Staff

Greg Beyer

Senior Systems Support Engineer

System Administration

Pam Buffington

Director of Research Cyberinfrastructure and Computing

John Eric Coulter, Ph.D.

Research Scientist

Cyberinfrastructure Integration Architect

• PhD, Physics (Condensed Matter), Florida State University (2015)

Eric joined PACE in 2021, and works to explore and refine solutions for integrating PACE with broader communities like OSG and ACCESS, to provide unified views of research-related metrics at PACE, and to embrace flexible cyberinfrastructure practices. Before joining PACE, Eric could be found at Indiana University masquerading as a systems engineer with the XSEDE Campus Bridging team, providing HPC-oriented consultations to institutions across the US. He also worked closely with the Cyberinfrastructure Research Center at IU, providing support for several different science gateway projects. Prior to that, his research in condensed matter physics at Florida State University involved computational studies of the optical properties of strongly correlated materials.

Brad Crawford, Ph.D.

Research Scientist

AI Solutions Architect

• Ph.D., Chemical Engineering (Computational Chemistry), West Virginia University

Brad joined PACE in February 2023.  Brad has 9 years of experience as an industry engineer before his Ph.D., where he worked as a chemical engineer and project manager.  Before joining the PACE team, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Wayne State University, working on software development and computational chemistry.

Brad has experience developing scientific software, which minimizes the learning curve for novice computational chemists.  For more advanced computational chemistry users, this software enables seamless simulations to be created and executed on a large scale, allowing researchers to explore a vast chemical and thermodynamic space with minimum user interaction.  He also developed fully automated and reproducible workflows that manage and track the job submissions to the High-Performance Computing (HPC) centers, from building the initial chemical systems to conducting the final simulation data analysis. 

Philip R. Florio

Systems IT Architect Lead

System Administration

Matt Guidry

Senior Systems Support Engineer

System Administration

Matt joined PACE early in 2022, bringing along years of experience as a Linux Systems Administrator. He provides a wealth of experience with the RedHat Enterprise Linux operating system and configuration management administering large numbers of nodes. Prior to PACE, he was a lead system administrator for the University System of Georgia where he managed configuration for their self-hosted VMware infrastructure, Single-Sign-On integrations for OneUSGConnect and other system-wide USG applications.

Eric Harmon

Systems Support Engineer Lead

System Administration

Aaron P. Jezghani, Ph.D.

Ph: 404-894-3507

Research Scientist

Scheduler Architect

• Ph.D., Physics (Nuclear Physics), University of Kentucky
• M.S. Physics (Nuclear Physics), University of Kentucky

Aaron joined the PACE team in May 2019 as a computing facilitator, and currently serves as the Scheduler Architect. Through supporting users, he grew to appreciate the opportunity to improve HPC workflows through scheduler and systems configurations that lower the barrier to entry and passively optimize code execution. Additionally, Aaron has been involved in the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program since Spring 2020, mentoring multiple teams of students with the Team Phoenix VIP through international HPC competitions at the ISC-HPC and Supercomputing conferences and more recently, providing leadership for the Future Computing with the Rogues Gallery VIP as they research applications of novel compute architectures. Prior to joining PACE, Aaron studied free neutron and nuclear beta decay as a precision test of the Standard Model, which entailed a diverse range of activities, including particle simulation and detection, digital and analog signal processing, and algorithm optimization across x86, GPU, and FPGA architectures.

Ruben Lara

Ph: 404-385-5604

Senior Systems Support Engineer Manager

Research Cyber Infrastructure Manager

Fang (Cherry) Liu, Ph.D.

