Speaker List and Short Bios
- Georgios Artopoulos - The Cyprus Institute
- Andreas Athenodorou - The Cyprus Institute
- Brett Bode - NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Theodoros Christoudias - The Cyprus Institute
- Zoe Cournia - Biomedical Research Foundation Academy Of Athens
- Stéphane Coutin - CINES
- Mitchell Peter Edward - OpenSESAME
- Jacob Finkenrath - The Cyprus Institute
- Kyriacos Hadjiyiannakou - The Cyprus Institute
- Philip Paul Hofstad - Mellanox Technologies
- Kenneth Hoste - Ghent University
- Salman Matalgah - SESAME
- Ralph Niederberger - Juelich Supercomputing Centre
- Gaetano Pastore - Datera
- David Power - vScaler
- Morris Riedel - University of Iceland
- Roberto Sisneros - NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- George Tsouloupas - The Cyprus Institute
- Alexander Withers - NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Georgios Artopoulos - The Cyprus Institute: Short Bio
Dr Georgios Artopoulos, Assistant Professor, works on immersive and performative spaces, virtual environments and interaction design, moving image installations, digital simulation, material performance and construction technologies in the study of built heritage and the creative exploration of historical narratives. Giorgos holds a Master of Philosophy in Architecture and the Moving Image (University of Cambridge, UK, 2004) and a PhD, conducted at the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge (2005-2010) with a Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, where he assisted as Tutor and Research Assistant. Previously he was employed by the School of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University, the University of Melbourne, the University of Cambridge and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Giorgos has contributed in 12 International Research Programs and received the Best International Short Film award in Mestre Film Festival, Venice and his work was presented in the International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Czech National Gallery, Prague, the International Exhibition Computational Turn in Architecture, MAV, Marseille, the Hong Kong and Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, the 11th and 12th Biennale of Young Creators of Europe, the 63rd Venice Film Festival, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, the Royal Institute of British Architects, London, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, the London Design Festival, London, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago, the ISEA 2006 and 2008, the British Council, Brussels, the Byzantine Museum, Athens, the Benakis Museum, Athens and in many International Film Festivals and art exhibitions. His work was published in more than 25 peer-reviewed journals and books of architecture and 36 International Conference proceedings and exhibition catalogues.
Andreas Athenodorou - The Cyprus Institute: Short Bio
Andreas Athenodorou graduated from the Physics Department at the University of Cyprus in 2004 and pursued doctoral studies in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Oxford with Dr. Michael Teper. His doctoral studies focused on the Large-N limit of SU(N) Gauge Theories and more specifically on the effective string theoretical description of the SU(N) flux-tube using Lattice Gauge Theory simulations.
Andreas held postdoctoral positions at DESY Zeuthen under the guidance of Professor Rainer Sommer, at Swansea University under the guidance of Professor Biagio Lucini and at the University of Cyprus under the guidance of Professor Constantia Alexandrou. In addition he worked as a fixed term Lecturer and Assistant Professor at the University of Cyprus teaching undergraduate courses.
Andreas is now a post-doctoral fellow at The Cyprus Institute. He is a work package leader in Vi-SEEM consortium and a local research coordinator for PRACE.
His research interests include Theoretical Particle Physics, Lattice Gauge Theories, Large-N Gauge Theories, Hadron Structure and Beyond the Standard Model Physics as well as Computational Physics, High Performance Computing, Data Science and Machine learning in sciences.
Brett Bode - NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Short Bio
Brett M. Bode is an Assistant Director in the Blue Waters project office at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Blue Waters is the premier HPC system in the National Science Foundation portfolio providing leading edge computing and data capabilities to scientists around the country. Prior to joining NCSA in 2008 Brett spent nearly ten years as a scientist with the Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University researching ways to deliver better performance to scientific applications from HPC cluster systems. Brett holds a BS in chemistry and physics from Illinois State University and a PhD in physical chemistry from Iowa State University.
Theodoros Christoudias - The Cyprus Institute: Short Bio
Theodoros Christoudias is an Assistant Professor at the Cyprus Institute (CyI). He is working on atmospheric and climate modelling at the Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) and is responsible for the CyI Visualisation Lab.
He was previously a Computational Scientist and an Associate Research Scientist at the Cyprus Institute and an International Fellow at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), USA.
Research Interests include global climate modelling and tracer transport, regional air quality modelling, computational model development and optimization, and scientific data visualisation. He is serving as leader of the Climate Scientific Community in the Vi-SEEM EU H2020 e-infrastructures project and in the steering group of the EMAC global climate model consortium.
