Our hardware is exciting but our people are more than that
The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is what it is, because of its world-class expertise.
Without its knowledgable staff, the Centre would not have its reputation of excelling and advancing Australian science.
Ann Backhaus is the Education and Training Manager at Pawsey. She seeks to accelerate researcher’s discoveries through the Pawsey User Training Program. In addition, Ann helps build Australia’s next generation of scientists through the Internship Program, summer schools, and STEM outreach – underpinned with an extensive network of Partners. Ann also keeps Pawsey staff upskilled in current and future-looking technologies as well as essential skills, which contribute to Pawsey’s “friendly vibe”. Check out what we’re doing in Training & HPC in quantum, AI, ML and more on our website pawsey.org.au/news-and-events/
Ann has significant experience in adult teaching and learning, and in training program design, development, and management. Her experience spans numerous industries and sectors, including government, academia, and private enterprise.
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.
Karina Nunez has been part of the Pawsey team for over 10 years, and it has been a journey, focusing on STEM, government relationships, and engaging researchers at scale. Karina has played a pivotal role in building and expanding the Pawsey Brand and demystifying supercomputing for a wider audience.
She is an expert visual communicator whose passion for science and technology has seamlessly blended with her role in promoting Australia’s scientific supercomputing.
As a Pawsey representative, Karina has played a role in forging connections with international partners, fostering strong relationships for Pawsey with its users, and championing supercomputing with the support of researchers and universities.
Her mission? To seamlessly connect the dots between science, technology, and advocacy.
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.
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.
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).