Ph: 404-385-0045

Senior Research Scientist

Interim Manager of Research Computing Facilitation

Lead Research Software Engineer

Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Computational Science and Engineering (College of Computing)

• Ph.D. Computer Science (Specialize at Parallel and Distributed Computing), Indiana University at Bloomington

Dr. Liu has nearly 20 years of experience in High Performance Computing where she worked closely with world-class researchers in solving their computational needs on the large-scale computing system. She joined the Gatech PACE team in July 2012. She actively supports GT community on software integration, porting and optimization on PACE computing cluster, while she also served on multiple Ph.D. dissertation committees, and supervised dozens of students in their research projects, and trained the researchers.  Before joining Gatech, Dr. Liu was an assistant scientist at the Mathematics and Computational Science Division in the Department of Energy (USDOE) Ames Laboratory. Dr. Liu has extensive experience in multidisciplinary research, and her collaborations with domain scientists leads to successful scientific workflow and data management system. Her research interests broadly span software interface design, multi-physics and multi-code coupling, data management and provenance for scientific applications, big data analysis for research computing centers. 

Paul Manno

RBW-IT Professional

Allan Metts

Principal Architect

Allan is a Tech graduate who recently joined PACE in addition to his existing role on OIT's Digital Learning team. Prior to Tech he held Executive Leadership roles in private industry, focusing primarily on cloud software products and complex projects in the telecommunications, transportation, hospitality, and retail industries.

Craig Moseley

Ph: 404-385-2563

Senior IT Support Professional

Team Lead for Customer Experience and User Support

Trever Nightingale

Research Technologist II

Cloud Architect

Deepa Phanish, Ph.D.

Research Scientist

Research Computing Facilitator

• Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
• M.S., Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Deepa joined the PACE team in June 2022, where she works closely with Georgia Tech researchers, facilitating their computational efforts and conducting outreach workshops. She has been actively participating in the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program during her tenure at Georgia Tech, advising the Satdium-IoPT team and leading their sensor networks and machine learning projects. Prior to joining PACE, she was a post-doctoral fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech working on estimation and detection problems in sensor networks. She also has extensive industry experience working as a network planning engineer at Cox Communications and embedded systems developer at PathPartner Technology. Her research areas of interest include high performance computational physics, network optimization, and hybrid modeling in machine learning. She has won numerous awards for her work including the Sigma Xi best Ph.D. thesis award at Georgia Tech.

Ronald Rahaman

Research Scientist 

Research Software Engineer

• M.S., Computer Science, University of Chicago

Ron Rahaman works as a Research Software Engineer, where he designs and deploys the user-facing software stacks on PACE clusters. His long-term projects include the containerization strategies and Open OnDemand deployment at PACE.  He strives to provide a software environment that is both fully-performant on advanced hardware and highly-productive for humans.

Prior to PACE, Ron worked for 6 years as a software engineer at Argonne National Laboratory.  He was a core contributor to the U.S. Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project, where he helped develop the multi-physics coupling interface for the ExaSMR (Exascale Small Modular Reactor) simulation toolkit.  He also taught courses in High-Performance Computing at The University of Chicago's Masters Program for Computer Science.

Kenneth Suda

Senior Application Developer

Software Engineer (DevOps)

Jeffrey Valdez, M.S., M.B.E.

Research Scientist

Research Computing Facilitator

• M.S., Psychology, Yale University
• M.B.E., Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania
• M.S., Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

Jeffrey joined PACE's facilitation team in June 2022 with a broad, interdisciplinary background in biomedical research. His current research interests include high-performance computing (HPC), data science, and deep learning. Before joining PACE, he worked in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech with collaborators to develop HPC tools for the Rogues Gallery at the Center for Research into Novel Computing Hierarchies (CRNCH), computer vision tools for identifying social communication behaviors (such as nonverbal communication in social interactions), and recommender systems for healthcare with machine learning. Prior to Georgia Tech, he worked at the Brain Behavior Behavior Laboratory at the Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania, collaborating on studies in psychiatry and neuroimaging focused on schizophrenia and mental illness.

Peter N. Wan

Senior Systems Support Engineer

Ph: 404-385-5614

User Support

Security and Compliance

System Administration

Michael D. Weiner, Ph.D.

