Our panel of research computing professionals will describe available infrastructure and support resources with an overview of their home institutions’ HPC user base.  Challenges and learning curves involved in using HPC effectively will also be discussed.  Attendees are invited to share their own experiences and engage with panelists during this interactive Q&A session.

Featured Panelists:

• Matthew Brown – Virginia Tech. Matthew joined Virginia Tech as a computational scientist in 2018. His path toward research computing began with a 12-year career in higher-ed information technology with particular focus on design and implementation of IT infrastructure and interests in networking, systems engineering, virtualization, and data center design. In his role at ARC, Matt works to enable research by connecting people with ARC’s computational resources, optimizing those systems’ utility, and working with others in our group to plan and engineer future systems.

• Jacalyn Huband – University of Virginia. Jackie is a Computational Research Support Specialist at the University of Virginia (UVA). Her primary role is as a facilitator to researchers who are transitioning their codes onto a high-performance computing (HPC) platform. She also is active in developing workshops for programmers at all levels. In addition to her work at UVA, Jackie has been an Associate Professor in Computer Science and a programmer in industry. She has experience programming in R, Python, Matlab, C/C++, and Fortran.

• Jayshree Sarma – George Mason University. Jayshree is the Director for the Office of Research Computing at George Mason University.

• Carol Parish – University of Richmond. Carol is the Floyd D. and Elisabeth S. Gottwald Professor of Chemistry and Associate Provost for Academic Integration at the University of Richmond. She received the Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Purdue University where she studied electronic structure theory with Cliff Dykstra.  She was also a Fujitsu post-doctoral fellow in Clark Still’s laboratory at Columbia University and completed a sabbatical year in Roald Hoffmann’s group at Cornell University. She was a 2012 Fulbright Fellow studying with Sason Shaik at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has received numerous awards for her work with undergraduates including the 2019 American Chemical Society award for Research at an Undergraduate Institution. Her research investigates the fundamental molecular nature of a wide range of physical phenomenon ranging from the accurate characterization of diradical excited states to the dynamics of motor proteins.  She has mentored more than 100 undergraduate students, authored 58 research publications, and raised over $4 million to support her research group from NSF, DOE, ACS-PRF, and the Dreyfus Foundation.

• Eric Walter – William & MaryEric got his Ph. D. in chemistry from UPenn in 2001 and started at W&M the same year.  He is now the Executive Director of Research Computing at W&M.

• Mike Davis – Virginia Commonwealth UniversityMike has served the research community at VCU since 1997.  Working as a systems engineer, Unix Manager for Academic Technology, and since 2007 serving as the Founding Technical Director of VCU’s High Performance Research Computing. He is involved with a number of external initiatives including the NSF funded ACCORD project and the Technical Group of MARIA and is a fellow of the NSF Funded Cyber Facilitators program.