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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.