Dell Technologies HPC Community Event
March 18th at 10:00am CDT
*(Moved from Wednesday to Thursday) The Unique and Ongoing Importance of Open-Source Software in HPC
presented by Fernanda Foertter, Director of Applications, NextSilicon; Greg Kurtzer, CEO, Ctrl IQ, Inc.; and John Lockman, AI Systems Engineer, Dell Technologies |
About the Event
HPC software transitioned from the 'classical supercomputing era' (Crays, CDCs, Thinking Machines, etc.) into cluster-based HPC systems leveraging commodity technologies two decades ago. With that transition also came another important transition: to open-source software, at all layers (OS, tools, libraries, and applications). While the supercomputing era had spawned some open-source applications and tools, the cluster computing era made open-source software crucial in HPC. The past two decades have continued to support and emphasize the importance of open-source software at all layers, for many reasons. In this panel, Fernanda Foertter of BioTeam, Greg Kurtzer of Ctrl IQ, and John Lockman of Dell Technologies will discuss the history (briefly), characterize the present, and debate the future of open-source software in HPC. |
About the Speakers
Fernanda Foertter, Director of Applications, NextSilicon
Fernanda recently joined NextSilicon as Director of Applications. Previously, Fernanda was a Senior Scientific Consultant at BioTeam, working on helping organizations with artificial intelligence, machine learning and technical aspects of doing data science such as methods, data integration, system integration, infrastructure, and scaling. She is also interested in exploring data curation, metadata, processes and organizational collaborations since data science often uses data from multiple parts of an organization or system.
Greg Kurtzer, CEO, Ctrl IQ, Inc.
Greg is well known throughout the HPC industry as a thought leader, innovator, disruptor and generally cool guy. He is probably most well known for starting and leading the CentOS distribution of Linux, but he is also the person behind Warewulf, Singularity Containers, and Rocky Linux. Previously, Greg spent nearly twenty years working for the United States Department of Energy (DoE) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he was Chief HPC Systems Architect. After that, Greg founded Sylabs which was acquired in early 2020 before founding Ctrl IQ.
John Lockman, AI Systems Engineer, Dell Technologies
Programmer, Developer, and Evangelist for containerization and orchestration with Kubernetes, John Lockman works in the Dell EMC HPC and AI Innovation Lab. He specializes in nature-inspired programming, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. John brings a passion for building tools to make advanced computing accessible to a larger audience. |