Management

National Center for Computational Sciences Director—James J. Hack

hack_profile James J. Hack directs the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), a leadership computing facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory supporting transformational science. He identifies major high performance computing needs from scientific and hardware perspectives and puts forth strategies to meet those needs as machines evolve to the petascale, able to carry out a quadrillion calculations per second. An atmospheric scientist, Hack also leads ORNL’s Climate Change Initiative.

After receiving a Ph.D. in atmospheric dynamics from Colorado State University in 1980, Hack became a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he worked on the design and evaluation of high-performance computing architectures. In 1984 he moved to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a National Science Foundation-sponsored center, where his roles included senior scientist, head of the Climate Modeling Section, and deputy director of the Climate and Global Dynamics Division. He was one of the principal developers of the climate model that ran on NCCS supercomputers to provide more than one-third of the simulation data jointly contributed by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to the most recent assessment report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group that shared the 2007 Nobel peace Prize with Al Gore. He has also held an adjoint professor position at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is author or co-author of 98 scientific or technical publications.

Hack is a member of the DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee and the Working Group on Numerical Experimentation, sponsored by the Joint Scientific Committee for the World Climate Research Program and the World Meteorological Organization Committee for Atmospheric Sciences. He also chairs the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison Advisory Committee. He has served on the ORNL Computer Science and Mathematics Division Advisory Committee, a wide variety of NSF high-performance computing review and advisory panels, the U.S. Water Cycle Scientific Steering Group, and was editor for the Journal of Climate. He was also a founding member of DOE’s Computational Science Graduate Fellowship Program, a highly successful educational initiative in which he continues to participate.

Leadership Computing Facility Project Director—Arthur S. Bland
Buddy Bland Buddy Bland is the director for the Leadership Computing Facility project, which is tasked with upgrading the Jaguar supercomputer to 250 teraflops in 2007 and with installing a Cray petaflop supercomputer by the end of 2008. He previously served as director of operations for the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) from 1996 until June 2006. Buddy has worked in high-performance computing his entire career. He joined the staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 1984 as the system programmer/administrator for the Cray X-MP system. He managed the Supercomputing Systems Section, which later became the UNIX System Section, until 1992, when he moved to the newly formed Center for Computational Sciences as the computing resources manager. In that position he installed the Kendall Square KSR-1 and Intel Paragons and oversaw the development and installation of the file storage systems and networks to support the NCCS. In 1996 Buddy was appointed director of operations of the NCCS. In that role he has managed the operation of the computer center through the life of a series of computers, including the IBM Power3, IBM Power4, Compaq AlphaServer SC, SGI Altix, Cray XD1, Cray X1, Cray X1E, and Cray XT3. He is the ORNL representative on the High Performance Storage System Executive Committee.

Prior to joining ORNL, Buddy was a captain in the U.S. Air Force, serving at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. He has B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from the University of Southern Mississippi.

Director of Science—Douglas B. Kothe
Doug Kothe Doug Kothe is the director of science for the NCCS at ORNL, responsible for guiding the multidisciplinary research teams using the center’s leadership computing systems. Doug has more than 20 years of experience in computational science research. His research interests and expertise have centered on developing physical models and numerical algorithms for simulating physical processes in the presence of incompressible and compressible fluid flow. A leader in modeling interfacial flows, he has been the principal developer of broadly disseminated scientific simulation tools. His most notable contribution has been the development of methods for flows possessing interfaces, especially free surfaces.Before joining the NCCS, Doug was deputy program director for Theoretical and Computational Programs in the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). He served for several years as the leader of ASC’s Telluride Project, which developed the advanced manufacturing simulation tool “Truchas” for the Department of Energy complex. He joined the technical staff at LANL in 1988 as a member of the Fluid Dynamics Group, in which he helped develop the Ripple, Pagosa, and CFDLIB computational fluid dynamics codes. He later worked in the Structure/Relations Group and was group leader of the Continuum Dynamics Group.

Doug received his B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Missouri–Columbia and his M.S. and Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from Purdue University. He is the author of more than 60 refereed publications and has written more than a half-million lines of source code.

Director of Operations—James H. Rogers
Jim Rogers Jim Rogers is the director of operations for the NCCS, responsible for managing day-to-day operation of systems and developing plans for future generations of systems and infrastructure. Jim has broad experience in high-performance computing, having provided strategic-planning, technology-insertion, and integration support for multiple computing centers, including those at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center, the Aeronautical Systems Center, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center, the NASA Ames Research Center, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Alabama Supercomputer Center. He comes to the center from Computer Sciences Corporation in Huntsville, Alabama, where he was a principal solutions architect. He has also been part of the Supercomputing (SC) series of conferences, most recently as the executive director for SC05 and as a member of the SC Steering Committee.

Deputy LCF Project Director—Kathlyn Boudwin
Kathlyn Boudwin Kathlyn Boudwin is the deputy project director for the ORNL Leadership Computing Facility (LCF). In this role she reports to Buddy Bland, the division director for the NCCS/LCF. Ms. Boudwin served as the associate project director at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) from 1999 through project completion in May 2006. In addition, she was also the conventional facilities task leader for the Central Laboratory and Office Building at SNS. Prior to her work at ORNL, Ms. Boudwin was the project controller for the Advanced Photon Source and the Argonne Guest House at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) from 1991 through project completion. She was responsible for the Finance and Cost/Schedule groups for the project. She then accepted the position of manager of property and special materials for ANL. Ms. Boudwin has prior experience in construction accounting working as the project accounting manager as well as working in other financial management positions with Pepper Construction Company, a large general contractor based in Chicago. Ms. Boudwin earned a B.S. in economics from Michigan State University and an M.B.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago.