Our hardware is exciting but our people are more than that

Aditi is driven by a passion for uniting communities, solving intricate problems, and forging connections between seemingly disparate concepts.

Aditi’s role centres on fostering collaborations that harness supercomputing’s potential and bringing together diverse minds to tackle complex scientific challenges. Aditi loves unravelling puzzles and weaving patterns, while advocating for the transformative power of interdisciplinary innovation.

Ahmed has been involved in the Information Technology industry for 15 years, in Systems Administration, on-site support and help desk roles. Ahmed is always looking for new ways to increase his knowledge and keeping up with changes in technology.

Ahmed specialises in virtualisation management, Linux systems, applications, website and hardware management as well as network support and monitoring.

Joining the Helpdesk team in October 2018, Alec brings years of prior customer service experience to Pawsey, providing our clients with rapid and dependable support.

With a further background in network administration and software development, Alec’s broad IT skillset finds him assisting Pawsey’s operations across multiple disciplines.

Alexis’s formal qualifications include a PhD in Environmental Engineering, Masters in Mechanical Engineering (Thermofluids) and Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering (Thermofluids).

He commenced with Pawsey in March 2018 and brings a wealth of knowledge in the application and development of numerical/computational tools for the development of solutions for scientific and applied engineering and fluid mechanics problems.

In his current role he is responsible for engaging new researchers, undertaking collaborative uptake projects to develop or improve performance of computational tools/workflows, and presents training material focused on computational research.

Alexis is a University lecturer, he has received numerous awards and published a number of journal articles.

Ali is a Visualisation Specialist with an engineering background and specialises in visualising scientific data.

With extensive exposure to VTK technology and script visualisation this puts him in good stead to supply researchers with an in-depth insight into their simulation, resulting in an integrated time-efficient workflow. His experience of working on fluid flow in porous media is a significant asset in the support of geoscientists.

Ali provides customised high-end hardware/software packages for different case studies in Geoscience, Petroleum Engineering, CFD, and eHealth. His extensive knowledge in image segmentation and processing of microscopy images (micro-CT, SEM) helps generating large-scale visualisations in high-resolution.

Andrew is a highly experienced IT professional with more than 20 years’ experience in the industry, he has worked in a number of institutions including the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh. He holds a Master of Science in IT Computer Security and a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Biochemistry.

Andrew commenced with Pawsey in 2017 and is responsible for several Cray XC30/XC40 systems, commodity clusters and high performance Lustre storage systems, maintenance planning and implementation, general user queries, liaison with vendors, bug tracking and upgrade testing.

Between 2013 and 2017 he was the Senior Supercomputing Systems Manager representing Pawsey Supercomputing Centre at The University of WA.

Ann is the Education and Training Manager at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre.

Ann has significant experience in adult teaching and learning. She has led distributed, global teaching and learning teams strategically and operationally, in the creation of such assets as e-learning materials, digital stories, microlearning units, webinars, demonstrations, web sites and wiki sites, digital classroom courses and workshops, and a variety of enablement materials. Her experience spans numerous industries and sectors.

Ashley is a highly experienced System Administrator with more than 18 years’ experience in the Supercomputing industry.

After completing a Bachelor of Engineering (Major Computer System), he spent 10 years as System Administrator/Programmer at The University of WA.

He commenced with Pawsey in 2011 as Supercomputing Systems Administrator and is responsible for configuring and administering the High Performance Facilities including the SGI High Performance Computing GPU Cluster and the HPC Parallel File-system at The University of WA.

Ashley is also a Pawsey representative on The University of WA Technical Operations Group Panel.

Having completed a Bachelor of Podiatric Medicine and a Master of Biomedical Science (Human Biology), Audrey has experience in both clinical and research settings. Her interest lies in the area of bioinformatics, where crossover from bench to bedside is taken place. With her strong background in biology, she joins the Pawsey Team to work on accessibility of HPC for bioinformatics.

Boney holds a degree in Bachelor of Electronics & Communication Engineering and is a Microsoft-certified IT professional.

She commenced with the Pawsey Helpdesk and Technical Services in March 2022 and is responsible for managing incidents and service requests as well as responding to a wide array of queries from Pawsey users, ensuring their needs are addressed in a timely and efficient manner.

Boney has more than 8 years of experience in the Information technology industry as an IT Administrator as well as in technical support, customer service roles, and procurement

Mr Evans brings decades of IT management experience to his current role of seeking to understand the business needs of end users and translating these into specific IT requirements. He coordinates the delivery of IT services, products, environment and support, to enable the required business outcomes for end users.

An important part of the Service Manager role is to articulate and document agreed levels of service delivery with each user group. Mr Evans is then responsible for ensuring that IT services are provided to the agreed standard, including coordination of the required resources and continuous monitoring of service targets.

Chris obtained a PhD in Computational Physics and a Bachelor of Science, Physics and Computer Science both through The University of WA.

Chris joined Pawsey in 2012 and was promoted in 2016 to his current position of Team Lead – Senior Supercomputing Specialist. During his time at Pawsey Chris has played a pivotal role in the coordination of the merit allocation calls, project management of the procurement of the Advanced Technology Cluster, managing the Pawsey Uptake Project calls and was instrumental in the development and running of the GPU training and User Forums.

Chris brings more than 20 years’ experience in IT infrastructure used for higher education and academic research purposes.

Chris is responsible for the Pawsey Data Services Storage Infrastructure, and his experience covers designing, procuring, commissioning and managing storage and server hardware, filesystems, operating systems and hypervisors.

Chris manages a team of Storage and HSM Systems Administrators, who together, maintain, manage and ensure Data Services are provided to Pawsey researchers, who require storage of, and access to their Research Data Collections of National Significance.

Pawsey Research Data Services provide storage and use of research data collections in either a dedicated RDS storage file system, or in the Pawsey General Science Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) system, both of which are accessible via the Pawsey Data Portal.

With a background in project management, Christianne has managed a variety of consultancy projects and events for clients in both Australia and the UK.

Since joining Pawsey, Christianne has taken on responsibility for supporting projects such as ADACS, and coordinating various engagement activities and outreach events.

Cristian is a computer scientist who joined Pawsey in 2020 as Supercomputing Application Specialist to apply his parallel algorithms knowledge and GPU programming skills to solve HPC challenges.

Prior to Pawsey, he worked at the National Research Council of Italy on accelerating scientific and industrial applications using NVIDIA GPUs.

Mr Carey has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry and currently ensures system availability for the supercomputers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre; ensuring continuity of access for Pawsey researchers.

These systems include Magnus and Galaxy, Pawsey’s Cray XC40 and XC30 supercomputers, the Centre’s high-performance Lustre filesystems and the high speed Infiniband fabric which connects these systems together.

Darran has been a part of the Pawsey team, and worked on its systems, since the Centre’s inception as iVEC in 2001.

Pawsey website

Mr Schibeci leads the Supercomputing team – the world-class experts providing access to cutting-edge resources. He coordinates recruitment of operational and uptake team members and represents Supercomputing in the Pawsey Management Team.

Mr Schibeci manages new hardware procurement, such as the Advanced Technology Cluster and the Group File System. 

He brings more than 10 years’ experience in high-performance computing and more than 20 years in systems administration, including Lead System Administrator for our first TOP500 supercomputer and first multi-teraflop supercomputer. This work included technically supporting iVEC’s first GPU cluster and being development champion for maali, the open-source build system.

Deva holds a PhD in Software Engineering which he completed through the Lero-the-Irish Software Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland.

He is a Supercomputing Application Specialist at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. He is responsible for assisting researchers to efficiently parallelise their codes and port them onto the infrastructure operated in the Pawsey centre.

Deva undertakes technical assessment of parallelised applications for performance on supercomputers and assists research groups in scaling their research applications and simulations from hundreds to thousands of processors.

Fathima is a learning and development specialist with over 15 years of experience, designing, developing and delivering successful training programs across various industries and sectors.

She has worked across British, American and Australian education systems and has significant experience in adult education. She also has extensive leadership experience in staff development, process and productivity improvements and overall performance management.

Fathima holds a bachelor’s degree in Computing and a Master’s in Business Administration. She is a qualified Trainer and Assessor with a passion to improve the skills of organizations and its people through effective learning and development strategies.

Ilkhom obtained his PhD in Theoretical Atomic Physics from Curtin University, Western Australia.

