Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility

Buddy Bland

Buddy Bland is the director for the OLCF. He previously served as director of operations for the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) from 1996 until June 2006. Bland has worked in high-performance computing his entire career. He joined the staff at 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, Bland 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, Cray XT3, and Cray XT4. He is the ORNL representative on the High Performance Storage System Executive Committee.

Prior to joining ORNL, Bland 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.

James J. Hack directs the NCCS, a premier scientific research facility and home to the OLCF at ORNL. 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 exascale, able to carry out a million trillion 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.

Jack Wells is the director of science for the NCCS at ORNL. He is responsible for devising a strategy to ensure cost-effective, state-of-the-art scientific computing at the NCCS, which houses the Department of Energy’s OLCF, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Computing Research Center, and the National Science Foundation’s National Institute for Computational Sciences.

Most recently, Wells directed institutional planning at ORNL, developing a strategic plan for the lab, overseeing its discretionary research and development investments, and managing its Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy programs. As the principal investigator for an Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment project investigating lithium/air batteries, he has used leadership computing systems to tackle complex energy storage issues crucial to the Department of Energy mission.

In ORNL’s Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate, Wells has worked as group leader of both the Computational Materials Sciences group in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division and the Nanomaterials Theory Institute in the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. During a sabbatical, he served as a legislative fellow for Senator Lamar Alexander, providing information about high-performance computing; energy technology; and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education issues.

Wells began his ORNL career as a graduate researcher in 1990, then spent 3 years at Harvard University in an Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics fellowship, returning to ORNL as a 1997 Wigner postdoctoral fellow.

As NCCS Director of Operations, Jim Rogers is responsible for managing day-to-day operation of systems and developing plans for future generations of systems and infrastructure. Rogers 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.

Kathlyn Boudwin is the deputy project director for the OLCF. In this role she reports to OLCF Project Director Buddy Bland. 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, 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. 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. Boudwin earned a B.S. in economics from Michigan State University and an M.B.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago.