Dec. 13, 2019 — On Nov. 11, 2019, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin announced changes to its leadership team.
John Cazes has been elevated to Director of the High Performance Computing (HPC) where he will oversee a team of 20 with responsibilities for improving application performance, providing frontline support, predicting performance on future architectures, and training the next generation of scientists and engineers.
“I’ve spent the past 20 years of my professional career working with researchers to enable greater performance on our HPC resources and evaluating advanced technologies and techniques,” Cazes said. “I look forward to leading the HPC group at TACC to ensure that we continue to provide a high level of support and the most productive resources available to the open science community.”
“Bill and John have been invaluable members of the TACC team. Congratulations to both of them for their long and outstanding service to TACC and on their new roles,” said Dan Stanzione, TACC Executive Director.
Cazes joined TACC in 2005 as the onsite representative for climate, weather, and ocean for the Department of Defense’s Programming Environment and Training (PET) program. He has served in the HPC group for his entire time at TACC and was most recently named Deputy Director. In addition to his position at TACC, he has held multiple leadership roles in the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), including managing the Extended Collaborative Support Services (ECSS) program.
Cazes replaces Bill Barth, who has served as TACC’s Director of HPC for more than a decade. Barth will lead the newly-formed Future Technologies group, which will focus on technology decisions around the center’s HPC systems and the Frontera Phase 2 leadership-class computing facility.
“I’m excited to lead TACC’s efforts to identify the technologies and architectures that will advance science and engineering over the coming decade,” said Barth. “This is an interesting time in HPC and the future systems we deploy will enhance the productivity of thousands of researchers nationwide.”
Barth began working at TACC as a graduate student in 2003 and joined as a full time researcher after he received his PhD. Barth was co-Principal Investigator (PI) on the Stampede, Stampede2, and Lonestar4 systems, and serves as PI on a number of National Science Foundation grants related to TACC Stats, MPI optimization, and XDMOD integration. TACC will recruit to build the new Future Technologies group.
“Bill and John have been invaluable members of the TACC team,” said Dan Stanzione, TACC Executive Director. “Congratulations to both of them for their long and outstanding service to TACC and on their new roles.”
Source: Aaron Dubrow, Texas Advanced Computing Center