Datanami
EnterpriseAI
HPCwire Japan
QCwire
HPC & AI Wall Street
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!
Tim Banks
Green Revolution Cooling, providers of single-phase immersion cooling for datacenters, welcomed Tim Banks as its director of strategic alliances. Banks will be responsible for identifying and supporting partnership opportunities, creating strategy, and executing the plan for expanding GRC’s relationships with key technology partners.
“I look forward to maximizing my experience in strategic alliances to contribute to the rapid growth and development of GRC,” said Banks. “I’m thrilled to join the GRC team as it continues to meet the demand of more efficient cooling technologies while providing solutions for high-density computing environments.”
Raphaël Bello, Mike Lamont and Joachim Mnich
CERN appointed Raphaël Bello, Mike Lamont, and Joachim Mnich as its three new directors. Bello, who held several positions at the French Ministry for the Economy and Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will take on the role of director of finance and human resources at CERN.
Lamont was appointed as CERN’s director for accelerators and technology. He started his career at CERN in 1989 working on the SPS and LEP, before moving to the LHC in 2001. Particle physicist Mnich was appointed director for research and computing. He was research director at the German national laboratory DESY and has been working with CERN since the L3 experiment from 1987-1999, and more recently with CMS. For a list of the new members and promotions at CERN, click here.
Kim Budil was appointed as the director and president of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Since LLNL’s establishment in 1952, Budil will be the 13th director and the first woman to be appointed to the position. Most recently, she served as the principal associate director for the weapons and complex integration division at the Lab. Budil succeeds William H. Goldstein, who served in the position since March 31, 2014.
“I am deeply honored to take on the role of laboratory director,” Budil said. “Our Lab has a storied history and continues this spirit of innovation and impact today through the efforts of our amazing workforce. The Lab team has demonstrated time and again its resilience and commitment to our mission of service to the nation, and I look forward to working with all of my LLNL colleagues, LLNS, and our partners across the nuclear security enterprise, NNSA, DOE, and other agencies to ensure that this incredible institution continues to serve through outstanding science and technology.”
EVOTEK, a datacenter and cloud solutions provider, appointed James Caswell as its director of high performance computing. Caswell will be leading a new team that will focus on the next generation of datacenter and on growing the market. He comes from Dell EMC, where he held the role of enterprise district manager of its data protection division.
“Computing needs are at an all-time high while customers balance their own private computing needs, with applications running in the public cloud,” said Caswell. “Disaster recovery, ransomware, and a whole new set of opportunities are at the forefront of customer discussions. EVOTEK has been on an impressive hyper-growth trajectory since its 2014 inception. I’m excited to be joining the team to build out this growing business.”
Anantha Chandrakasan, Alan Edelman, and Samuel Madden
Three MIT computer science faculty, Anantha Chandrakasan, Alan Edelman, and Samuel Madden, have been elected fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery. Chandrakasan leads the MIT Energy-Efficient Circuits and Systems Group. He was recognized as a 2020 ACM fellow for energy-efficient design methodologies and circuits that enable ultra-low-power wireless sensors and computing devices. Edelman, an applied mathematics professor for the Department of Mathematics, the Applied Computing Group leader for the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and co-founder of the Julia programming language, was recognized for contributions to algorithms and languages for numerical and scientific computing. Madden, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Distinguished Professor of Computing, was recognized as a 2020 ACM fellow for contributions to data management and sensor computing systems.
Bob Coecke
Cambridge Quantum Computing welcomed Professor Bob Coecke as its chief scientist. Coecke comes from the University of Oxford, where he was professor of quantum foundations, logic and structures. He has previously held the role of senior scientific advisor to CQC in an effort to develop quantum natural language processing capabilities.
“After more than two decades of shaping the foundational tools for quantum computing, I am excited to be joining CQC and seeing those tools become part of the `real world’, now that quantum computers start to scale and become more relevant,” Coecke said. “Many of the aspirations and hopes that we have nurtured, for example when we developed ZX-calculus, are indeed starting to come to fruition within the quantum computing industry. Writing about Quantum Natural Language Processing 12 years ago, and then during 2020 finally being able to implement it on a real quantum computer was gratifying on many counts. More broadly, I foresee a major role for quantum AI, and am looking very much forward to the challenge of building an organization that will harness the power of quantum technology in a responsible manner.”
