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. 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. Rebecca is the deputy Chair for SCC this year and will chair the Student Cluster Competition for SC19. She's also been a coach for the Australian cluster-competition teams at SC13 and SC14 and the NERSC teams at ISC16 and ISC17.

Stephen Harrell is part of the Teaching, Education and Outreach staff in Research Computing at Purdue and is actively pursuing a Masters in Atmospheric and Planetary Science. Before that, he was a member of the systems staff for Purdue's primary HPC resources. Stephen was als the Student Cluster Competition chair for SC16 and SC17. Additionally, he has been the staff advisor for seven Student Cluster Competition teams from Purdue.

Christopher Bross is working on his PHD this year. His first encounter with HPC was at the Student Cluster Competition at SC13. Since then he has focused his study plan on HPC and simulation and modeling courses. He participated in the SCC one more time as a student and has worked as a member of the SCC committee ever since. This year, Christopher is in charge of the Reproducibility Challenge.

Dr. Si Liu is a research associate in the high performance computing group at TACC. He manages the HPC Applications group, 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.

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.

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 at LANL.

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.

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.