Ph: (404)894-3566

Research Scientist

Research Computing Facilitator

• Ph.D., Physics (Biophysics), Cornell University

Michael joined PACE’s facilitation team in June 2019. He has worked extensively with Georgia Tech researchers to enable their work employing computing through training workshops, user support, and more. Michael also supports PACE’s Instructional Cluster Environments (ICE), which offer HPC for academic courses and training workshops. Years after first encountering HPC, Michael remains in awe of its power, and he is enthusiastic about enabling others to harness it. He is always happy to meet with researchers to identify resources and opportunities to enable their research, including through PACE clusters, national ACCESS resources, and the Open Science Grid. Michael is a member of the Leadership Team (2022-2024) for Campus Champions, a national organization of research computing professionals. Prior to joining PACE, Michael completed his Ph.D. in physics with a focus on computational biophysics. He conducted molecular dynamics simulations of the physical chemistry of lipid membranes on a variety of supercomputers, especially those allocated through XSEDE. 

Gregory Willcox

Systems IT Architect Lead

System Administration

• MBA, Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology

Deirdre (Dee) Womack

Senior Systems Support Engineer

System Administration

Dee joined PACE in April 2020, where she works on the cyberinfrastructure team to maintain the HPC cluster environment, which also includes the installation of new devices. Dee has over 20 years of experience installing various types of hardware and all operating systems within the Unix family in large environments, including the US Intelligence Community, Government, Retail, Transportation, and Manufacturing industries. Prior to joining PACE, she was the sole systems engineer responsible for deploying the infrastructure hardware for the iPad launch that encompassed four data centers spread across the United States while at AT&T.

Grigori Yourganov, Ph.D.

Research Scientist

Research Computing Facilitator

• Ph.D., Medical Science, University of Toronto
• M.Sc., Computer Science, York University (Toronto, Canada)

Grigori joined the PACE team in October 2022. Prior to that, he had been working as the HPC Research Facilitator at Clemson University, and as a post-doctoral fellow at University of South Carolina and Medical University of South Carolina. His background is in neuroscience, in particular in the analysis of the relationship between brain scans and behavioural data. This analysis is quite computationally intense, which has made Grigori interested in high-performance computing. He believes all fields of science that deal with large amounts of data can really benefit from HPC clusters, and he is very excited to join the PACE team and to help the Georgia Tech researchers to find optimal HPC strategies for their research work.

Dan (Ann) Zhou

Ph: 404-385-3966

Research Technologist II

Storage Architect

Marian Zvada, M.Sc., M.B.A.

Research Scientist

Research Computing Facilitator

• MSc in Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia
• MBA, College of Business, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Marian is a Research Computing veteran, previously employed for almost a decade as a systems integrator supporting research in high energy physics for the CMS experiment in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN as well as a member of the Open Science Grid (OSG) Investigation Team, dealing mostly with newly introduced methods connecting complex existing software systems into larger workflows for automated use. His exceptional work has been an enabler for thousands of scientists worldwide from Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Open Science Grid (OSG) and other collaborative scientific projects. Before he joined Georgia Tech in May 2022, he was no stranger to PACE, as his support had been instrumental in deploying PACE's OSG cluster "Buzzard".

Aadarsh Vavilikolanu

Student Assistant

Aadarsh Vavilikolanu is an undergraduate student from College of Computing who joined PACE in Summer 2023. He works with the Research Computing Facilitation team with Dr. Michael Weiner.

Samarth Parameswar

Student Assistant

Samarth Parameswar is an undergraduate student from College of Computing who joined PACE in Fall 2022. He works with the Research Computing Facilitation team with Jeffrey Valdez.

Oghenekome (Kome) Onoyona

Student Assistant

Oghenekome Onoyona is an undergraduate student from College of Computing who joined PACE in Spring 2023. She works with the Research Computing Facilitation team with Dr. Michael Weiner.

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