Betsy Doughty and Rich Gadomski
The Active Archive Alliance elected Betsy Doughty, vice president of corporate marketing at Spectra Logic, and Rich Gadomski, head of tape evangelism at FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A., Inc., as its co-chairpersons of the board of directors.
“Active archives are more relevant today than when we founded the Alliance a decade ago as users place increasing value on unstructured data for creating time to market advantage, research and development, and business intelligence,” said Doughty. “It has been a privilege to serve alongside Peter on the board, and we thank him for his inspired leadership and support. We are also eager to continue the Active Archive Alliance’s momentum and drive to educate end-users and facilitate the implementation of active archive solutions to solve today’s data growth challenges.”
Netlist, Inc., provider of high-performance SSDs and modular memory subsystems, announced the addition of Raj Gandhi as its vice president of the ASIC engineering unit within the company’s research and development team.
Gandhi has more than 30 years of experience developing integrated circuits. He comes from Marvell, where he served as the VP of IC engineering. He also served as principal engineering and VP of the IC engineering division at QLogic Corp. Gandhi holds an MS in computer and systems engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Intel appointed Pat Gelsinger as its chief executive officer. Gelsinger has over 40 years of experience serving in technology and leadership roles, most recently serving as CEO of VMware. He also spent 30 years at Intel, becoming the company’s first chief technology officer and driving the development of technologies such as USB and Wi-Fi. He will also join Intel’s board of directors upon assuming the CEO role on Feb. 15, 2021.
“I am thrilled to rejoin and lead Intel forward at this important time for the company, our industry and our nation,” said Gelsinger. “Having begun my career at Intel and learned at the feet of Grove, Noyce and Moore, it’s my privilege and honor to return in this leadership capacity. I have tremendous regard for the company’s rich history and powerful technologies that have created the world’s digital infrastructure. I believe Intel has significant potential to continue to reshape the future of technology and look forward to working with the incredibly talented global Intel team to accelerate innovation and create value for our customers and shareholders.”
James Hack, the former director of the National Center for Computational Sciences, retired from his 40-year career in computing and his 13-year career at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. At OLCF, he led the delivery of the Cray XT5 Jaguar, the Cray XK7 Titan, and the IBM AC922 Summit, three Top500 computing systems.
A major contribution by Hack to the OLCF was the development and execution of the Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program, which awards time on the supercomputers at the OLCF and Argonne Leadership Computing Facility to researchers using high performance computing to solve “grand challenge” problems in science and engineering.
Exascale Computing Project researchers Daniel Kasen and Rob Ross received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s honors. Kasen and Ross are one of eight who received the award. For the full list, click here.
The award recognized Kasen for “pioneering contributions in multi-messenger astrophysics, including seminal work on kilonovae, r-process nucleosynthesis, white dwarfs, and Type I and II supernovae; and for leadership in the application of high-performance computing in astrophysics.” The award recognized Ross for “significant research contributions in the areas of scientific data storage and management, and communication software and architectures; and leadership in major DOE initiatives such as the SciDAC program.”
The Association for Computing Machinery named Jose Meseguer a 2020 ACM Fellow. Meseguer, a Grainger College of Engineering Computer Science at the University of Illinois professor, was recognized as an ACM Fellow for the “the development of logical methods for design and verification of computational systems.”
“Without the support of collaborators and the Illinois CS department, none of this would’ve been possible,” Meseguer said. “This is much broader than any one individual, and because of that, I’ve led a very charmed life. All of the people I’ve worked with share a passion and a love for research that breeds a high level of excellence. And the best thing about these people and these collaborations is that they have led to friendships for life.”
Alexander Picchietti
Verne Global, a provider of datacenter solutions for high performance computing, appointed Alexander Picchietti to the newly created role of senior director, strategic alliances. Picchietti will be responsible for developing relationships with key partners, growing the ecosystem of service providers and vendors required to meet the needs of global organizations locating their compute-intensive workloads in Iceland.