Zoe Cournia - Biomedical Research Foundation Academy Of Athens: Short Bio
Zoe Cournia graduated from the Chemistry Department in the University of Athens and subsequently pursued doctoral studies in the University of Heidelberg, Germany, with Dr. Jeremy Smith in the field of computational biophysical chemistry. For her thesis she used a combination of Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations, Quantum Chemical, and Neutron Scattering calculations to provide insights into why cholesterol is evolutionary preferred for mammalian plasma membranes. Cournia then joined Dr. Bill Jorgensen's lab in the Department of Chemistry, Yale University to perform post-doctoral studies in computer-aided drug design - focusing on the design and discovery of novel anti-cancer agents and prediction of pharmacological properties using computational techniques. In the same lab, Dr. Cournia also worked on the discovery of novel and selective inhibitors of the parasitic Leishmania Major and Ancylostoma Ceylanicum MIF orthologs. Dr. Cournia served as a co-President of the Yale Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Society during 2007-2008, became a Lecturer in Yale College in 2009 and in 2009 was honored with the "Women of Innovation Award" from the Connecticut Technology Council. Since October 2009 she is a member of BRFAA, where as a researcher (Lecturer Level) she works on targeting the mutated cancerous PI3Kα protein with small molecule inhibitors, inhibition of the c-Myc-Max interaction with small molecule inhibitors, and the design of small molecule agonists for the RXRalpha-Nurr1 heterodimer as a means to treat Parkinson's disease. For these studies the Cournia lab employs a combination of MD simulations, virtual screening, de novo drug design, free energy perturbation calculations, pharmacological property prediction and Monte Carlo simulations.
Stéphane Coutin - CINES: Short Bio
Stéphane Coutin holds an engineering degree from INSA Lyon, Information Technology department (1988) and an Msc in management from IAE Montpellier (2009). He has more than 20 years experience in Information System project/program management and IT team management. He worked in both large international or medium size companies as well as in public sector, delivering solutions in a lot of functional domains. He joined CINES in 2013 managing projects in both HPC and data preservation domains. He is currently involved in the PRACE and EUDAT projects, focusing mainly on collaboration between e-Infrastructures.
Mitchell Peter Edward - OpenSESAME: Short Bio
Coming soon.
Jacob Finkenrath - The Cyprus Institute: Short Bio
Dr. Jacob Finkenrath received 2015 a PhD in the field high energy physics at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. Since June 2015 he hold a PostDoc position as a Computational Scientist at the Cyprus Institute in the Department CaSToRC. He is involved in the local research group of Prof. Constantia Alexandrou with a research focus on Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics. Since 2015 Dr. Finkenrath is working on PRACE activities, mainly on Benchmarksuites for HPC machines with/out accelerators.
Kyriacos Hadjiyiannakou - The Cyprus Institute: Short Bio
Kyriakos Hadjiyiannakou is a Postdoctoral fellow at the CaSToRC of The Cyprus Institute. During 2015-2016 he was a Postdoctoral associate at the George Washington University. He received a B.S. in Physics from the University of Cyprus in 2011 with degree excellent. He received his Ph.D. in Computational Physics from the University of Cyprus in 2015 and he was awarded for his internationally recognized publications from the Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences.
His research interests span both HPC programming and lattice QCD. Much of his work has been on implementing algorithms and methods for lattice QCD, mainly through parallel platforms for supercomputers. In the computational part he developed highly optimized codes using the CUDA API, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and OpenMP. He has explored several techniques for the evaluation of the disconnected quark loops which are extremely computationally demanding quantities. In addition, he developed a package which allows a simulation of gauge configurations for Nf=2 nHYP clover configurations on the GPUs. He has already, 11 papers published on recognized journals and in total 257 citations. His publication in the Physical Review Letters with title “Direct Evaluation of the Quark Content of Nucleons from Lattice QCD at the Physical Point” was a great achievement for his scientific career. He has given talks in recognized conferences and disseminated his findings in seminars organized from various research organizations.
Philip Paul Hofstad - Mellanox Technologies: Short Bio
Philip Hofstad is a Staff Systems Engineer at Mellanox Technologies supporting EMEA. Phil has a focus on Ethernet, Datacenter, Virtualisation, SDN/NFV, Cloud and Storage networks. He has more than 25 years’ experience within the IT industry, he has designed and built cutting edge Enterprise and Data Center solutions at Cisco, Dell, 3Com and Mellanox. He has extensive experience leading Engineering teams and augmenting the sales cycle with my technical expertise.
Kenneth Hoste - Ghent University: Short Bio
Kenneth Hoste is the lead developer and release manager of EasyBuild (http://hpcugent.github.io/easybuild/), a GPLv2-licensed software build and installation framework implemented in Python to manage (scientific) software installation on High Performance Computing (HPC) systems.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Ghent University (Belgium), and is a member of the HPC-UGent support team (http://www.ugent.be/hpc/en/) since 2010, where he is mainly responsible for aspects related to user support and training.
Salman Matalgah - SESAME: Short Bio
Salman Matalgah is leading the Computing and Network division at SESAME since 2010; he is an IT systems expert with a wide experience on operating a heterogonous complex IT environment.
He is in charge of designing and implementing SESAME’s computational infrastructure and IT services.
His intensive technical expertise covers varieties of topics on computational applied sciences, e-Infrastructure and ICT. As a technical advisor for more than 10 years, engineer Matalgah has worked on several technology and education related projects funded by the European Commission, United Nations, and many national and international institutions. Today he is acting as a coordinator for User Resources at IMAN1 (Jordan’s National Supercomputing Centre).
