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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!
Nicole Anasenes and Maria Shields
Ansys, an engineering simulation software provider, appointed Nicole Anasenes as its chief financial officer and senior vice president of finance and Maria Shields as its senior vice president of administration. Anasenes, who is the former chief financial officer and chief operating officer of Squarespace, stepped down from her role as a member of the Ansys board of directors and its audit committee to take the role.
Shields was promoted to senior vice president of administration from her role as Ansys’ chief financial officer. She will be responsible for leading the company’s human resources, information technology, procurement and real estate functions.
Matthew Bailes, professor at Swinburne University, received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2020 Swinburne University of Technology Vice-Chancellor’s Awards. Bailes started working at Swinburne in 1998 and established the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing research group. He held the role of director until 2010, where he grew its staff to 50. He also drove the development of Swinburne Astronomy Online.
“When I was first recruited, the head of my school said; if you come here, you can do anything,” Bailes said. “And to me, that’s what Swinburne means. It was a place you could do things that were a bit left of field, or out of the textbook.”
Tom Bethell joined Kao Data, provider of datacenters for high performance colocation services, as its business development director. Bethell comes from Next Generation Data and brings years of experience from sectors including datacenter, HPC and telco. He also worked at China Telecom, Six Degrees Group and Pulsant.
“Kao Data’s ability to meet and support customer demands for HPC and A.I. infrastructure is unrivaled in our industry, and I’m excited to be joining the team,” said Bethell. “Our location within a hotbed of HPC, AI and startup innovation presents the incredible potential to be the U.K. number one colocation facility for intensive and GPU-powered compute. I believe that this, combined with the depth and expertise of our leadership team and our growing cloud capabilities, will be a recipe for long-term success.”
Altair, a software and cloud solutions provider in the areas of simulation, data analytics and high-performance computing, appointed Matthew Brown as senior vice president. Brown held senior financial leadership positions at cyber safety company NortonLifeLock and Symantec, an enterprise security software provider.
“I’m thrilled to be joining Altair at such an exciting point in the company’s history,” said Brown. “Innovation and envisioning the future are at the core of Altair’s culture. I look forward to continuing that legacy while working alongside some of the industry’s smartest people to drive profitable growth and deliver value to our customers, partners, stockholders, and employees.”
Bronis de Supinski, chief technology officer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Livermore Computing division, was elevated to the rank of fellow and recognized for his leadership in the design and use of large-scale computing systems. IEEE’s fellow committee selected de Supinski for the prestigious distinction.
“I am pleased to be elevated to an IEEE fellow,” de Supinski said. “I am grateful to LLNL, Livermore Computing and my colleagues for their essential contributions to the research and system development that are the hallmark of my achievements. These achievements have enabled me to reach a goal that I set for myself many years ago — to be a world-leading computer scientist. This honor is evidence that LLNL fosters an environment where truly meaningful impact can be made. I hope that many of the most significant accomplishments of my LLNL career are yet to come, such as the successful acquisition of El Capitan in 2023.”
IBM has appointed Gary D. Cohn as vice chairman of IBM and member of the IBM Executive Leadership Team. Mr. Cohn will work in partnership with CEO Arvind Krishna and the IBM Executive Leadership Team on a wide range of business initiatives and external engagement, in areas including business development, client services, public advocacy and client relationship management.
“I am honored to be joining IBM, one the world’s most important companies, providing technology that helps organizations be agile and resilient in unpredictable times,” said Cohn. “With the company’s long history of innovation and transformation for every technology era, and a focused growth strategy that will capitalize on the enormous opportunity in hybrid cloud and AI, this is an exciting time to begin working alongside Arvind, the IBM team and IBM’s incredible roster of clients.”
Massimiliano Di Ventra, co-founder of the developer of high-performance computing technology company MemComputing, Inc., received the Foresight Institute’s 2020 Feynman Prize for Theory in nanotechnology. The award was established in 1993 and named in honor of physicist Richard Feynman. It recognizes researchers who advance Feyman’s goal for nanotechnology, which is to construct atomically-precise products through the use of productive nanosystems.
“I am honored to have received this prize, which came as a complete, and very pleasant surprise,” said Di Ventra. “It is not just a recognition of my research, but also the contribution of many students, postdocs, and collaborators, I have had the fortune and privilege of working with over the years.”
Kao Data, provider of datacenters for high performance colocation services, appointed Rod Faul as its senior client director. He joins from VIRTUS, bringing 30 years of telco and datacenter experience. He has also held sales roles at Level3 and Telefonica.
“During a time of market consolidation, mergers and acquisition, Kao Data offers significant opportunities to innovate and work with clients outside of the industry norms,” said Faul. “I’m delighted to be joining the team at Kao Data, and believe that our location and the expertise of our industry-leading technical team offers customers within the hyperscale, HPC and A.I. communities a scalable, resilient and highly-efficient home for their digital infrastructure.”
Edo Ganot
Excelero, provider of software-defined block storage for AI/ML/deep learning and GPU computing, appointed Edo Ganot as its chief business officer. Ganot will be responsible for developing go-to-market initiatives: sales and partnerships that align with the company’s NVMesh Elastic NVMe software-defined storage product solution with the demand for data storage in the U.S., Asia-Pacific and Europe.
“This is a rare inflection point in the enterprise I.T. market where A.I., high-performance computing and large database deployments have created an unmet need for faster and cost-effective storage,” Ganot said. “Excelero’s impressive installed base with global Tier 1 players and technology partnerships with industry leaders gives us a tremendous advantage. I look forward to accelerating the partnerships, sales and marketing initiatives that will propel our growth.”
