Thomas Hauser, director of High Performance Computing at Utah State University, has recently left USU to become associate director of research computing and head of the Research Innovation Center at Northwestern University. Hauser’s new appointment begins Nov. 1. Nate Benson, lead systems administrator at HPC, has been appointed as acting director.

“I have enjoyed my time at USU,” said Hauser. “I enjoyed building a strong HPC infrastructure at USU to support computational engineering and science, and I appreciate the vision and support of Vice President for Research Brent Miller.”

Hauser has been director of HPC@USU since 2005. Over one-hundred USU faculty and students in five colleges have depended on HPC@USU to accomplish their research; there are currently about 70 active users.

Additionally, Hauser was very active promoting the application of HPC in science and engineering in Utah and the U.S. He hosted and organized a conference, “Opportunities for HPC in Agriculture and Life Sciences” in 2007, and co-organized the “Utah Advanced Computing Summer Institute” in 2008. Hauser also lead the formation of the Utah Cyber Infrastructure Consortium. Nationally, he was a member of the organizing committee of the workshop “Developing a Coherent Cyberinfrastructure from Local Campus to National Facilities: Challenges and Strategies” in 2008.

Hauser’s team has been selected as one of four finalists in the prestigious national Supercomputing Conference SC09 Storage Challenge, a competition showcasing real-world effective approaches using computer storage, which is often the main limitation of overall system or application performance.

HPC@USU has attended the international SC conference with student research exhibits since 2005, when HPC@USU was newly founded. Since SC06, HPC@USU has collaborated with the University of Utah Center for High Performance Computing to present a unified Utah HPC presence as part of the Utah Cyberinfrastructure consortium that Hauser chaired for the last three years.

“I’ve always felt strongly about including student researchers in our activities,” said Hauser. “Not only have they presented research, but they have also been exposed to cutting-edge HPC technology, industry direction, and technical progress. This exposure helps inform their research at USU, as well as offer incredible networking opportunities for them on a national scale.”

Benson joined HPC@USU in October 2008 as the lead systems administrator and brings with him nearly two decades of experience managing and designing large computer clusters, data centers, and storage area networks. With experience mentoring and managing many IT system administration personnel in business environments, Benson has for the past year designed a lean, but strong, hardware infrastructure of new equipment to expand USU research computing capabilities into the future.

“We wish Thomas well in his new position at Northwestern University,” said Brent Miller, vice president for research at USU. “At the same time, we believe we will continue to see many great things from HPC in the coming years under the capable leadership of Nate Benson.”

HPC@USU is a research support center at USU designed to enable research activities and education in all disciplines that depend on advanced computing technologies. It provides large scale computing, visualization and data management resources; enables education of advanced cutting-edge simulation and cyber environments; and creates partnerships to develop and deploy new computing systems to advance education and knowledge. For more information, visit http://www.hpc.usu.edu.
 

Comments

Insert Comments

* Name:

* Email Address:

URL:

* Comments:

* Validation:

(Please enter the letters and numbers that appear below)