His background is in theoretical ion-atom collision physics where he developed fully quantum-mechanical and semi-classical computational codes to model ion-atom and ion-molecule collisions. He has extensive experience in developing software which utilise OpenMP, MPI, Cuda and OpenACC parallelism.

At Pawsey, Ilkhom assists researchers with parallelising their codes to efficiently utilise supercomputing resources. Another direction he has been working on is porting researchers’ existing CPU-based parallel codes to run in parallel on GPUs.

Jeffrey is a highly experienced Data Infrastructure Specialist. He holds a Masters in Software Engineering and is certified in PMP and IBM AIX.

Prior to joining Pawsey in 2015, he was employed by IBM Spectrum Storage Engineering, where he developed his strong skills base in designing and implementing enterprise storage systems for large scale supercomputing clusters.

Jeffrey is currently designing, implementing and will manage next generation Pawsey software defined, unified storage for research data and nimbus cloud. He is also setting up an in-place analytics platform to provide multiple spark instances on shared hardware for data scientists and data engineers.

Jeremy holds a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Engineering which he completed with Honours.

With more than 22 years’ experience working in IT, he commenced with CSIRO in 2008 before moving to Pawsey in 2012. Jeremy has been involved with systems administration and supporting cloud infrastructure, and since 2014 he has been responsible for running the WA node of the NeCTAR Research Cloud.

Jeremy is now Technical Lead for the Pawsey Nimbus cloud, which commenced operations in 2017.

Jesse is a visualisation specialist with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Games Technology from Murdoch University.

He has several years for experience in the visualisation space including at the Curtin Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch (Curtin HIVE).

His specialisations include Virtual and Mixed reality simulations, and visualisation of multi-disciplinary research data on large scale displays.

Jesse Also completed a Pawsey/iVec internship in 2010.

Ms Nunez developed and now implements, the Centre’s marketing strategy, managing its brand and image; drawing upon her 18 years of experience in corporate communications. 

This includes design and coordination of regular events designed to: raise awareness of the Centre, both nationally and internationally, contribute to building the reputation of Perth as an innovation hub and showcase the outcomes of specific projects. 

Ms Nunez facilitates media interviews and engages with journalists, with the goal of highlighting the Centre’s capabilities and services. She brings her passion for architecture to designing and producing layouts for key exhibitions intended to showcase the Centre.

Whilst currently studying full-time for a new career in Occupational Therapy, Kathryn is very pleased to be back in the Pawsey team, working in Education and Training. Kathryn was previously Executive Officer for Pawsey from 2015 to 2018, before moving to CSIRO’s Cyber Security Team.

Kathryn works one day a week to support the Education and Training Manager with the Internship Program and training events.

She is a Project Officer / Executive Officer with comprehensive skills and experience in governance, business strategy and operations, and reporting in government environments including cyber security, high
performance computing, energy research projects and tertiary education.

Kevin Buckley took up the role of Supercomputing Systems Administrator at Pawsey in late January 2018, having spent nine-and-a-half years filling university-wide roles, of eResearch Programmer and eScience Consultant, from within the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, and was the initial deployer of pilots for, the then pan-Australasian, grid-computing infrastructure, as well as being the administrator of its Radio Astronomy group’s NGAS node.

Prior to moving to New Zealand, Kevin had become the University of Lancaster’s High Performance Systems Consultant, having initially done postgraduate work within computational hydrology/hydrogeology on early parallel processing platforms. Along with an MSc from Lancaster, Kevin has a BSc/ARCS from taking a Physics degree at Imperial College.

Konstantinos (Kosta for short) over the last 15 years he has worked as a Software Engineer and a Data Engineer for a number of large organisations in Australia and internationally. He has mostly worked on real-time and batch pipelines on the Hadoop ecosystem and their deployment and management on public clouds (AWS and GCP). He has a passion for astronomy and machine learning and has been helping teams solve tough problems. Aside from developing technical solutions he has experience in helping teams improve their processes and mentoring.

Lachlan has been working in the field of IT for approximately 13 years, starting off with a Bachelor of IT from CQUniversity. After completing his degree, he gained experience as a Network Engineer, working for various organizations in the Central Queensland area. His expertise primarily revolved around Process Control and Industrial Automation systems, focusing on the Mining/Resources sector for over 7 years.

