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February 4, 2013
Nick Wright has been named head of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC) Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), which focuses on understanding the requirements of current and emerging applications to make choices in hardware design and programming models that best serve the science needs of NERSC users. ATG specializes in benchmarking, system performance, debugging and analysis, workload monitoring, use of application modeling tools, and future algorithm scaling and technology assessment. The team also engages with vendors and the general research community to advocate technological features that will enhance the effectiveness of systems for NERSC scientists.
In addition to managing a team of three, Wright will work closely with NERSC management to set strategic directions for the facility. To provide input for HPC system procurements, he will collaborate with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Future Technologies Group (FTG) to assess emerging technologies in architecture, algorithms, parallel programming paradigms and languages.
"Computing technology is undergoing a major technology disruption as computer companies move to manycore architectures. The ATG will work closely with our industry partners to ensure that future NERSC supercomputers continue to meet the mission needs of DOE's Office of Science," says NERSC Director Sudip Dosanjh.
Wright joined NERSC in 2009 and initially worked on the Integrated Performance Monitoring (IPM) framework. Funded by the National Science Foundation, IPM provides a low-overhead performance profile of the performance aspects and resource utilization in a parallel program. More recently, he worked on performance measurement and optimization as part of the NERSC-Cray Center of Excellence, which was tasked with investigating performance optimization for the multicore-era. Currently he is the architecture and performance lead for the NERSC-7 (Edison) and upcoming NERSC-8 procurement projects and has published more than 20 papers related to high performance computing.
Before joining NERSC in 2009, he was a member of the Performance Modeling and Characterization (PMaC) laboratory at the San Diego Supercomputing Center. He earned both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in chemistry at the University of Durham in England.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.
