The HPC Advisory Council Members of the Board

For general questions or comments, please contact info@hpcadvisorycouncil.com

HPC Advisory Council Chairman
Gilad Shainer - gilad@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Gilad Shainer is an HPC evangelist that focuses on high-performance computing, high-speed interconnects, leading-edge technologies and performance characterizations. Mr. Shainer holds an M.Sc. degree (2001, Cum Laude) and a B.Sc. degree (1998, Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering from the Technion Institute of Technology in Israel. He also holds patents in the field of high-speed networking.

HPC Advisory Council Media Relations and Events Director
Brian Sparks - brian@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Brian Sparks is responsible for the promotion, education, and outbound communication of the HPC Advisory Council's activities, workshops, and events. In addition, Mr. Sparks is co-chair of the InfiniBand Trade Association's Marketing Working Group, and an active member of the OpenFabrics Alliance Marketing Working Group. Mr. Sparks hold a B.S. Communication Studies from San Jose State University.

Director of the HPC Advisory Council, Asia
Tong Liu - tong@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Tong Liu is responsible for application performance characterization and benchmarking with high-speed interconnects. Before joining the HPC Advisory Council, Mr. Liu was a senior software design engineer at Hewlett-Packard where he led distributed data warehouse development. Prior to HP, he was a systems engineer and advisor in the Scalable Systems Group at Dell Inc. He has published more than 20 publications in the High Performance Computing field. Mr. Liu holds a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Louisiana Tech University.

HPC Advisory Council China Events Manager
Blade Meng- blade@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Blade Mengis is responsible for organizing the HPC Advisory Council's events and press engagements in China. Before joining the council, Mr. Meng served as executive editor at ZDNet China, focusing on products and technologies around server, processor, virtualization, cloud computing, data centers and high-performance computing. Prior to ZDNet, he was the editor at IT168, focused on enterprise product and technologies, and also served as administrators of ChinaUnix and ITpub which are two famous media outlets in the Chinese technical community. Skilled in Internet marketing and social networking, Mr. Meng graduated from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

HPC Advisory Council HPC|Works Special Interest Group Chair and Cluster Center Manager
Pak Lui - pak@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Pak Lui is responsible for application characterization, profiling and testing. Before joining the HPC Advisory Council, Mr. Lui was a cluster and software engineer, responsible for building and testing different configurations and environments. Mr. Lui hold a B.Sc. in Computer Systems Engineering and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Boston University

HPC Advisory Council Director of Educational Outreach
Scot Schultz – scot@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Scot Schultz is a technology specialist with broad knowledge in operating systems, high speed interconnects, processors technology, clustering and applications characterizations such as bioinformatics, electronic design, engineering, entertainment & media, financial services, and oil & gas. Scot is also a board member of OpenFabrics Alliance and the HyperTransport consortium, among many others.

HPC Advisory Council Programming Advisor
Tarick Bedeir - Tarick@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Tarick Bedeir is an HPC software engineer with Schlumberger, currently developing software for high-speed interconnects.  Bedeir holds a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in computer science, and has been working in HPC for over four years.

HPC Advisory Council Workshop Program Director
Eric Lantz – eric@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Eric Lantz is a HPC specialist, with a broad knowledge of the Message Passing Interface libraries, high-performance networking, and overall security. He is also a program manager for Microsoft High-Performance Computing (HPC). Prior to this, Eric worked at Microsoft in software engineering, Windows Mobile device management and security, and file management software. Before joining Microsoft, Eric was an aerospace stress and dynamics engineer, where he worked on NASA’s space shuttles, global positioning system (GPS) satellites, and laser technology.

HPC Advisory Council Research Steering Committee Director
Cydney Stevens - cydney@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Cydney Stevens, with over 15 years experience at leading technology companies, has been integral in guiding development and publication of hundreds of technical Best Practice articles, conference proceedings and books. Cydney has been privileged to worked alongside a wealth of industry-wide IT experts, provide guidance and direction on content and topics, as well as providing SME authors with the forums and delivery mechanisms for their expertise - and is pleased to be able to continue those endeavors as part of the HPCAC Research Steering Committee.

HPC Advisory Council HPC|Scale Special Interest Group Chair
Richard Graham – richard@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Richard Graham has been at ONRL since Jan, 2007 and is the Group Leader for the Application Performance Tools group in the Computer Science and Mathematics division at ONRL, and is a Distinguished member of the Research Staff.  Prior to joining ORNL he spent eight years at ORNL serving in a range of technical and managerial roles, leaving as the acting group leader for the Advanced Computing Laboratory.  He is currently chairman of the MPI Forum, and is leading the MPI-3 effort.  He led the LA-MPI development effort, and is one of three founders of the Open MPI project. Dr. Graham received his PhD in Theoretical Chemistry from Texas A&M University in 1990, and a BS in Chemistry from Seattle Pacific University in 1983.

HPC Advisory Council HPC|Cloud Special Interest Group Chair
William Lu – william@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
William Lu has 20 years of experiences in high performance computing. In early years, William worked at CERN as a scientist and in the past 15 years with Platform Computing. William spent number of years leading a team of solution architects helping users improving efficiency and increase throughput in HPC environment. He has been working with top commercial companies and leading research institutes in implementing grids and cloud solutions. William holds a Ph.D. degree of high energy physics.

HPC Advisory Council HPC|GPU Special Interest Group Chair
Sadaf Alam – sadaf@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Sadaf Alam is a computer scientist at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Switzerland.  She is a member of the Scientific Computing Research group where she leads programming environment for future HPC systems tasks.  She has a PhD in computer science from the University of Edinburgh, UK.

HPC Advisory Council India Outreach
Goldi Misra – goldi@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Goldi Misra is heading the High Performance Computing Solutions Group and Group Coordinator of C-DAC, Under Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and IT, Govt. of India, responsible for PARAM Series systems, HPC Clusters & ecosystem outreach, Application Porting and Parallelization, Development of software tools, Infrastructure integration & management services. The group caters to the HPC requirements throughout India and abroad on behalf of Government of India. Mr. Misra has more than 12 years experience in the field of High Performance Computing.

Director of the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Center of Excellence and HPC|Storage Special Interest Group Chair
Hussein Harake – hussein@hpcadvisorycouncil.com
Hussein Harake is an HPC System Manager. He has been working for the Swiss National Super Computing Center (CSCS) for over 9 years and has been a frequent contributor to different HPC projects. In the last 3 years he was involved in implementing different Cray XT systems, most recently the XT5 22K cores and 211Tflops. Hussein also leads the central file storage and the high speed network (InfiniBand) implementation projects at CSCS.