Competition Committee

The hardworking volunteer committee that makes the Student Cluster Competition possible is dedicated to students and mentoring the future of HPC at the SC conference. These individuals donate their time and energy to create a one-of-a-kind experience for undergraduates.

2016 Committee

Back Row:

Stephen Harrell, Purdue University
Competition Chair
Stephen is Teaching, Education and Outreach staff in Research Computing at Purdue. Before that, he was systems staff for Purdue's primary HPC resources. He has also been the staff advisor for seven Student Cluster Competition teams at Purdue.
Dr. John Cazes, Texas Advanced Computing Center
Competition Deputy Chair
John leads the HPC Applications group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. He has over 20 years experience in HPC and is focused on providing high level support to the HPC user community. John began participating in the Student Cluster Competition program in 2010 and has advised five different teams.
Dr. Kris Garrett, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Reproducibility Lead
Kris is a computational mathematician at Los Alamos National Lab working in the field of algorithmic and computational optimizations for kinetic equations. He has 5 years of experience in high performance computing and software development. This is his first year participating in the student cluster competition.
Christopher Bross, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität
Applications Team
Dr. Xiao Zhu, Purdue University
Applications Shadow

Middle Row:

Bob Beck, Obtuse Systems Corporation
Password Application Judge
Bob hails from the Great White North in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Professionally he usually tends to work on things involving moving obscured bits around, and as professional test subject for extreme microphone level settings in remote meeting software. For fun, he is a developer on the OpenBSD and LibreSSL projects.
Dr. Rebecca Hartman-Baker, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Student Impact Team
("Why I Brought an All-Female Team to the Student Cluster Competition at ISC16")
Dr. Sam Coleman, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, retired
Webmaster, night shift
Sam is happily retired from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and has never been busier, with volunteer tasks at SCC, the MSST mass storage conference, the Reno Air Races, the Air Race Classic, and other organizations. He has been on the SCC committee since 2007.

Front Row:

Jennett Tillotson, Indiana University
Primary Technical Lead
Dr. Hai Ah Nam, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Chair Emeritus and Decadal Celebration Lead,
Hai Ah is a computational nuclear physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory by day and digging a tunnel back to California by night. She's most pleasant after a good run and feeding and thinks that every dispute should be settled via a DDR (dance dance revolution) showdown.
Randy Herban, Purdue University
Technical Team
Randy is a Program Manager with Purdue University who works with Research Groups to ensure they have the right resources available. Randy co-led the Purdue team in 2010 and has assisted the committee since 2015.
Ramin Nosrat, IBM
Student Impact Team

Not Pictured:

Scott Michael, Indiana University
Applications Lead
Aaron Pellman-Isaacs, IBM
Technical Team
Aaron is a former competitor in the SCC for Stony Brook University and now works for IBM as a Software Engineer.
Paul Peltz, Los Alamos National Lab
Secondary Technical Lead
Paul Peltz is a Scalable Systems Engineer in the High Performance Computing Division at Los Alamos National Laboratories where he helps procure, test, and integrate the new HPC systems into production. He has almost 20 years of experience collaborating with vendors to evaluate and integrate pre-release hardware and software. Currently he is the systems technical lead on the Trinity project and is actively working with Cray to deploy their largest XC system to date, a 110 cabinet XC40 named Trinity.
Doug Smith, University of Colorado
Student Impact Team