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Speaker Biographies

ROGER BARGA is general manager and director of development at Amazon Web Services, where he is responsible for the Kinesis data streaming services. Previously, Dr. Barga was in the Cloud Machine Learning Group at Microsoft, responsible for product management of the Azure Machine Learning service. He is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, where he is a lecturer in the Data Science and Machine Learning programs. Dr. Barga holds a Ph.D. in computer science, has been granted over 30 patents, has published over 200 peer-reviewed technical papers and book chapters, and has authored a book on predictive analytics.

PETE BECKMAN is the co-director of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering. From 2008-2010 he was the director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, where he led the Argonne team working with IBM on the design of Mira, a 10 petaflop Blue Gene/Q. Dr. Beckman joined Argonne in 2002. He served as chief architect for the TeraGrid, where he led the design and deployment team that created the world’s most powerful Grid computing system for linking production HPC computing centers for the National Science Foundation (NSF). After the TeraGrid became fully operational, he started a research team focusing on petascale high-performance system software, wireless sensors, and operating systems. He also coordinates the collaborative research activities in extreme-scale computing between the U.S. Department of Energy and Japan’s ministry of education, science, and technology. He leads the Argo project for extreme-scale operating systems and run-time software. He is the founder and leader of the Waggle project for smart sensors and edge computing. The Waggle technology and software framework is being used by the Chicago Array of Things project to deploy 500 sensors on the streets of Chicago beginning in 2016. Dr. Beckman also has experience in industry. After working at Los Alamos National Laboratory on extreme-scale software for several years, he founded a Turbolinux-sponsored research laboratory in 2000 that developed the world’s first dynamic provisioning system for cloud computing and HPC clusters. The following year, he became vice president of Turbolinux’s worldwide engineering efforts, managing development offices in the United States, Japan, China, Korea, and Slovenia. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University (1993) and a B.A. in computer science, physics, and math from Anderson University (1985).

THOMAS FURLANI serves as director of the University at Buffalo’s Center for Computational Research (CCR). CCR maintains a high-performance computing environment, high-end visualization laboratories, and support staff with expertise in high-performance computing, data analytics, and visualization. An NSF predoctoral fellow,

Dr. Furlani has more than 30 years-experience in high-performance computing, including scientific computing, computational chemistry, and parallel processing. Dr. Furlani serves as principal investigator on several externally funded projects, including the XD-Net Metric Service Award (XDMoD tool) from NSF. In addition, Dr. Furlani serves on the NYSERNet board of directors and is a founding member of the Visualization in Transportation Committee of the National Transportation Research Board. Dr. Furlani also coordinates on-going K-12, undergraduate, and graduate level programs, including the Eric Pitman Annual Summer Workshop in Computational Science for High School Students.

ELIU HUERTA is the Gravity Group lead at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Huerta obtained a master’s degree in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, followed by a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics, at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. He is a broadband gravitational wave astrophysicist whose work is at the interface of analytical and numerical general relativity, boosted with innovative applications of machine and deep learning, to detect and characterize gravitational wave observations across the gravitational wave spectrum. He uses advanced cyberinfrastructure facilities and innovative hardware architectures to create scenarios for multimessenger astrophysics. Dr. Huerta has made significant contributions at the level of gravitational wave source modeling, development of data analysis techniques, testing and development of computational infrastructure for compact binary detection, and exploitation of advanced cyber-infrastructure facilities for compact binary detection for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the NANOGrav Consortium. He is a council member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, a full member of the NANOGrav Consortium, and a member of the Dark Energy Survey and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Collaborations.

DAVID KONERDING is a senior engineer at Google. Previously, he was senior architect for research computing at Genentech, computer scientist in the Distributed Systems Department at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a postdoctoral scholar for Steven Brenner and Kimmen Sjolander at University of California, Berkeley, a programmer for the Computer Graphics Lab, and a graduate student in the doctoral program of the Graduate Group in Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. He holds a B.A. in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

DOUGLAS KOTHE is currently the director of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP). He has over three decades of experience in conducting and leading applied R&D in computational applications designed to simulate complex physical phenomena in the energy, defense, and manufacturing sectors. Prior to his current position, he was deputy associate laboratory director of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate (CCSD) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Other prior positions at ORNL include director of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, DOE’s first Energy Innovation Hub (2010-2015), and director of science at the National Center for Computational Sciences (2006-2010). Before coming to ORNL, he spent 20 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he held a number of technical and line and program management positions, with a common theme being the development and application of modeling and simulation technologies targeting multi-physics phenomena characterized in part by the presence of compressible or incompressible interfacial fluid flow. He also spent 1 year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the late 1980s as a physicist in defense sciences. He holds a B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Missouri, Columbia (1983), and an M.S. (1986) and Ph.D. (1987) in nuclear engineering from Purdue University.

VANI MANDAVA is a computer scientist and currently the director of data science at Microsoft Research at Redmond. She has over a decade of experience in engineering teams designing and shipping software that in use by millions of users across the world. She is passionate about enabling academic researchers and institutions develop technologies that fuel data-intensive scientific research using advanced techniques in data management, data mining, especially leveraging Microsoft cloud and AI platform. She has enabled the adoption of data mining best practices in various v1 products across Microsoft client, server and services in MS-Office, Sharepoint, Online Services (Bing Ads) organizations, and in the Academic Search service. She co-authored a book Developing Solu

tions with Infopath and holds patents in service engineering. She leads Microsoft Research Outreach efforts at data science institutions in U.S. universities. She co-chaired KDD Cup 2013 and partners with many academic and government agencies, including NSF-supported Big Data Innovation hub consortia.

SANJAY PADHI leads the AWS Research Initiatives including AWS’s federal initiatives. Dr. Padhi has more than 15 years of experience in large-scale distributed computing, data analytics, and machine learning. He is the co-creator of the Workload Management System currently used for all the data processing and simulations by CMS, one of the largest experiments in the world at CERN, consisting of more than 180 institutions across 40 countries. He also co-founded the ZEUS Computing Grid project at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Germany before joining CERN. Dr. Padhi obtained his Ph.D. from McGill University in high-energy physics and is also appointed by the dean of faculty as an adjunct professor of physics at Brown University.

MANISH PARASHAR currently serving as Office Director of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) at NSF. He joins NSF from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where he is currently a distinguished professor and the founding director of the Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute and the Applied Software Systems Laboratory. He also serves as a full member of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and is a visiting professor in the faculty of Business, Computing, and Law at the University of Derby (United Kingdom). Most recently, at Rutgers, he co-led strategic planning efforts in Research Computing and served as the interim associate vice president of research computing between 2015 and 2016 to oversee the establishment of the Rutgers Office of Advanced Research Computing. Dr. Parashar served as program director in the then-Office of Cyberinfrastructure at NSF between 2009 and 2011, managing a research portfolio that spanned software sustainability, computational and data-enabled science and engineering, and cloud computing. Among his accomplishments was leading the establishment of the crosscutting Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) program. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in computer engineering from Syracuse University and a B.E. degree in electronics and telecommunications from Bombay University (India). He has received numerous honors throughout his career, including a 2013 R&D 100 Award (with ORNL and the Georgia Institute of Technology), the Peter D. Cherasia Faculty Scholar Award from the Rutgers School of Engineering (2014-2017), IBM Faculty Awards in 2008 and 2010, the Tewkesbury Fellowship from the University of Melbourne (Australia; 2006), and the Rutgers Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research (2004-2005). He was elected to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society’s Golden Core in 2016; is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and IEEE; and is an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Scientist. Manish has co-authored hundreds of technical publications, conference proceedings, journal special issues, and textbooks throughout his career. He is the founding chair of the IEEE Technical Consortium on High-Performance Computing, current editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions of Parallel and Distributed Systems and serves on the editorial boards and organizing committees of several other journals and international conferences and workshops.

SHYUE PING ONG is an associate professor in the Department of NanoEngineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011. His research laboratory, the Materials Virtual Lab, focuses on the interdisciplinary application of ab initio calculations and informatics to the discovery and study of novel materials for energy and other applications. He was the recipient of the DOE Early Career Research Award in 2014, the ONR Young Investigator Program Award in 2016, and was appointed as a Scialog Fellow in Advanced Energy Storage in 2017.

ROBERT ROSS is a senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a senior fellow at the Northwestern-Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering. He is the director of the DOE SciDAC RAPIDS Institute for Computer Science and Data, whose mission is to assist application teams in overcoming computer science and data challenges in the use of DOE supercomputing resources. Dr. Ross’s research interests are in system software for high-performance computing systems, in particular distributed storage systems and libraries for I/O

and message passing. He received his Ph.D. in computer engineering from Clemson University in 2000. Dr. Ross was a recipient of the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

SAURABH SINHA is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on regulatory and comparative genomics and has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NSF, and U.S. Department of Agriculture. He is co-director of the NIH BD2K Center of Excellence at the University of Illinois. He chairs the M.S. Bioinformatics program of the department, and leads the educational program of the Mayo Clinic-University of Illinois Alliance. He serves as program co-chair of the RECOMB Regulatory and Systems Genomics (RSG) conference. He is an NSF CAREER award recipient and was recognized as a University Scholar in 2018.

ALEXANDER SZALAY is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Alumni Centennial Professor of Astronomy, professor in the Department of Computer Science, and director of the Institute for Data Intensive Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is a cosmologist, working on the statistical measures of the spatial distribution of galaxies and galaxy formation. He is a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received an Alexander Von Humboldt Award in Physical Sciences and in 2007 the Microsoft Jim Gray Award. In 2008, he became doctor honoris causa of the Eotvos University, Budapest.

MICHELA TAUFER is the Jack Dongarra Professor in High Performance Computing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK). Before to join UTK, she was a professor in computer and information sciences and a J.P. Morgan Case Scholar at the University of Delaware where she also had a joint appointment in the Biomedical Department and the Bioinformatics Program. She earned her undergraduate degrees in computer engineering from the University of Padova (Italy) and her doctoral degree in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology or ETH (Switzerland). From 2003 to 2004, she was a La Jolla Interfaces in Science Training Program postdoctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the Scripps Research Institute, where she worked on interdisciplinary projects in computer systems and computational chemistry. Dr. Taufer’s research interests in high-performance computing include scientific applications, scheduling and reproducibility challenges, and big data analytics. She has nearly 100 publications and delivered nearly 80 talks at various conferences and research institutes. She is currently serving on the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructures. She is a professional member of the IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM.

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