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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!
Bertil Brendeke
Submer announced the addition of Bertil Brendeke as the company’s vice president of sales for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Brendeke comes from Acronis Cloud, where he held the role of vice president for the Europe and Middle East regions.
“Having worked with a few of the team members in the past, I am super excited about joining this scale-up company,” said Bertil. “It is always a pleasure to work with young, ambitious, motivated, and talented team members. When you know that the market is ready for the product and solutions of the future, which are being created by this pool of talented people. And that Submer stands for the creation of future-proof immersion cooling solutions which have also been recognized by International investors like Norrsken VC, Mundi Ventures, and Tim Reynolds.”
Hannes Bernien and Nicole Yunger Halpern
The Institute of Physics Publishing’s International Quantum Technology announced Hannes Bernien from the University of Chicago received the ‘young scientist’ award, and Nicole Yunger Halpern from Harvard University received the ’emerging researcher’ award.
The awards recognize and support early career researchers in the field of quantum technologies. Bernien and Halpern were selected for the award for their substantial accomplishments and extraordinary potential for future contributions.
Greg Bruno joined SoftIron Ltd. as its chief architect. Bruno will be responsible for managing SoftIron’s software and hardware integration strategy. He comes from Teradata, where he held the engineering fellow’s role in the Technical and Innovation Office Research Team. Bruno has over 20 years of engineering experience, including his work in developing the Rocks cluster toolkit at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
“There has been a certain level of stagnation in the data center and server industry when it comes to the way that hardware is designed and sourced, which has, disappointingly, become an almost acceptable status quo,” said Bruno.
Kazem Cheshmi, Madhurima Vardhan, and Keren Zhou
Kazem Cheshmi, Madhurima Vardhan, and Keren Zhou are the recipients of the 2020 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. Cheshmi of the University of Toronto was recognized for building a Sympiler that automatically generates efficient parallel code for sparse scientific applications on supercomputers.
Vardhan of Duke University was recognized for developing a memory-light massively parallel computational fluid dynamics algorithm using routine clinical data to enable high-fidelity simulations at ultrahigh resolutions. Lastly, Zhou of Rice University was recognized for developing performance tools for GPU-accelerated applications. ACM and the IEEE Computer Society jointly present the Fellowships.
Melvin Cordova joins Tachyum Inc.’s advisory board of its newly created Tachyum Government Corp. Cordova brings over a 30-year career in delivering advisory services to companies that enter into business with the Department of Defense and intelligence community organizations.
He has a 22-year career in the United States Navy. His service includes leading DoD’s investments in In-Q-Tel’s portfolio businesses oversaw DIA contributions in military drills, and directed various technologies maturations. He has also served as senior program manager, deputy chief, and acting chief in the Defense HUMINT Management Office, Technology Tradecraft Office.
William “Bill” Gropp was elected to serve as president-elect in 2021 of the IEEE Computer Society and president in 2022. Gropp, NCSA director and chief scientist, holds the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the IEEE CS vice president for Technical and Conference Activities and a Board of Governors member.
Gropp has been a part of the HPC community since 1987, when he played a significant role in developing the MPI message-passing standard. He is has authored many papers and books on MPI, including “Using MPI” and “Using Advanced MPI.”
Dominique Henneresse
2CRSi announced the appointment of Dominique Henneresse to its board of directors as an independent director. Henneresse has held leadership positions in the finance division of large and small corporations, including Alcatel, Steelcase, and Point P. He has held various advisory roles since 2010.
“I’m delighted to join 2CRSi’s Board of Directors,” Henneresse said. “I am looking forward to bringing my own experience into such an ambitious and dynamic team. In the age of Big Data, it is a chance to see a French group emerge in the development of innovative high-performance energy-efficient servers.”
