Oil and Gas High Performance Computing Workshop 2008

SPEAKERS

Per Brashers, Sr. Software Consultant, EMC NAS Engineering

Bio: Per joined High-tech as an electronics technician for UC Berkeley, and soon became the network and UNIX specialist. After eight years, he departed UCB to head up the on-line division of CMP media and later became manager of the on-line development staff. Six years later he became the CTO of a application hosting provider. In 2001 Per joined EMC with nearly 10 yeas experience on EMC’s Symmetrix and Celerra platforms, and has been instrumental in forwarding the Celerra platform. Per has been co-contributor on numerous patents, including the original HighRoad patent. Per has participated in the deployment of numerous HPC solutions around the world.

Web page: http://www.emc.com

Stéphane Bihan, Technical Sales Engineer, CAPS Enterprise

Bio: Stéphane Bihan has held several R&D positions in companies such as ARC international plc in London, Canon Research Center France, ACE compiler experts in Amsterdam and the Irisa research lab. He participated in projects such as the ones from the Medea+ European Program. His work was devoted to the development of applications for specialized processors. He graduated from the University of Rennes I.

Web page: http://caps-entreprise.com

Samuel Brown, Utah Tomography & Modeling/Migration Consortium, University of Utah

Bio: Samuel Brown is a PhD candidate in the Dept. of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah. His research interests include depth imaging, waveform inversion, and high-performance computing, in which he has seven years industry experience.

Web page: http://utam.gg.utah.edu

Henri Calandra, Technical Advisor, Depth Imaging & HPC, Total

Bio: Henri Calandra obtained his M.Sc. in mathematics in 1984 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1987 from the Universite des Pays de l’Adour in Pau, France. He joined Cray Research France in 1987 and worked on seismic applications. In 1989 he joined the applied mathematics department of the French Atomic Agency. In 1990 he started working for Total SA. After 12 years of work in high performance computing and as project leader for Pre-stack Depth Migration Research, he became head of Total USA’s Geophysics Research Group for 3 years in 2002 and coordinated Depth Imaging Research for the worldwide group until mid 2007 He is now technical advisor in depth imaging and high performance computing.

Web page: http://www.total.com/

Sean Cochrane, Global Storage Architect, Sun Microsystems

Bio: Sean Cochrane is currently a Senior Global Architect working within the CTO office of the Global Storage Practice for Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sean has been working in the computer industry for over 15 years. Sean holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Utah and has a wide range of experience in the computer industry. Sean's experience ranges from software development and system administration, to large scale networking, to storage technology and large scale storage architecture. Sean started his career working at the University of Utah while studying computer science. His roles there included system and network administration, as well as software and web development as well as developing and managing a team to create the data/networking services for the State of Utah. Sean started working at Sun in 1997 as a Systems Engineer working with many of Sun's largest Education and Research customers. Since 1998 Sean has focused on Sun Storage and become a widely used expert and a leader of the Storage community for Sun. Sean has led and/or helped with storage architectures for sites such as SLAC, SDSC, ARSC, KISTI and TACC. For the past year, Sean has focused on Storage Architectures in High Performance Computing. Sean is the architect the Scalable Storage Cluster which is a reference architecture using the Lustre file system with SunFire x4500's. Some of Sean's skills include the following: Storage and I/O performance File systems Archiving and tiered storage implementations Storage and overall data management Architecture System Interconnects I/O technology. HPC Storage Architectures Operating Systems Storage and Server Hardware architecture Sun's Storage History and Future Creating new storage solutions including the current Scalable Storage Cluster which combines servers, storage, software and networking for a ready to ship scalable parallel file system implementation using Lustre and x4500's.

Web page: http://www.sun.com/

Jeff Denworth, Director of Platform Solutions, DataDirect Networks

Bio: Jeff Denworth serves as the Director of Platform Solutions at DataDirect Networks, Inc. In this role, Mr. Denworth is responsible for deploying system-level hardware and software solutions to commercial and government data centers worldwide - including high-performance cluster storage, network attached storage and disk archive solutions. Previously, Mr. Denworth served as the Director of Sales at Cluster File Systems, Inc. where he was responsible for worldwide business development and sales of the Lustre File System. Mr. Denworth has over 8 years of experience in the IT and HPC marketplace and has presented at file system and HPC conferences worldwide.

Web page: http://www.datadirectnet.com/

Keith Gray, Manager of High Performance Computing, BP

Bio: Keith Gray is Manager of High Performance Computing for BP. The HPC Team supports the computing requirements for BP's Advanced Seismic Imaging Research efforts. This team supports one of the largest Linux Clusters dedicated to research in Oil and Gas. Mr. Gray graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in geophysics, and has worked for BP and Amoco since 1985. He was listed in HPCWire's People to Watch 2006.

