Candidate for President
Vote for one.
Ashley Barker – Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
As the Section Head for Operations for the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Lab, I’ve had the opportunity to assist with several large Cray system deployments, from acquisition to operations. I have been an active member of the Cray User Group (CUG) for many years and have attended several CUG conferences and served on the Program Committee, the PEAD Special Interest Group, and on the Election Committee. I have found my involvement with CUG to be extremely rewarding, as it has enriched both my knowledge and professional network. I tend to get more relevant information and ideas from the CUG Conferences than others that I attend, as it is useful to hear talks and learn from colleagues that have similar architectures, software, and tools. In addition, meeting others in this community has led to a number of important collaborations over the course of my career. We continue to see high-quality papers submitted to the CUG Program in the areas of systems support, applications, and file systems and I/O. However, while we solicit for papers in User Services, I have noted that we do not typically receive many submissions specific to this area. As a long-time member of the Cray User Support community, I think this is an area of the where I can work to solicit more participation and help grow and strengthen this area of the program. Thank you for considering me for this role.
Candidate for Vice President
Vote for one.
Bilel Hadri, PhD – King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
I’m Bilel Hadri, computational scientist at the KAUST Supercomputing Lab since July 2013. I’m leading efforts in benchmarking, regression testing and helping in coordinating operational support, strategic efforts for systems procurements, upgrades and providing advanced support to users.
I received a Master in Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Houston in 2008. Following a Postdoctoral Position in May 2008 with Dr Jack Dongarra, I joined the National Institute for Computational Science at ORNL as a computational scientist in December 2009.
CUG activities since 2010:
• papers & BoFs (Best Paper Award CUG2012)
• reviewer in applications and user-support track
• XTREME since 2015
• elected PEAD-SIG chair in 2016 and in 2018
• elected Director-at-large in 2020
I’m running for the Vice-President to help the CUG board in different activities such as outreaching to the Cray HPC community, from leadership customers to small sites.
CUG is a great computing community and I have been enthusiastically engaged since 2010 not only by participating and sharing scientific contributions, but also as an active volunteer with the board, to successfully organize CUG conferences. I have volunteered at several HPC conferences program planning and technical committees including SC and ISC for example.
My experience has prepared me well for serving the CUG community, as Vice-President. I will sustain the remarkable efforts of the past years. I look forward to continuing the collaboration with the board members, and to improving the quality and quantity of submissions by incorporating best practices from other HPC conferences.
Candidates for Director At Large (DAL)
Vote for one.
Paul Lin, PhD – National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)
My name is Paul Lin and am a member of the Application Performance Group at LBNL/NERSC. My responsibilities include working with application teams to optimize performance and scaling on the production Cray XC40 Cori platform and the pre-production Perlmutter Cray EX platform through the NERSC Exascale Science Applications Program (NESAP) and ECP. I previously worked at Sandia National Laboratories and was one of the early application testers on the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, which was commercially produced as the Cray XT3. At Sandia, I was a developer on several large-scale physics/engineering applications including CFD, magnetohydrodynamics and plasma physics codes. I have also spent considerable time optimizing the performance and scaling of my applications on Red Storm, the LANL/SNL Cray XE6 Cielo and LANL/SNL Cray XC40 Trinity. I received my PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, and specialized in CFD, solvers and numerical analysis. I served on the organizational committee for a multi-lab national laboratories workshop for a couple of years and have served on the technical program committee for numerous national and international HPC conferences including SC, IPDPS, ICPP, VECPAR, etc. I am running for the position of director-at-large because I want to support CUG and the CUG conference. I believe my experience at both a US DOE office of science laboratory and US DOE national security laboratory as well as 17 years as a developer of large physics/engineering application codes on Cray computer systems brings a valuable perspective to the board of directors.
Lena M. Lopatina, PhD – Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
My name is Lena Lopatina, and I am an HPC consultant at Los Alamos National Laboratory. CUG is one of the most important conferences I attend each year. I believe there is tremendous value for all Cray sites to meet to discuss our achievements and challenges, brain storm solutions, discuss future endeavors, etc. I have personally benefited from the technical program and discussions at CUG, and have always brought those benefits back to my site. Now I would like to give back to the CUG community by serving on the CUG board and offering my help, my time, and my expertise to make future CUG meetings as well as the CUG organization as a whole successful in our common goal of facilitating collaboration and information exchange in the high-performance computing community. I have served as the chair of the nominating committee during which time I became very familiar with the CUG by-laws, the CUG organization, and the CUG board roles, which will enable a smooth integration into my new role. My background in computational physics as well as in high performance computing, combined with my role as an HPC consultant, makes me uniquely qualified to work with the extensive cray user group body as well as its disparate group of vendors.
Brett Bode, PhD – National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
I am an Assistant Director at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. I am a co-PI on the Blue Waters and Delta awards from the National Science Foundation that funded HPE/Cray systems at NCSA. Blue Waters represented high-end computing in the NSF space while Delta targets the long tail of science with an HPE Apollo based system using Slingshot. Due to these systems, I have been involved in CUG since 2013. I find CUG to be an invaluable venue to interact with both HPE/Cray and the community that supports their systems and want help support CUG to ensure it continues to provide this critical venue for the community.
I have previous user group/conference organization experience with multiple SC committees and the AMD User Forum. I have a combined background in developing and supporting applications and more recently managing HPC systems, large operations teams support system and their deployments. This background gives me a great perspective on the needs of the CUG members both large and small. I would use this background as a member of the board to support the existing programs as well as look for ways to broaden the membership of CUG.
