Advanced Technologies Group Staff

John Shalf's background is in electrical engineering: he spent time in graduate school at Virginia Tech working on a C-compiler for the SPLASH-2 FPGA-based computing system, and at Spatial Positioning Systems Inc. (now ArcSecond) he worked on embedded computer systems. John first got started in HPC at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in 1994, where he provided software engineering support for a number of scientific applications groups. While working for the General Relativity Group at the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam Germany, he helped develop the first implementation of the Cactus Computational Toolkit, which is used for numerical solutions to Einstein's equations for General Relativity and which enables modeling of black holes, neutron stars, and boson stars. John joined Berkeley Lab in 2000 and has worked in the Visualization Group, on the RAGE robot, and on various projects in the Future Technologies Group.

Andrew Canning works on the programming and algorithmic developments necessary to run codes on parallel machines, specializing in materials science applications. Along with a team of colloborating scientists at Oak Ridge National Lab, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and the University of Bristol (UK), Andrew won the 1998 Gordon Bell Prize for the fastest parallel application, which modeled 1,024 atoms of a metallic magnet. Although the team won for their 657 Gigaflop/s performance level, they subsequently were able to run the application at more than one Teraflop/s. Andrew has a B.S. in theoretical physics and astronomy from the University of Glasgow and a Ph.D. in statistical physics from the University of Edinburgh. For three years he was an employee of Cray Research in Lausanne, Switzerland, developing parallel codes and algorithms for materials science applications on the Cray T3D parallel computer.

Soon after she became the first woman ever to earn a PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University, Alice Koniges began her career as a member of NERSC’s Computational Physics Group in 1984 at LLNL. She achieved the first successful parallel code run on the four-processor Cray-2. She began her career researching parallel computing and computational plasma physics, eventually achieving luminary status in both fields. Her expertise in the transition from vector to parallel computing culminated in her textbook Industrial Strength Parallel Computing, published by Morgan Kaufmann in January 2000. Nowadays, her research interests include cloud computing, benchmarking, the multi-core revolution and programming languages associated with multi-core computing, as well as her mainstay of application supercomputing.

Leonid Oliker is the point man for computer architectures of the future -- MTA, IRAM, etc. Lenny joined NERSC as a post-doc in the Scientific Computing Group, where he co-authored the "Best Paper of SC99," "Parallelization of a Dynamic Unstructured Application Using Three Leading Paradigms."

Erich Strohmaier, one of the co-founders of the twice-yearly TOP500 listing of the world's most powerful computers, is a specialist in evaluating and optimizing performance of high-performance computing systems. He began working on what would become the TOP500 list, which ranks computers according to how well they run the Linpack benchmark, in 1990 in his native Germany. The list debuted in 1993, and in 1995 Erich moved to Tennessee to work with Jack Dongarra, the team's American representative. Erich was born in Bavaria and earned degrees in physics and theoretical physics at the universities in Heidelberg and Mannheim.

Nick Wright came to NERSC to evaluate future technologies for potential application in scientific computing, and also to continue collaborating with David Skinner on the IPM project, which is a portable profiling infrastructure for parallel codes. Before NERSC, Nick was a member of the Performance Modeling and Characterization (PMaC) group at the San Diego Supercomputing Center. He earned both his undergraduate and doctorate degrees in chemistry at the University of Durham in England.