Former NERSC Consultant Mentors Math, Computer Science Students

March 10, 2015

Frank Hale, a former consultant in NERSC’s User Services Group (USG) who currently tutors math at Diablo Valley College (DVC) in Pleasant Hill, CA, recently brought a group of computer science enthusiasts from the college to NERSC for a tour.

Hale, the first person hired into the USG when NERSC relocated from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to Berkeley Lab in 1996, started his computing career at the age of 15 and got his first consulting job at 17. Prior to joining NERSC, he was a principal research associate in the Earth Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab for 11 years and is credited with co-developing the Bore II groundwater flow and contamination code, still in use today.

Frank Hale (back row, second from left) was an HPC consultant in NERSC's User Services Group for nearly a decade.

In 1999 Hale was a member of the procurement team that brought IBM SP systems to NERSC, and in 1999-2000 he served as the liaison between the Department of Energy, University of California and Berkeley Lab during the "Y2K crisis" and growing concerns about cybersecurity. In 2000 he rejoined the USG, retiring in 2008.

“In April 2014 I was hired by the math department at DVC to provide tutoring, and along the way I have met many young computer science students at the college,” Hale said. “This semester I decided to re-engage the world of computing with an emphasis on computer science education at the basic, fundamental level. “

On February 27 he and 10 DVC students—primarily members of the college’s Computer Science club—visited NERSC, where they were hosted by Elizabeth Bautista; heard talks from Richard Gerber, David Skinner and Jack DeSlippe on high performance computing and how it is used at NERSC to enable a broad range of science; and took a tour of the machine room.

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.