Web page: http://www.bp.com

Larry Jones, Vice President, Product Marketing, Panasas

Bio: Larry is responsible for all product marketing, product management and marketing strategy at Panasas. He led product marketing at Panasas from the start of the company, working to define and launch its first products in 2003. He previously served as Vice President of Product Management at Driveway, a leader in personalized online storage. Prior to that, Larry was the Director of Marketing of E*Trade's Business Solutions Group, where he grew customers for the company's business to business services by 200% and revenue by 130%. He has also held various senior marketing management roles at Lotus Development/IBM for Lotus Notes and cc:Mail, and held various product management positions at Farallon Computing and Northern Telecom.

Web page: http://www.panasas.com

John Mellor-Crummey, Associate Professor, Computer Science, Rice University

Bio: John Mellor-Crummey's research focuses on software technology for high performance computing, with a particular emphasis on parallel computing. His current work includes data-parallel compiler technology, compiler and run-time technology for high performance scientific computing, tools for application performance analysis, compiler technology for domain-specific languages, and techniques for application performance modeling. Past work has included developing techniques for execution replay of parallel programs, efficient software synchronization algorithms for shared-memory multiprocessors and techniques for efficiently detecting data races in executions of shared-memory programs.

Web page: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~johnmc/index.html

Scott Morton, Manager, Geophysical Technology, Hess Corporation

Bio: Scott Morton has 25 years of experience in computational & theoretical astrophysics & geophysics, distributed between academia, the computer industry and the petroleum industry. In 1997 he joined Hess Corporation and helped build one of the first commodity PC clusters used for seismic imaging. He currently leads a small but active technology group for Hess where one of his responsibilities is to monitor and test new computational technologies.

Web page: http://www.hess.com

Jan E. Odegard, Executive Director, Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, Rice University

Bio: Jan E. Odegard joined the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology (formerly Computer and Information Technology Institute) at Rice University as Executive Director in 2002. In this role he led the development and deployment of large scale competing resources in support of research. Today, the computational resources deployed at Rice supports the research of over 100 faculty members and close to 500 users. The majority of users are engaged in research in science and engineering. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice (1996) in the area of digital signal processing and served as executive director for the Computational Mathematics Laboratory (1996-1997), and Center for Multimedia Communication at Rice (1998-1999). In 1999, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Stavanger in Norway as Associate Professor and served as department chair (2000-2001).

Web page: http://kiit.rice.edu

Ebb Pye, Ebb F. Pye & Associates

Bio: Ebb Pye is a marketing and sales professional with over 30 years experience focused on technology companies selling into the Oil and Gas sector. Ebb has held key management positions during the successful startup phase of Bonner & Moore Computing, GeoQuest International, Landmark Graphics and Sierra Geophysics. In 1993, Ebb established Ebb F.
Pye & Associates, a marketing consulting organization specializing in providing services to the E&P segment of the petroleum industry. Over the past thirteen years, EFP&A has provided marketing services to more than 50 organizations including most of the major computer hardware vendors and several international electronics companies.

Vivek Sarkar, E.D. Butcher Professor of Computer Science, Rice University

Bio: Professor Vivek Sarkar conducts research in programming languages, program analysis, compiler optimizations and virtual machines for parallel and high performance computer systems. He leads the Habanero Multicore Software project at Rice University which spans the areas of programming languages, optimizing and parallelizing compilers, virtual machines, and concurrency libraries for homogeneous and heterogeneous multicore processors. His past projects include the X10 programming language, the Jikes Research Virtual Machine for the Java language, the ASTI optimizer used in IBM'’s XL Fortran product compilers, the PTRAN automatic parallelization system, and profile-directed partitioning and scheduling of Sisal programs.

Vivek became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1995, an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2006, and the E.D. Butcher Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in 2007. Prior to joining Rice University in July 2007, Professor Sarkar was Senior Manager of Programming Technologies at IBM Research. His responsibilities at IBM included leading IBM's research efforts in Programming Model, Tools, and Productivity in the PERCS project during 2002 - 2007 as part of the DARPA High Productivity Computing System program. Vivek holds a B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, an M.S. degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. In 1997, he was on sabbatical as a visiting associate professor at MIT, where he was a founding member of the MIT RAW multicore project.

Web page: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~vsarkar

Guillaume Thomas-Collignon, CGGVeritas

Bio: Guillaume Thomas-Collignon is a senior software developer, specialized on high performance computing and parallel applications. His main focus at CGGVeritas is to optimize seismic imaging algorithms on the current production platforms, mostly commodity-based PC clusters. His work also includes evaluating new computing architectures that could provide a significant performance increase on the most heavily used algorithms. His previous working experience was in the same field, as an HPC software optimization specialist for Sun Microsystems.

Web page: http://www.cggveritas.com/

Chap Wong, Chevron

Bio: Chap Wong, Senior Staff Architect at Chevron Energy Technology Company, Technical Computing, has over twenty five years experience with Chevron in supporting upstream technical computing. Chap has involved in architecting the large Chevron upstream cluster since 2001. Chap graduated from National Taiwan U. with a degree in E.E. and a master degree in Computing Science from TAMU.

Web page: http://www.chevron.com