Hazen Named Storage Systems Group Lead

Damian Hazen, who has been with NERSC since 2001, has been named group lead for the Storage Systems Group. Hazen has been acting lead since last October, taking over for Jason Hick, who recently left NERSC to take a position at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

During his time at NERSC, Hazen has worked primarily in the Storage Systems Group as an administrator and programmer for HPSS, but was also part of the Networking Group for two years. His background in high-performance computing (HPC) stems from his days at Washington State University, where he earned his computer science degree. He was an HPC systems administrator at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory from 1997-1999 and worked in private industry in Portland, Ore. for a year before joining NERSC.

“I wanted to work at Berkeley Lab because I was interested in the contributions made by the lab to computing, and particularly what they had done in computer networking,” Hazen said. “And my background in storage fit well with the group here at NERSC.”

While he enjoys programming, Hazen is excited about the additional responsibilities his new position brings.

“Aside from the technology, it is really refreshing to have more interactions with my colleagues,” he said. “I look forward to both interacting with the members of this group and increasing the impact the group makes on the organization.”

Near-term, his top priority is to hire new staff to fill open positions in the group, including a senior HPC storage systems analyst and two HPC storage systems engineers.

Farther out, Hazen is evaluating how new storage technologies such as flash will influence how storage at NERSC is going to look in the next few years. He is also looking at whether object storage, which is how large commercial data centers such as Amazon store their data, might be integrated into the NERSC storage environment.

“There is a lot of change in the industry right now, particularly with flash taking on a more prominent role in enterprise storage,” Hazen said. “The NERSC burst buffer is showing that the bandwidth traditionally provided by a large parallel file system can be satisfied with a smaller flash layer. This is a very disruptive force, which makes it a particularly exciting time in HPC storage.”