Team Liaisons

This year, we will continue our team-liaisons program. The team liaisons are Student Cluster Competition Committee members who serve as links between the teams and the committee. The liaisons will meet with their assigned teams a few times a day, during the competition, to make sure that everything is going well and that teams don't have concerns. The liaisons will also serve as friendly faces that teams can discuss the competition with and they can receive feedback from teams on what is or isn't going well. There is also a group of committee people who will help with translation this year. They, and the liaisons, will assist us to make sure that communication is clear.

Dr. John Cazes is the manager of the HPC Applications group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). He is also the lead for the Community Codes area in the Extended Collaborative Support Service component of the NSF Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program. John relies on his background in HPC, astrophysics, and climate/weather/ ocean modeling to support the wide variety of researchers on TACC resources.

Dr. Cazes has been involved with the Student Cluster Competition since SC10 and has worked with many teams over the past seven years. In 2016 and 2017, he moved behind the curtain and became part of the SCC committee. He will be leading the SCC effort next year for SC18 in Dallas.

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.

Dr. Rebecca Hartman-Baker leads the User Engagement Group at NERSC, a group of consultants who engage with the NERSC user community to increase user productivity via advocacy, support, training, and the provisioning of usable computing environments. She loves supercomputers and working with students, so the cluster competition is a natural convergence of those interests. In addition to serving on the competition committee since 2015, she's been a coach for the Australian cluster-competition teams at SC13 and SC14 and the NERSC teams at ISC16 and ISC17.

Andy Howard has been involved with the competition since the first year it started. He's been a student team member, co-adviser, and now helps with the competition on the committee. Andy now works as a Program Manager for the Microsoft Azure team helping to on-board HPC workloads for customers both on-premises and in the cloud.

Doug Smith is currently the HPC & Network Engineer at the Laboratory for Atmospheric & Space Physics at the University of Colorado - Boulder. His research interests are Fluid Dynamics, Magnetic Fields, High performance computing, networking as well as cloud based scientific computing and big data. He has been involved with the SCC from its beginning as the leader of the University of Colorado Teams as well as competition chair and committee member.

Kathleen Shoga works as a computer scientist for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Livermore Computing Division. She works on multiple aspects of HPC, including performance tools, system administration, system monitoring, and big data databases. She also participated in the SCC in ’12 and ’13.

Christopher Bross is finishing his master’s degree right now and planning to start a PHD program later this year. His first encounter with HPC was at the Student Cluster Competition at SC13. Since then he his focused my study plan on HPC and simulation and modeling courses. He participated in the SCC one more time as a student and has worked in the committee for the SCC afterwards.

Ramin Nosrat is an IBM Program Manager for High Performance Storage System (HPSS) software and services. HPSS is software developed in collaboration with LLNL, LANL, SNL, ORNL, and NERSC. HPSS addresses extreme-scale storage and archive requirements. For example, HPSS software is being used at 5 of the top 10 TOP500 systems.

These liaisons will be assisted by Dr. Xiao Zhu, Dr. Xuanhua Shi, and Dr. Si Liu.

Dr. Xiao Zhu is a computational scientist at Purdue University. He received his PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010. His current research lies in the interface of advanced computing and computational chemistry. Some of his current projects include carbohydrate interactions with guest molecules, in silico identification of antimicrobial peptide from natural proteins. He also has extensive experience in high-performance projects and has been working closely with research groups across campus and the XSEDE community.

Dr. Xuanhua Shi is a professor in Big Data Technology and System Lab/ Service Computing Technology and System Lab, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China), who is the director of GPU research center of HUST, and vice director of Parallel and Distributed Computing Institute and Big Data Technology and System Lab. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China) in 2005. From 2006, he worked as an INRIA Post-Doc in PARIS team at Rennes for one year. His current research interests focus on the cloud computing and big data processing. He published over 90 peer-reviewed publications, such as VLDB, PPoPP, ICS, Cluster, ICDCS, and CCGrid. He received research support from a variety of governmental and industrial organizations, such as National Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, European Union and so on. He has chaired several conferences and workshops, and served on technical program committees of numerous international conferences, such as SC, ICPP, CCGrid, EuroPar and Cluster.

Dr. Si Liu is a research associate in the high performance computing group at TACC. He conducts research on HPC software tools and provides the science and engineering community with superior user experience. He is also collaborating with academic and industrial institutions all over the world on various data-intensive research projects that demand advanced HPC technology and cyberinfrastructure. Prior to joining TACC, Si worked as a software engineer in Computational Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He participated in establishing the Yellowstone supercomputer system in the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) for climate research, provided consulting services and technical support to scientific computing communities, and collaborated with scientists on climate models development and optimization. His main research interests include high-performance computing, parallel and distributed algorithms, performance analysis, benchmarking, domain decomposition methods, numerical analysis, and inverse problems.