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DICE Alliance 2010 Speaker Biographies

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Morning Keynote: Victor H. Reis, Senior Advisor, Office of the Undersecretary of Energy for Science

Dr. Victor Reis As the Senior Advisor, Office of the Undersecretary of Energy for Science, Dr. Reis is currently working on a broad range of departmental strategic issues. He is a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of the U.S. Strategic Command. Mr. Reis led the Nuclear Strategies Project and served as a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of the U.S. Strategic Command and the Sandia National Laboratory National Security Advisory Panel among others.

As the Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs in the U.S. Department of Energy, he led the development of the DOE’s Stockpile Stewardship Program. As Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) at the Pentagon, he served as the principal advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for scientific and technical matters, basic and applied research, laboratories and early development of defense weapons systems. His other key positions include Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Senior Vice President for Strategic Planning, SAIC; Assistant Director for National Security and Space, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President (OSTP); Senior Staff Member, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory and other positions in industry and government. Reis earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a Master of Engineering degree in Mechanical Engineering from Yale University and a Master of Arts and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Afternoon Keynote: Dr. Gil Weigand, Director of Strategic Programs, Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Dr. Gil Weigand is the Director of Strategic Programs in the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

In this position, Weigand develops new initiatives that integrate, consolidate and focus the significant gains in computational science capabilities on important global challenges related to energy, the environment and national security.

Weigand has held several senior management positions within the Department of Energy (DOE) and is a recipient of the Secretary of Energy Gold Medal. Among the DOE titles he held were Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research, Development and Simulation with the agency’s defense programs, now called the National Nuclear Security Agency and also the defense program’s Senior Technical Information Officer.

Weigand was the architect behind DOE’s highly successful Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. The program built a partnership between DOE laboratories and U.S. industry that developed the world’s first supercomputer capable of a sustained performance of 1 trillion floating-point operations per second (1 teraflops). It also set the pace for the rapid advance in high-performance computing (HPC) that has led to current systems capable of hundreds of teraflops.

Recently, Weigand received the inaugural James R. Schlesinger Award from the Secretary of Energy for his passion for excellence along with his ability to foster and implement the practices and values that are necessary for the protection of our nation. Weigand holds a doctorate in engineering from Purdue University.

Barry Bolding, Ph.D.

Dr. Barry Bolding has over 20 years of experience in HPC as a scientist, applications specialist, systems architect, pre-sales product and market manager as Vice President of Scalable Systems at Cray Inc. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, and has published numerous papers in the area of computational modeling of physical and chemical systems. Dr. Bolding has worked for a number of leading HPC companies, including Cray Research, SGI, Network Computing Services, Tera Computer Corporation, IBM and Cray Inc. His diverse background allows him to have a unique, balanced perspective on future systems development, how modern HPC systems are used and how customers weigh the performance and total cost of ownership against data center, engineering and the business realities they face.

Steve Conway

Steve Conway, Research Vice President of IDC’s High Performance Computing group, plays a major role in directing and implementing HPC research related to the worldwide market for technical servers and supercomputers. A 25-year veteran of the HPC and IT industries, Mr. Conway authors key IDC studies, reports and white papers; helps organize and advance the HPC User Forum; and provides thought leadership and practical guidance for users, vendors and other members of the HPC community. He is also a member of the DICE Technical Advisory Panel. Before joining IDC, Mr. Conway was Vice President of corporate communications and investor relations for Cray, Inc. Mr. Conway had a 12-year career in university teaching and administration at Boston University and Harvard University. A former Senior Fulbright Fellow, he holds bachelor's and master's degrees in German from Columbia University and a master's in comparative literature from Brandeis University, where he also completed doctoral coursework and exams.

Jim Escoe

Jim Escoe has an undergraduate degree in Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the Ohio State University. He has over twenty years of experience in the Product Lifecycle Management industry. For the last ten years, Escoe has led Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) High Performance Computing (HPC). He led the transformation of this capability from a departmental computing center serving a handful of engineers to providing the HPC for all P&G technical centers around the world. This service provides the basis for P&G's modeling and simulation which is central to their overall innovation strategy. Most recently, Escoe has taken on the role of leading the transformation of P&G's use of 3D CAD, visualization, and modeling and simulation/HPC in packaging innovation.

Keith Gray

Keith Gray is Manager of High Performance Computing for BP. The HPC team supports the computing requirements for BP's Advanced Seismic Imaging Research efforts. This team supports one of the largest Linux Clusters dedicated to research in Oil and Gas. Mr. Gray graduated from Virginia Tech University with a degree in Geophysics, and has worked for BP and Amoco since 1985. He was listed in HPCWire's People to Watch 2006.