Recently, Lachlan made the decision to relocate from Queensland to Western Australia to join the SKAO. There, he was involved in the network design for the SKAO-Low Telescope. With great enthusiasm, he now looks forward to his new role at Pawsey, where he aims to drive network improvements that will effectively support Pawsey’s operations in the future.

Luke completed a Bachelor of Science (Environmental Science) with Honours from The University of WA. 

Since commencing with Pawsey in 2008, he has held for variety of positions including working on various NCRIS capabilities such as IMOS and TERN (Auscover).  He was Project Manager for a NeCTAR eResearch Tool project (CATAMI), and currently works as a Data Specialist assisting and advising researchers on the use of Pawsey’s resources.

Luke undertakes various outreach, engagement, support and training activities to drive uptake of services.  He also currently works as the Data Manager for WAMSI (Western Australian Marine Science Institution).

Maciej joined Pawsey in 2017 as a Supercomputing Application Specialist and holds a PhD in Computational Science. He is a mathematician and computational scientist and has expertise is optimisation and development of application on massively parallel and accelerated HPC systems.

Since 2004 he has been involved in many HPC projects including porting weather prediction codes to Cray X1e vector architecture, accelerating astrophysical computational kernels on IBM Cell processors, optimisation of open source simulation codes on IBM Power7 architecture and developing scalable codes on IBM Blue Gene/Q, Cray XC40.

Maciej is a highly documented author with more than 25 publications in various fields of computational science.

Marco completed a PhD in Materials Science, specialising in theoretical and computational chemistry.

Joining Pawsey in 2018, Marco engages with researchers in the fields of computational materials science, computational chemistry and bioinformatics.

Marco’s area of expertise is quantum mechanical calculations and classical molecular dynamics (including free energy calculations). He is also highly experienced in software development (mostly Fortran, plus a bit of C++) and has accumulated an extensive skill set of bash/Python scripting to automate workflows for pre-processing, post-processing and visualisation of simulation data.

Marco was also employed for a number of years as a university researcher, developing and applying methods to model, simulate and analyse materials properties and processes.

Mark Gray is currently the Head of Scientific Platforms at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. He brings a strong research and data management background to his role of building the next generation of supercomputing systems for Australia. This includes procurement, deployment, training, user expectation management – and leadership of the team who administer and operate Pawsey systems.

Mark has a background in earth science and research software engineering with experience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Prior to joining Pawsey, Mark worked with the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network and the Integrated Marine Observing system here in Australia, building large scale satellite data processing facilities.

Mark is a research executive with more than 20 years’ experience working at a senior level in innovative research and business development roles in complex, multi-stakeholder environments. Through national and international programs and joint-ventures, Mark had successfully led initiatives to accelerate the impact of research, development and education programs for Australia’s key energy, mining and agricultural sectors.

He is a former Chief Executive of an LNG research and development alliance of CSIRO, Curtin University and UWA, partnering with Chevron, Woodside and Shell. Prior to his appointment at Pawsey Mark led the innovation and industry engagement portfolio at The University of Western Australia. In addition, Mark is the current Chair of the Board of All Saints’ College and was appointed an adjunct Senior Fellow of the Perth USAsia Centre (an international policy think tank) in 2017.

Basha obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from UTM Malaysia.

Basha has extensive experience in parallel algorithms and numerical methods related to computational Fluid Dynamics, Multiphase flow and Heat transfer. He has worked on several modelling & simulation software, such as COMSOL, SolidWorks, Ansys CFX, FLUENT, ICEM CFD, Hysys, and has published more than 40 journal and conference papers in this research area.

After joining the centre, he has been actively involved in supporting users to install software, scaling and optimization of the codes. He is also involved in revising training materials and developing CFD-CPU and CFD-GPU testing codes.

Pascal obtained a PhD in Astrophysics from Queen’s University, Kingston Ontario, Canada. His background is in numerical astrophysics, where he explored the physics governing the Universe through complex virtual universes. He has an extensive track record of developing astronomical software for HPC systems.

At Pawsey, he is responsible for assisting researchers to efficiently parallelise their codes and port them onto the infrastructure operated at the centre. Pascal undertakes technical assessment of parallelised applications for performance on supercomputers and assists research groups in scaling their research applications and simulations from hundreds to thousands of processors.

