tintri’s market leadership position in virtualized environments for the enterprise market,” said Ellery. “Tintri’s product portfolio continues to deliver market leading levels of simplicity, predictability and resource analytics that has garnered incredible customer feedback with almost a ‘cult-like’ following over the last several years. I look forward to the opportunity to lead the organization as we build on top of the impressive foundation that the team has laid out.”

Stuart Feldman

Citadel Securities has announced that Stuart Feldman has joined the firm as a senior advisor focusing on technology-related activities. Stuart played a critical role in creating the UNIX operating system and is based known for developing the first Fortran 77 compiler and for writing “Make,“ a tool that automated the process of compiling, managing, and installing computer programs on UNIX systems. Feldman is the former president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and is currently a fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAS.

“I am excited to join a firm that plays such an important role in the global market and heavily leverages advanced technology to drive innovation and results,” said Feldman. “I look forward to working closely with Citadel Securities and its leadership team as they tackle some of the biggest and most technically difficult challenges in the financial markets.”

Chelsea Finn

ACM has announced that Chelsea Finn is receiving the 2018 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation, “Learning to Learn with Gradients.” In her thesis, Finn introduced algorithms for meta-learning that enable deep networks to solve new tasks from small datasets, and demonstrated how her algorithms can be applied in areas including computer vision, reinforcement learning and robotics.

Finn is a research scientist at Google Brain and a postdoctoral researcher at the Berkeley AI Research Lab. This fall, she will begin a full-time appointment as an assistant professor at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ian Foster

The IEEE Computer Society has announced that Ian Foster, senior scientist and distinguished fellow, director of the Data Science and Learning Division at Argonne National Laboratory, and the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, has been selected to receive the 2019 IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS) Charles Babbage Award for his “outstanding contributions in the areas of parallel computing languages, algorithms, and technologies for scalable distributed applications.”

Foster’s research deals with distributed, parallel, and data-intensive computing technologies, and innovative applications of those technologies to scientific problems in such domains as materials science, climate change, and biomedicine. His Globus software is widely used in national and international cyberinfrastructures.

David Keyes

The organizers of ISC High Performance have announced the selection of Prof. David Keyes of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, as the ISC 2020 Program Chair. As program chair, Prof. Keyes is working with the ISC program team to define the conference topics, while also leading the 2020 steering committee, spearheading the effort to further elevate the value of ISC High Performance for the HPC community.

“ISC has been an important partner of KAUST since our founding,” said Keyes. “Europe is a geographically close partner and contains many centers of excellence in HPC research participation.  As a university, we exhibited at ISC in our early years to recruit faculty, research scientists, post-docs, and PhD students in areas of sustainable technologies and fundamental sciences connected with energy, environment, food, and water. KAUST was formed downstream of the computational revolution, whereby simulation and analytics are respected along with theory and experiment as fundamental paradigms. This is reflected in our faculty hiring, academic structure, curriculum, and, of course, facilities. The expanding scope and depth of the ISC conference series fit our purpose like a glove.”

Dieter Kranzlmüller

The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) has announced that Prof. Dr. Dieter Kranzlmüller will be its new chair of the Board of Directors. Prof. Kranzlmüller is the Chair of the Board of Directors and Managing Director of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Garching near Munich.

“From the validation of black holes at the farthest reaches of the universe, to the interaction of a medicine’s molecules with a cancer cell, to massive real-time data processing of autonomous vehicles operating in a hive fashion on a highway, HPC has and will be pivotal in shaping our scientific understanding, our industrial and economic competitiveness, and the quality and prosperity of our society,” said Kranzlmüller. “It is an immense pleasure to serve as GCS’ Chair and to continue building our nation’s leadership-class supercomputing assets with my fellow directors and our centres’ staff of talented, dedicated HPC experts, scaling and domain specialists, educators, and researchers.”

Simon McIntosh-Smith

The Cray User Group (CUG) has announced that the paper “Scaling Results From the First Generation of Arm-based Supercomputers” has won the Best Paper Award at CUG 2019. The paper was written by Simon McIntosh-Smith, James Price, Andrei Poenaru, and Tom Deakin from the University of Bristol. McIntosh-Smith co-developed the first modern many-core accelerators at ClearSpeed Technology (a company that he co-founded). He is a professor of high performance computing at the University of Bristol, where he leads the High Performance Computing Research Group.

“Excited and honoured that Isambard won the “best paper” award at #CUG2019 in Montréal,” McIntosh-Smith tweeted. “Huge thanks to the amazing team who did all the work: [James Price], [Tom Deakin] and Andrei Poenaru.”

Daniel Reed

The White House has announced that Daniel Reed has been appointed to be a member of the National Science Board (NSB). Reed will complete the remainder of a six-year term that expires on May 10, 2024. Reed is a professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Utah. Last year, Reed was appointed to serve as senior vice president for academic affairs at the university as well. Prior to joining the University of Utah, he was chair of computational science and bioinformatics at the University of Iowa. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University.

The NSB is comprised of 25 presidentially appointed members and the director of the NSF, who serves in an ex officio capacity. The NSB’s stated duty is to pursue the goals of the NSF, including advocating for “the pursuit of national policies for the promotion of research and education in science and engineering.” The NSB, which meets about five times a year, also sponsors the Vannevar Bush Award and the NSB Public Service Award.

NCSA 2019-2020 Faculty Fellows

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has named seven new faculty fellows for the 2019-2020 academic school year. The faculty fellowship is a program that provides seed funding for new collaborations that include NCSA staff. The fellows are:

• Rini Mehta for “The Big Picture: Media, Capital and Networks of Influence”
• Hope Michelson for “Predicting International Food Security Crises: A Data-Driven Approach”
• Yumeng Li for “Discovery of Advanced Nanoelectrics Through AI-Accelerated Multiscale Simulation from First Principles”
• Diwakar Shukla for “Enabling Long-Term Reuse of Experimental and Computational Datasets on Protein Dynamics”
• X. Shelly Zhang for “High-Performance, Multi-Objective, and Multi-Physics Design Optimization of Next-Generation, Patient-Specific Implant Scaffold at Scale”
• Kevin Leicht and Brant Houston for “The War on Professional Expertise: The Global Spread of Online Myths About Medicine and Health”

To read last month’s edition of Career Notes, click here.

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.