“Verne Global has a strong history of partnering with industry-leading companies in order to offer its customers the best technology, that’s backed-up with the best service, all within a highly specialist and optimized datacenter environment,” said Picchietti. “I’m excited to be joining the team to grow this ecosystem of companies and services, and ultimately make Iceland the go-to destination for global HPC projects.”
IBM appointed Martin Schroeter as is the chief executive officer of the upcoming independent company that will be created after it separates from IBM’s Managed Infrastructure Services business. NewCo will focus on the management and modernization of IT infrastructure in every industry around the world. Schroeter was IBM’s senior vice president of the global markets division.
“NewCo is a trusted partner to the world’s most global enterprises with a team that has the best skills and experience in the industry,” Schroeter said. “I look forward to developing a diverse ecosystem of partnerships and alliances, to continuing a deep relationship with IBM, and to the creation of market leading capabilities.”
Prashant Shenoy was named the founding chair of the new Special Interest Group on Energy of the Association for Computing Machinery, which aims to bring together researchers from a variety of computing disciplines to address the challenges associated with future energy systems and their impact on society. He currently serves as a distinguished professor and associate dean in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst.
“We envision SIGENERGY as an interdisciplinary forum for researchers and practitioners who use computational methods and technologies to help decarbonize our society,” Shenoy said. “In the face of a global climate crisis, we urgently need to work together towards revolutionary, carbon-free systems of energy generation and consumption.”
Thirty-three-year Intel veteran Sunil Shenoy returned to the company as its senior vice president and general manager of the design engineering group. Shenoy, who departed in 2014, will be responsible for managing the design, development, validation and manufacturing of intellectual properties and system-on-chips for client and datacenter applications.
Shenoy was senior vice president and general manager of RISC-V at SiFive, an Intel Capital portfolio company working to commercialize the RISC-V open architecture. At Intel, Shenoy was corporate vice president in charge of Intel’s Platform Engineering Group, responsible for microprocessor and SoC design across Intel’s product groups. He also led Intel’s Visual and Parallel Computing Group and server and PC silicon development R&D and engineering, among other responsibilities.
Ben Smith and Michael Zimmerman
Ben Smith and Michael Zimmerman joined Green Revolution Cooling as its chief product officer and vice president of operations, respectively. Smith comes from Schneider Electric, where he held the role of VP of datacenter cooling systems. As CPO, Smith will be responsible for developing and launching new products while managing the lifecycle of existing GRC’s immersion cooling offerings.
As VP of operations, Zimmerman will be responsible for the worldwide manufacturing of GRC products, quality, and supply chain. He has over 20 years of experience holding executive positions. Most recently, he served as VP of global operations at Zebra/Xplore.
The Association for Computing Machinery named 95 members 2020 ACM Fellows for fundamental contributions in areas including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, computer graphics, computational biology, data science, human-computer interaction, software engineering, theoretical computer science, and virtual reality, among other areas. For the full list of ACM Fellows, visit here.
“This year our task in selecting the 2020 Fellows was a little more challenging, as we had a record number of nominations from around the world,” said ACM President Gabriele Kotsis. “The 2020 ACM Fellows have demonstrated excellence across many disciplines of computing. These men and women have made pivotal contributions to technologies that are transforming whole industries, as well as our personal lives. We fully expect that these new ACM Fellows will continue to be in the vanguard of their respective fields.”
AMD promoted Martin Ashton, Mark Fuselier, Darren Grasby, Devinder Kumar, and Sam Naffziger to senior leadership positions. Ashton now holds the role of senior vice president of Graphics Architecture and Radeon Technologies Group Intellectual Property. Fuselier is the senior VP of Technology and Product Engineering.
Grasby holds the roles of executive VP and chief sales officer. He is responsible for driving the adoption of AMD products and customer experience. Kumar is now the executive VP and chief financial officer. He is now responsible for the company’s financial profile. Naffziger is the senior VP, corporate fellow, and product technology architect with continued responsibility for maximizing the competitiveness, efficiency and cost of next-generation AMD solutions.
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.