Cambridge Quantum Computing welcomed Duncan Jones as head of the company’s quantum cybersecurity business. Duncan brings over a vast commercial background working for technology companies such as Thales and Arm. He will be responsible for developing and commercializing the company’s quantum software and technologies in cybersecurity, science, engineering, finance and gaming.
“I am excited and honored to join the team at CQC at this time of strong momentum,” Jones said. “There are so many potential applications of CQC’s technology today in finance, science, and in particular cybersecurity. I am attracted by CQC’s approach that is described succinctly as ‘Science led; Enterprise driven.’”
Arvind Krishna was elected chairman of the board at IBM. Krishna, who started working at IBM in 1990, was appointed as the company’s chief executive officer in January 2020. He is also a member of the board at the company.
Prior to his CEO appointment, Krishna most recently held the role of senior vice president for IBM’s cloud and cognitive software division, where he played an instrumental role in the acquisition of Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions.
The National Energy Technology Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory, appointed Michele Ostraat as its chief operating officer. Ostraat will be responsible for delivering strategic direction, leadership and management of NETL’s support functions and services, including cybersecurity and IT infrastructure.
Ostraat most recently held the role of senior downstream research center leader at Aramco Services Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. She also holds a B.S. in chemistry from Trinity University.
WekaIO, provider of high-performance and NVMe-optimized file storage solutions, appointed George Pamboris as its vice president of product management. Pamboris will be responsible for accelerating the company’s parallel file system to solve their customers’ technology challenges. He brings over 20 years of experience in the I.T. industry and has served in executive leadership roles at EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Amazon Web Services and Teradata.
“I’m excited for the opportunity to help WekaIO continue to revolutionize the storage industry by developing a product that not only provides superior speed and capacity metrics but that truly improves customers’ ability to leverage the value of their data by reducing TCO and increasing ROI through business outcomes,” said Pamboris. “I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to improve product lines at many top companies and recognize that WekaIO is well-positioned for its own success and to revolutionize the storage industry.”
Quantum Corp. welcomed Brian Pawlowski as its chief development officer. Pawlowski brings over 35 years of technical and leadership experience, having held leadership positions at DriveScale, Pure Storage, and NetApp. He currently serves as co-chair of the NFS Working Group at the Internet Engineering Task Force. He has served on the board of trustees for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and as a board member at the Linux Foundation.
“As Quantum strives to be the leader in video and unstructured data, I’ll be focused on building synergies across our general business units, driving hybrid multi-cloud data management solutions, expanding our software download strategy, and simplifying our products for ease of customer use,” said Pawlowski.
Thomas Potok
Thomas Potok was named a Battelle Distinguished Inventor, one of six scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory selected for the honor. Potok is section head for data and artificial intelligence systems research in ORNL’s computer science and mathematics division.
Potok also holds a joint faculty appointment at Duke University and is co-founder of a joint venture startup company, where he is commercializing his coinventions with Knoxville-based Covenant Health. His patents cover technologies related to machine learning, deep learning, text analytics and neuromorphic computing. For the list of all six scientists named as Battelle Distinguished Inventors, click here.
Pliops, a storage hardware acceleration vendor, appointed Eyal Waldman to its board of directors. Waldman is the founder and former CEO of Mellanox Technologies, which was acquired earlier this year by Nvidia for $7 billion. As a Pliops board member, Waldman will help guide the company’s strategy and scale its technology into new use cases.
“Pliops is tackling the most challenging issues that are vexing datacenter architects – namely, the colliding trends of explosive data growth stored on fast flash media, ultimately limited by constrained compute resources,” noted Waldman. “I look forward to working with the Pliops team as they bring their technology to customers and partners.”
Stefan Wild, Jeff Hammond and Judith Hill
The SIAM Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering announced the appointments of Stefan Wild, Jeff Hammond and Judith Hill as chair, vice-chair and program director, respectively.
Wild is a computational mathematician for the Applied Mathematics, Numerical Software, and Statistics Laboratory at the Argonne National Laboratory. He was also a DOE CSGF recipient from 2005-2008. Hammond works at Intel Corp. as a principal engineer. He was also a DOE CSGF recipient from 2005-2009. Hill, a DOE CSGF recipient from 1999-2003, is a computational scientist and leader of the Scientific Computing Group at the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Kevin Yagerwas was selected as a fellow for the 2020–2021 cohort of the Oppenheimer Science and Energy Leadership Program. Yagerwas is the leader of the Electronic Nanomaterials Group at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
“OSELP is the most eye-opening program I’ve ever been a part of,” said Yager. “The cohort format enables us to have candid conversations about each of the labs and gain a comprehensive perspective of the DOE complex. Many of the labs have a very different mission than that of Brookhaven—for example, the National Nuclear Security Administration labs—and so I would not have otherwise had the opportunity to visit them.”
2020 ACM Distinguished Members
The Association for Computing Machinery inducted 64 Distinguished Members in 2020. All selected members are longstanding ACM members and were selected by their peers for a range of accomplishments that move the computing field forward. The 2020 ACM Distinguished Members made contributions in data science, mobile and pervasive computing, artificial intelligence, computer science education, computer engineering, graphics, cybersecurity, and networking, among many other areas.
The ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes up to 10 percent of ACM worldwide membership based on professional experience as well as significant achievements in the computing field. For the 2020 ACM Distinguished list, 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.