Sandia National Laboratories Fellow Gil Herrera was selected to serve on the U.S. National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee. Herrera joins a group of 20 individuals comprised of government, industry, and academia to advise the president and the secretary of energy, among other government officials, on matters regarding quantum information science. He was appointed for a period of three years
“Quantum computing represents both an exceptional opportunity and a dire threat,” Herrera said. “On the positive side, when useful quantum computers can be built, they could solve molecular chemistry problems that could significantly reduce worldwide energy consumption or facilitate the rapid development of pharmaceuticals. On a more negative note, a quantum computer threatens public-key encryption that protects almost all secure web communications.”
Gaurav Khanna
Gaurav Khanna was named founding director of Research Computing at the University of Rhode Island. Before joining the university, Khanna served as professor of physics and co-director of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Center for Scientific Computing & Visualization Research.
“I’m looking forward to building a research computing center at the University of Rhode Island that will help support and grow the research efforts of both junior and established researchers across its campuses,” says Khanna. “I intend to develop a wide array of computational resources (local, regional, cloud) with full support, to advance the diverse research work underway at Rhode Island’s only public research university.”
Tamara Kolda, a 20-year veteran at Sandia National Laboratories, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Kolda’s election was due in part to her revolutionary work in tensor composition. She is one of 87 members elected this year and one of a few mathematicians to gain membership. At Sandia, Kolda has established her career in discovering mathematical patterns in data sets.
“It’s an honor to be recognized in the National Academy of Engineering as a mathematician,” Kolda said. “I’ve had a great career at an engineering lab because I work with engineers focused on solving key problems of national interest.”
Tony Maslowski
Tony Maslowski joined Cerebras Systems as its vice president and chief financial officer. Maslowski will be responsible for managing the company’s finances and lead its expansion to new markets worldwide. He brings over a 25-year career working with S&P 500 companies. He has also served as CFO at Broadcom.
“I am honored to join the Cerebras team and to support its mission of bringing the fastest AI computers in the industry to leading organizations worldwide,” said Maslowski. “I look forward to helping Cerebras continue to grow at a rapid rate as we bring our pioneering technology to new markets and solve some of the largest AI problems in the world.”
The Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer Society named Vivek Sarkar as the 2020 ACM/IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award recipient. Sarkar is recognized for “foundational technical contributions to the area of programmability and productivity in parallel computing, as well as leadership contributions to professional service, mentoring, and teaching.”
Sarkar serves as the Chair of the School of Computer Science and the Stephen Fleming Chair in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Sarkar will receive a $5,000 honorarium, and he will receive the award at the SC20 virtual plenary awards session on November 16, 2020.
Jeffrey Vetter
Jeffrey Vetter was promoted to corporate fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He also serves as section head for the Advanced Computer Systems Research Division at ORNL and is the Experimental Computing Laboratory’s founding director. Vetter has fostered a 17-career at ORNL, most recently serving under the role of leader for the Future Technologies Group at the Computer Science and Mathematics division.
Before ORNL, Vetter was a computer scientist and project leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Vetter is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Scientist Member. He has recently authored the books “Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale (Vols. 1 and 2).
Michael Trzupek
Core Scientific appointed Michael Trzupek as its chief financial officer. Trzupek will be responsible for the company’s financial activities, including EY audits, acquisitions, finance, tax, and accounting. Before Core Scientific, he served as CFO at Premera Blue Cross and interim CFO at Sound Transit.
“Core Scientific is led by an experienced leadership team with a long-standing record of success, and I am honored to be joining the company,” said Trzupek. “I sincerely look forward to building upon the strong foundation Bill has created by working closely with our auditors, suppliers, and customers to capitalize on the exponential growth in digital asset mining in North America.”
The High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart announced Marian Albers of the Institute of Aerodynamics at the RWTH Aachen University; Gerd Schädler of the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; and Lars Schäfer of the Institute of Theoretical Chemistry at the Ruhr University Bochum are the recipients of the 2020 Golden Spike Awards.
The High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart’s Golden Spike Awards recognizes distinction in computational research and in innovative applications of high-performance computing at its yearly HLRS Results and Review Workshop. For more on each winner and the award, click here.
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.
