ACM SIGHPC SYSPROS

The SIGHPC Systems Professionals Website

Election Slate 2020

Chair

Adam Hough

I would like to considered for President of the SIGHPC SYSPROS ACM Chapter. I am the current treasurer and have been a HPC system professional for 15 years at various organizations with my current position with with Shell’s HPC & TI organization in the team with role in designing, procuring, and deploying HPC resources around the world. I have been active in the HPC SysPros since the SC12 BoF session.

There is a continuing need for additional for face to face meetings and knowledge sharing with the focus on helping grow the knowledge sharing of this profession across all organizations. I hope to try and start an additional meeting at ISC as a goal to continue to grow the organization while I am currently based in the Netherlands.

Vice Chair

David Clifton

David Clifton is the Technical Lead for High Performance Computing in the IT group at Ansys, a leading developer of CAE simulation software. He holds a Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics from The Johns Hopkins University, and has been a Unix sysadmin for over 30 years. He was the workshop chair for HPCSYSPROS19 at SC19 and was on the review committees for PEARC19 and PEARC20.

Treasurer

Jenett Tillotson

I would like to be considered for Treasurer of the SIGHPC SYSPROS ACM Chapter. I have been an HPC System Administrator for 17 years, have been active in both IBMXXL and the CUG in the past, and currently serve as a Senior Cluster System Administrator at NCAR. I have been active in HPCSYSPROS since the days when we just had a BoF at SC, and recently I have served as the Membership Chair and the President of this Chapter. As for my involvement in the rest of the HPCSYSPROS community, I have helped organize the past HPCSYSPROS Workshop serving as the Program Chair for our inaugural workshop.

The Treasurer position for the next two years will be a pivotal role for SIGHPC SYSPROS. The ACM has not yet determined how we are to be managed as a Virtual Chapter. We have been working on this issue for the past two years which has culminated with SIGHPC SYSPROS creating a non-profit entity in order to be able to operate financially. This will require us to file for 501c(3) tax status with the federal government some time in the next two years. I have past experience with this process, and I have successfully led Bloominglabs, a makerspace in Bloomington, Indiana, to gain 501c(3) status.

I look forward to continuing working with SIGHPC SYSPROS and I appreciate your consideration for this position.

Secretary

Stephen Fralich

Ever since I learned of supercomputing systems while in high school, I was fascinated by both the technical aspects of them as well as the research that they enable. I’ve been working with Linux HPC systems since the early 2000s and with UNIX/Linux systems since I was in high school. I’m currently an HPC Systems Engineer at Boeing. Prior to Boeing, I lead the technical side of the University of Washington’s central HPC effort for almost ten years and worked as an HPC Systems Administrator at the University of Chicago. I served as Member at Large for the first two years of the chapter’s life. I also served on the SC19 workshop organizing and submission review committees. If you’d like more detail, you can find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenfralich/

Membership Chair

Jeffrey Raymond

Hello my name is Jeffrey A. Raymond and I would be honored for the opportunity to serve you and the community and be utilized in growing the membership and diversity of the SigHPC - Syspros group. I have been an HPC system Engineer at the University of Pittsburgh supporting the infrastructure (Compute Clusters, Storage and IB\Omni Path fabrics) for ten years. Prior to that I was one of the primary Linux Systems Administrators for Enterprise systems. I am the team lead for HPC Engineers at the main University Data Center where we work together with faculty, staff, students and industry to architect, design, deploy and support systems to solve grand challenges, HPC, big data and all types of problems. I love and am very passionate about this work and the greater good we work to achieve.

My First SC conference was SC11 and at SC12 I attended the inaugural Syspros BOF. My second SC and each one since I have mentored students thru the Mentor-Protege program. I have also been on the Syspros committee for the past several years doing peer reviews of presentation content for the SysPros workshops.

At The University of Pittsburgh I have served on CIO commissioned working groups and committees that include Staff Development, Research Data Management and Senate Computing Usage. I am currently a member of the Committee for Inclusion and Diversity and serving as Chair of Remote Engagement - Subcommittee. Please consider my experience and background to help grow our SysPros membership.

William Scullin

I am the HPC Group Lead at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics. With 17 years of career experience in HPC Systems Administration, he has been a long-time contributor to this community. William was the first Chair of the of SIGHPC SYSPROS, held the office of Membership Chair since 2018, and the organizer and co-organizer of SC BoFs and workshops on systems management stretching back to 2010.

As Membership Chair, I will work to continue the chapter’s growth, boost outreach outside the United States, and improve our visibility within SIGHPC and the ACM. As with other groups, I remain dedicated to improving diversity and fostering inclusion efforts in our community. I look forward to continuing my service to our community.

Member(s) At Large (Choose Two)

John Legato

My name is John Legato and I’d like to be considered for the position Member-At-Large for SIGHPC-SYSPROS. I’ve been working as an HPC System Administrator in the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute(NHLBI) at the National Institutes of Health since 2003. I have experiencedesigning, procuring and operating HPC systems for a variety of workloads in the life sciences.

My service on NHLBI and NIH committees has given me experience in bridging the gap between the needs of researchers and design and operation of HPC systems to meet those needs. Through my role supporting users, I’ve seen the gaps in HPC training and demand for technical expertise and I welcome the opportunity to serve the chapter and the community.

Chuck Schwarz

My name is Chuck Schwarz and I would like to be considered for the Member-At-Large position for SIGHPC SYSPROS. I’ve been working In HPC at Purdue University since 2014. During my time here, I’ve witnessed firsthand the challenges presented by the complexities of HPC environments, and have seen the benefits of systems professionals sharing their knowledge and experiences to overcome the challenges presented by these environments. It is my hope that as Member-At-Large, we can continue to grow the SIGHPC SYSPROS organization into a thriving, diverse community.

Prentice Bisbal

Prentice Bisbal has been an HPC Systems Professional for almost 20 years. He first became interested in HPC when learning about mathematical modelling while earning his BS in Chemical Engineering from Rutgers University. After a brief stint as a Process Controls Engineer, Prentice took the leap and switched careers from Engineering to System Administration when he became a Unix Software Engineer (system administrator, really) and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), a US Department of Energy national laboratory in September of 1998.

Since then, Prentice has worked for several different employers in public and private academic research and the oil & gas, and pharmaceuticals industries. He has come full circle and is now woking at PPPL again.

He has experience with every aspect of HPC system administration: racking servers, diagnosing hardware issues, installing and configuring the operating system, compiling and installing numerous open-source and commercial computational packages, providing support and instruction to end-users, writing documentation, maintaining datacenters, designing clusters, working with architecture and engineering firms on the design of modular data centers, and writing RFPs and managing the RFP process for large purchases for the aforementioned clusters and modular data centers.

Prentice also has experience with multiple Unix variants, and a large variety of different hardware. He has worked with SunOS, Solaris, Digital Unix/Tru64, Irix, AIX, and, of course, Linux (mostly RHEL and its derivatives). He has worked with wide range of hardware including old Sun SPARCStations, large Sun Enterprise Servers, SGI O2 and Octane workstations, multi-processor SGI Origin NUMA systems (they were a big deal at the time!), an IBM Blue Gene /P, and all sorts of x86 systems.

Prentice is also a fixture in the HPC community, subscribing and regularly contributing to a variety of HPC-related mailing lists over the years, and attending the SC conferences and any other HPC workshops and conferences he can convince his employer to send him to. He participates local professional system admin groups such as LOPSA’s NJ and NYC chapters, the NYC Linux Users Group, and Unigroup of NYC. Prentice has also been involved with HPCSysPros from early on. He was on the organizing committee of the first HPCSysPros workshop at SC16.