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Richard Gerber Named New NERSC User Services Group Lead

December 12, 2013

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Richard Gerber

Richard Gerber has been named leader of the NERSC User Services Group (USG), effective immediately. He takes over for Katie Antypas, who was appointed head of the NERSC Services Department in September.

In his new role, Gerber will be responsible for managing a group that works to increase the scientific productivity of NERSC’s 4,700 users.  USG is responsible for problem management and consulting, assisting with code optimization and debugging, strategic project support, training, web documentation and third-party application and programming library support.

“Richard is the innovator behind many of NERSC's most popular web services that have been mimicked by HPC centers around the world, including the live Running Jobs page, the online queue look and the completed jobs workload statistics pages,” Antypas said.

Gerber joined NERSC in 1996 as a consultant in USG. He also holds the title of NERSC Senior Science Advisor.

Over the last 25 years Gerber has helped scientists around the world build, run, debug and optimize codes on supercomputers. In addition to providing consulting services to users, he oversees and contributes to the NERSC web site, coordinates training efforts, serves as the liaison to the NERSC User Group, manages NERSC's trouble ticket system and designs and implements the annual user survey.

Gerber also served as the NERSC-7 (Edison system) project deputy and co-leads the NERSC Program Requirements Reviews, which bring together leading scientists, DOE program managers and NERSC staff to gather future HPC requirements for the DOE Office of Science.

Gerber has a Ph.D. in physics, specializing in computational astrophysics, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he complete a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at NASA Ames Research Center. His specialty is N-body and smoothed particle hydrodynamics of colliding galaxies, particularly "ring" galaxies. He is also interested in N-body realizations of equilibrium galaxies and validation of computational simulations.


About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high-performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the NERSC Center serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.