Sam Yates joined Pawsey in 2021 as a Senior Supercomputing Applications Specialist after working in HPC roles at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and EPFL.

Sam has a background in pure mathematics with a PhD from the University of Adelaide in the field of discrete analytic geometry, but has since focused primarily on the development of high performance scientific software, with projects in potential fields geophysics, teletraffic modelling, computational biology and computational neuroscience.

Sarah obtained a PhD in Medicine from UWA in 2020. She has a background in both laboratory and computational genetics, specifically focussing on disease gene discovery in neuromuscular disorders.

She is now part of the Supercomputing Applications team at Pawsey, working to support bioinformatics users through workflow development and optimisation, training, and advocacy

Sean commenced his career as a researcher in the domain of computational chemistry.

Since joining Pawsey in 2013 he has become an expert in a wide range of programming languages and technologies, particularly in the areas of grid computing and visualisation. Sean also specialises in: Data analysis, programming and visualisation.

Sean’s formal qualifications include a PhD in Computational Chemistry and a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Physics and he is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow both at Curtin University and the Technical University of Delft.

Shree is a PhD student working on visualisation software that can help project managers to effectively analyse business risks in 3D. Shree holds a Bachelor Honours degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Curtin University. Shree has worked as an intern with Curtin University HIVE on a visualisation research project and has experience as a software engineer from Secure2Go Pvt. Ltd.

With interest towards visualisation and software development, Shree intends to extend her knowledge set in the field of VTK, C++ programming and business risk domain through her research project by simultaneously contributing to knowledge in the field of business risk analysis and contributing to practice in the field of 3D data visualisation.

With 15 years of project management experience in the mining industry, particularly managing major upgrades to mining railway signalling and control systems, Stacy has already seen almost every problem that can potentially derail a big project.

In her role, Stacy will bring a diverse group of people together to deliver a system that meets both the user and technical requirements.

A key part of Stacy’s planning is managing the change from existing systems to the new systems while minimising any impact on current Pawsey users. This requires staging the installation works and allowing time to migrate users onto new systems, while ensuring the new systems can simultaneously meet the needs of existing users, and emerging future users.

Coming from an engineering background, Stacy is particularly enthusiastic about the scientific developments that are being advanced using Pawsey facilities

Sumitha is a Linux System Administrator with more than 8 years experience in the IT industry.

After completing her Bachelor of Engineering in computer science she worked as a System Administrator. She commenced with Pawsey in 2019 as IT Officer. Sumitha has been involved with systems administration from 2007.

Mr Varetto is an accomplished manager and computational scientist.

His focus is on data-intensive high-performance computing, large scale parallel I/O and accelerators. He has held key roles in significant research projects, such as the EU funded ‘Human Brain Project’, has contributed to numerous projects with the European supercomputing infrastructure and has worked in commercial companies and government and academic institutions in the USA, Europe and Australia.

Mr Varetto has been developing GPU-accelerated scientific software since 2006 and is currently working on designing scalable scientific computing solutions on hybrid CPU/GPU systems and implementing large scale real-time data processing and visualisation workflows, while supporting international research projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

William joined Pawsey in 2016 initially as HPC System Support Officer before commencing in the position of Systems Administrator in 2017. In this role he has successfully developed and positioned a user and project management reporting web application – Origin.

He works on technologies including: Cray CLE, xCAT, Bright Cluster Manager, LDAP, Slurm, Puppet, Ansible, Linux, Lustre, CommVault, Infiniband, Perl, Python, Django, Flask, C, C++, AngularJS, NodeJS, JavaScript, Git, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, Nginx, Atlassian Tools (JIRA, Confluence)

He holds a Bachelor of Science majoring in Computer Science which be completed through Murdoch University.

Prior to joining Pawsey, William was a Programmer at iiNet.

Leading the visualisation at Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. His duties include helping researchers to develop workflows to visualise large scientific data using the Pawsey remote visualisation infrastructure, training researchers on various visualisation related topics, and design, implement and maintain various visualisation systems and services at Pawsey.

PhD in Geophysics from UWA, specialising in visualisation, human-data interactions and human-machine interactions.