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Keynote Speaker Bios

Tilak Agerwala, Vice-President, Systems, IBM Research

Tilak Agerwala is responsible for developing the next-generation hardware and software technologies for embedded systems, servers, and supercomputers for IBM. Dr. Agerwala's distinguished career includes jointly developing the architectural foundations of the RS6000 and was responsible for the systems architecture and technology strategy of the RS/6000 SP (1992-1997), the most successful parallel computer of all time. Dr Agerwala received the W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE in 1998 for outstanding contributions to the development of high performance computers.

Jacubus N. Buur,  Principal Research Physicist, Shell International Exploration and Production B.V.

Jacubus N. Buur is responsible for research initiatives in subsurface imaging and exploration for Royal Dutch/Shell via their GameChanger process. He has been instrumental in developing key visualization technologies and has made significant contributions to the adoption of clusters in the petroleum industry with the early installation of large-scale Linux clusters. Mr. Buur has been with the Royal Dutch/Shell family of companies for 20 years.

John Picklo,  Manager, Mainframes and High Performance Computing, DaimlerChrysler

John Picklo is responsible for systems software and hardware for all of the engineering mainframes and supercomputers at the Chrysler Group. His background includes 25 years of experience working with information technology in various technical and consulting roles. Mr. Picklo's automotive background includes experience designing and managing systems to support computer-aided design at DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, Nissan, and Toyota.

John Reynders,  Vice-President, Informatics, Celera Therapeutics

John Reynders is responsible for computational sciences, algorithmics, software engineering, computer science, and knowledge management efforts in support of drug discovery and development at Celera Therapeutics. Previously, Dr. Reynders served as Vice-President for Information Systems at Celera Genomics where he was responsible for all supercomputing capabilities, discovery software engineering, and enterprise system infrastructure. Prior to Celera, Dr. Reynders worked at Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Los Alamos National Laboratory where he managed the largest dedicated unclassified super computer in the United States.

Applications Track Speaker Bios

Stefano Cozzini, Democritos INFM National Simulation Cente

Stephano Cozzini is a development scientist at INFM (Italian National Institute for Matter Physics) working at National Simulation Center DEMOCRITOS hosted at Sissa (Trieste, Italy). He is presently coordinating all the IT activities within the center and works an external consultant for cluster and grid computing at ICTP (International Center of Theoretical Physics). His main professional interests are in the fields of high-performance computing and grid computing appliced to computational physics.

Aaron Darling, University of Wisconsin - Madison, USA

Aaron Darling is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He entered Simon's Rock College in 1997 and received an honorary high school diploma in 1998. In 2000 he received a Bachelor of Science degree from UW-Madison, where he elected to pursue graduate studies the following year. In 2002 he was awarded a National Library of Medicine Fellowship for training in Computation and Informatics in Biology and Medicine at UW-Madison.

In 2002 Aaron accepted a summer research internship working with Dr. Wu-chun Feng at Los Alamos National Labs. Dr. Feng's group had recently published several articles on a low-power, high-density Transmeta cluster called Green Destiny. Impressed by the efficiency of Green Destiny, Aaron could not help but 'imagine a beowulf cluster of these running BLAST.' During this internship he began work on mpiBLAST, an open source parallelization of BLAST. During his stay in Los Alamos he also discovered a passion for mountain-biking and ultimate frisbee. Aaron's current research project is methods for multiple genome alignment in the presence of inversions and rearrangements.

M. Ehtesham Hayder, Saudi Aramco

Dr. M. Ehtesham Hayder is a member of the Advanced Simulation Support Team, EXPEC Computing Center, Saudi Aramco. He worked at the Institute for Computational Mechanics in Propulsion (ICOMP/NASA Glenn Research Center), Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE/NASA Langley Research Center) and the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC/Rice University) before joining Saudi Aramco. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University, NJ in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

Ulisses T. Mello, IBM, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA

Dr. Ulisses T. Mello is a research scientist at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center and an adjunct associate research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He has more than 50 papers published in the literature. Dr. Mello received his Ph.D. and M.A. in geology from Columbia University, M.Sc. in geology from Federal University of Ouro Preto and B.Sc. in geology from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. From 1987 to 1994 he worked for the Petrobrás Research Center in large-scale fluid and heat flow within sedimentary basins. During this period, he was the principal architect and developer of the Petrobrás basin simulation system for risk assessment. In 1998, he received the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) Wallace Pratt Award for the best paper published in AAPG Bulletin. His research interests are basin modeling, 3D representation of geological structures, 4D seismic reservoir simulation, parallel computing, data mining, and visualization in geosciences. Since 2000, Dr. Mello has served as the IBM Research Relationship Manager for the Chemical and Petroleum Industry sector.