Rick Griffin, PE

Rick C. Griffin is an Electrical Engineering Specialist at UT-Battelle in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Since the beginning of 2001, Rick has provided engineering support for the design, construction, commissioning and operation of two large data centers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). These centers currently have 40MVA of electrical capacity for IT equipment and 13,800 tons of chiller capacity. Prior to his current work, he performed engineering design for power, controls, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), as well as research and development projects. Rick has also managed a municipal electrical utility and has a Professional Engineer license in Tennessee.

Keven Hofstetter

Keven Hofstetter joined Caterpillar Inc. in 1988 after earning a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University. Keven completed a one-year training program and then joined the Performance Analysis section within Caterpillar's Product Development Center of Excellence. He has spent most of the last 20 years in the area of virtual product development. Keven is currently a Research Program Manager responsible for the VPD Supporting Technology Research program. He develops technologies such as large-scale rigid and flexible multi-body dynamics, implement-earth interaction models, tire and track-soil interaction models and virtual operator models. His primary focus is the development of virtual tools that can be used to drive product development. Keven serves as Caterpillar Inc’s liaison to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and is a member of the Council on Competitiveness HPC Initiative Manufacturing Working Group.

Brian Kucic

Brian Kucic started his career as a Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacturing System Manager at Bohn Refrigeration Products in Danville, Illinois. Brian spent 10 years at Bohn, implementing many new manufacturing processes including the first “lights out” sheetmetal processing cell. In 1998, Kucic assumed the position of Program Manager of the Technology Management Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Brian Kucic assisted in the design and implementation of the Advanced Computation building’s machine room expansion and also served as the Cray User Group Operations chair from 1998 to 2003. Kucic accepted the position of Senior Operations Manager in 2004, increasing his responsibilities to include business development for the center’s Industrial Private Sector Program and served as the program’s Interim Director in 2007. Kucic is now one of three principals at R Systems NA, Inc. which is a spin out of NCSA and provides High Performance Computational resources to industry as well as academic researchers.

Gary New

Gary New is the Assistant Section Head and Computing Facility Engineer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Gary is responsible for overseeing and maintaining the infrastructure of the supercomputing center at the NCAR Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, managing day-to-day ESS activities as Assistant Section Head and serving as the Assistant Project Engineer for the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center data center to be located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Before coming to NCAR in 2000, Gary worked in the hospital and healthcare facilities field for 19 ½ years, beginning as an Electrician and rising to serve as the Building Services Supervisor encompassing all trades.

Dave Norton

Dave Norton graduated with honors for an engineering degree in computational material science at the Naval Research Laboratory. The degree included porting and optimizing applications using massively parallel programming techniques on the Connection Machine and RISC-based scalable systems. He later worked for Digital Equipment Corporation and Mission Critical Linux and has consulted for Quadrics, Linux Networx and Liquid Computing. Since 2004, Dave has worked with the Portland Group Inc. (PGI) customers to help maximize application performance on HPC systems utilizing PGI compilers and tools.

Roger Panton

Roger Panton is the Executive Director of the DICE Program. Along with Al Stutz, Panton leads Avetec’s HPC Research Division and is charged with leading the strategic direction and operations of the DICE Program. He also serves as an on-site Avetec representative at the Air Force Research Laboratory Department of Defense Shared Resource Center. Before coming to Avetec, Panton served as an engineer in the United States Air Force, and as a strategic and management consultant for The Greentree Group. Panton holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from Wichita State University and a Master of Science in Engineering Management from the University of Dayton.

Alvin "Al" Stutz

Al Stutz is Avetec's Chief Information Officer and co-leader of its HPC Research Division, the DICE program. Along with Roger Panton, he is responsible for the strategic planning and operations of the DICE program. As Principal Investigator of the DICE program, he is also charged with technology planning and oversight, as well as outreach to companies, government and national research laboratory leaders on topics of joint research interest. Stutz holds both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer and Information Science from The Ohio State University.

Dave Topp

Dave Topp is a Principal Technologist for High Performance Computing for General Electric (GE) Technology Infrastructure and has been active in the HPC community for 17 years. In this role, he provides leadership for HPC strategy and has day-to-day responsibility for multiple HPC installations supporting the Aviation business. His responsibilities include hardware evaluation and procurement, cluster management, job scheduler management and user support for the HPC user interface. As part of a larger team, he is also responsible for setting standards for hardware, OS images and development tools for HPC sites across GE. Dave holds a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University.

Tracey Wilson

Tracey Wilson is the DICE Program Manager. He is responsible for planning, implementing and providing strategic direction for the DICE program. Wilson also oversees the integration, growth and sustainment of the environment, and provides technical leadership for the DICE team. He is the Chair of the DICE Technical Advisory Panel, which represents HPC and data professionals from government, industry and academia. Wilson comes to the DICE team as a Systems Integrator and Network Specialist for Computer Sciences Corporation. He holds his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

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