Ralph Niederberger - Juelich Supercomputing Centre: Short Bio
Ralph Niederberger studied Computer Science at the University of Bonn and got his master degree in 1987.
As a Senior Research Associate at the Juelich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) of the Research Centre Juelich (FZJ) in Juelich, Germany, he is the deputy leader of the communication systems department and leader of the operational security group. His main working areas are high-speed communication, Internet Security, Network Management and Network Administration. He has been working in several regional, national and international network test-beds and projects concentrating on high-speed communications, optical networks, bandwidth on demand (BoD), Grid networking and Firewalls.
In the past he gave lectures on data communications and Internetworking with TCP/IP. Since 2003 Mr. Niederberger lectures "Network and Security Management" at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences.
Currently he is the leader of the network operations group of the EU FP7 PRACE project coordinating the network activities of the European wide dedicated PRACE project network and the EU Flagship project Human Brain. Within the EU FP7 project EUDAT he is working as the deputy-IT-Security-officer.
Since 2008 he is working for the EU reviewing the GÉANT project and has been appointed by the Human Brain project as representative for the International User Advisory Committee of GEANT3plus in 2013.
From 2006 till 2013 he has been within the Open Grid Forum (OGF) the Co-chair of the "Firewall Issues - Research Group (FI-RG)" and the "Firewall Virtualization for Grid Applications WG (fvga-wg)" investigating on firewall traversal for Grid applications.
Gaetano Pastore - Datera: Short Bio
Gaetano Pastore is EMEA Sales Director at DATERA, for more than 15 Years he has worked with cutting edge storage technologies, in different roles, spacing from Sales, Business Development, Technical Sales and Marketing. He has moved his first professional steps in the Storage arena in the beginning of the Flash-Era, with the first NAND SLC-based products. He has been among the first professionals in Europe to talk about the Enterprise Flash Acceleration and ServerSAN solutions in mission critical, IO-intensive applications. He is also among the early top sales professionals to sell multi-PB Object Storage systems in EMEA. His latest challenge is to bring Hyperscale Cloud technologies based on Automation, Software Defined economics and Scale-out distributed architectures into EMEA Datacenters.
David Power - vScaler: Short Bio
David Power, CTO of vScaler, specialises in developing industry leading HPC solutions along with leading teams that specialise in deployments and integrations. Having started his HPC career by managing a University in-house cluster where he studied Distributed Genetic Algorithms (DGAs) and grammatical evolution, David has since spent over a 15 years working on large-scale HPC systems with a history of bringing award winning products to market. A fan of open source technology from the outset, David selected OpenStack as the perfect platform to build the vScaler cloud platform on, and many of his current endeavours involve building OpenStack compliant cloud based solutions that build on the practises and optimisations of HPC.
Morris Riedel - University of Iceland: Short Bio
Dr. - Ing. Morris Riedel is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of Engineering and Natural Sciences of the University of Iceland. He received his PhD from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and started the work in parallel and distributed systems in the field of scientific visualization and computational steering of e-science applications on large-scale HPC resources. He previously held various positions at the Juelich Supercomputing Centre in Germany. At this institute, he is also the head of a specific scientific research group focused on “High Productivity Data Processing” as part of the Federated Systems and Data Division. Lectures given in universities such as the University of Iceland, University of Applied Sciences of Cologne and University of Technology Aachen (RWTH Aachen) include 'High Performance Computing & Big Data', Statistical Data Mining', ‘Handling of large datasets’, ‘Cloud Computing’ and ‘Scientific and Grid computing’. His current research focuses on 'high productivity processing of big data' in the context of scientific computing applications.
Roberto Sisneros - NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Short Bio
Robert Sisneros is the Technical Program Manager for the Data Analysis and Visualization Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. This group is tasked with supporting science teams utilizing NSF HPC resources as well as furthering the state of scientific visualization through cutting edge research. As a senior member of the Blue Waters Project, Robert's research interests in I/O and visualization are primarily aligned with issues of particular importance to high performance computing. These include: in situ visualization, data models and representations, parallel analysis algorithms, I/O parameter optimization, and "big data" analytics. Robert earned the degrees of Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science from Austin Peay State University and the degrees of Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
George Tsouloupas - The Cyprus Institute: Short Bio
Dr. George Tsouloupas is currently Technical Director at the Cyprus Institute High Performance Computing Facility. He manages a team of expert HPC, storage and Cloud system administrators, focusing on HPC/Cloud Operations as well as Integration of applications with high Compute and Data requirements. His interests include high-performance data storage systems; collection, curation and processing of diverse data; Medical Informatics; HPC deployment automation; Private/public Cloud deployment and automation; Integration of Cloud and HPC resources.
Alexander Withers - NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Short Bio
Alex Withers is a senior security engineer for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana, IL. Alex Withers’s interests and work crosses over a wide swath of information security policy, security architecture and applied cybersecurity research on intrusion detection and log analysis. Alex Withers is the Principal Investigator for two NSF grant awards centered on threat intelligence sharing (NSF award #1547249) and intrusion detection (NSF award #1535070). In addition, Alex Withers is the Information Security Officer for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) astronomy project.