Jim Prewett, University of New Mexico, USA

James E. Prewett is a High Performance Computing Systems Engineer at the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of New Mexico. His primary responsibilities there include maintaining high-performance-computing resources and networks as well as leading the security team. His primary interests are in security for high-performance-computing systems and monitoring those systems.

Ying Xu, University of California - Riverside, USA

Ying Xu received his B.E. degree in Computer Science from Tianjin University, Tianjin, P.R. China, in 1998. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate of Computer Science at the University of California, Riverside. His research interests include operating systems, distributed systems, mobile code and cluster computing.

Systems Track Speaker Bios

Robert A. Ballance, University of New Mexico, USA

Prof. Robert A. Ballance received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, in 1989. He is presently Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at UNM, and Associate Director, AHPCC. Dr. Ballance's interests include object-oriented software design and programming techniques; software engineering; user interface design; understanding, maintaining, and controlling software and hypermedia systems; system administration; and cluster computing. His compiler research includes the development and applications of the Program Dependence Web. Dr. Ballance has published numerous articles and technical reports in system design, user interfaces, programming language theory, and object-oriented application frameworks.

As the Associate Director for Computing Systems and Systems Research at AHPCC, Dr. Ballance oversees all high-performance computing systems associated with the Center., including the 512-processor Los Lobos cluster and the 128-processor RoadRunner cluster. He is co-PI and Project Manager for the 64-processor Vista Azul high-performance computing system awarded to AHPCC under a IBM SUR grant, and leads systems research on this hybrid architecture in local/remote scientific and visual computing. Dr. Ballance plays a guiding role in the adoption and evolution of Access Grid remote teleconferencing.

Dr. Ballance is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society and serves on the Board of Directors for the Linux Clusters Institute and the New Mexico Information Technology and Software Association. He has recently served as the Co-Chair of the Workshop on Human-Factors in the Access Grid and was a member of the program committee for the 2001 Workshop on Advanced Computing Environments held in conjunction with the Tenth IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Distributed Computing in San Francisco, California.

Tomoyuki Hiroyasu, Doshisha University

Tomoyuki Hiroyasu is Associate Professor of the Department of Knowledge Engineering and Computer Sciences at Doshisha University.

1987 Doctor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from Waseda University.

1987-1988 Research Associate in Waseda University

1988-2002 Research Associate in Doshisha University

2002-2003 Assistant Professor in Doshisha University

2003-Present Associate Professor in Doshisha University

He is working to develop optimization algorithms, such as gradient methods and genetic algorithms. He is applying these algorithms to solve several problems by computing simulations such as designing structures, finding the best parameters in fluid dynamics problems, and determining protein tertiary structures. To derive these solutions, huge computational costs are needed, which is why he is also working for developing tools for parallel, grid, and clusters.

Morris Jette, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA

Morris Jette is a computer scientist with the Integrated Computational Resource Management Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His primary research interest is computer scheduling, from individual tasks and processors to distributed applications running across a computational grid.

James H. Laros III, Sandia National Labs, USA

James H. Laros III is employed by Sandia National Labs as a Principal Member of the Technical Staff, where he is currently involved in research and development of technologies that can be applied to large cluster and MPP systems.

Nader Mohamed, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, USA 

Nader Mohamed obtained his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bahrain, Bahrain, in 1992 and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA, in 1998. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. His research interests include network middleware, computer networks, cluster and grid computing, and object-oriented distributed systems.

José Moriera, IBM, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA 

José E. Moreira received B.S. degrees in physics and electrical engineering in 1987 and an M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1990, all from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995. Dr. Moreira is a Research Staff Member and Manager, Modular System Software, at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Since joining the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1995, he has been involved in several high-performance computing projects, including the Teraflop-scale ASCI Blue-Pacific and ASCI White. Dr. Moreira is the author of over 30 publications on high-performance computing. He is currently the spec lead for the Java Community Process proposal to add multidimensional arrays to Java. In the Blue Gene project, he is the system software architect for this family of massively parallel machines.

Michael S. Warren, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA 

Michael S. Warren is a staff member in the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He holds a Ph.D. (1994) in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a B.S. in physics and B.S. in engineering and applied science from the California Institute of Technology (1988). His research in computational astrophysics extends from modeling the behavior of supernova explosions to understanding the structure and evolution of the universe. Warren has been a frequent user of many of the fastest parallel machines in the world for the past 15 years. He is a four-time winner of the Gordon Bell prize for significant achievement in parallel processing (1998, 1997 [two], and 1992), and the co-winner of the Intel Grand Challenge Computing Award (1992).