Board of Directors
Susan Baldwin - Executive Director, Compute/Calcul (Canada): Susan is responsible for leading the creation of a powerful national HPC platform for research. She works in collaboration with the university-based HPC consortia to provide for overall architecture and planning, software integration, operations and management and coordination of user support for the national HPC platform. She is responsible for developing and executing the strategic plan for HPC in Canada and securing the necessary funding. Compute Canada is also supporting the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) in the G-8 Exascale Project. In a recent consultation by the Government of Canada on a Digital Economy Strategy, the submission prepared by Ms. Baldwin won the most votes for the best idea. Prior to taking the Executive Director position, she was the Chief Administrative Officer with CANARIE Inc., involved in the strategic planning and implementation for both advanced broadband networks and advanced applications and was responsible for the management of all funding programs. For two decades prior to joining CANARIE, Ms. Baldwin held a variety of senior executive positions with various departments within the Government of Canada, including Executive Director, Broadcasting at the CRTC; Director General, Broadcasting Policy at the Department of Canadian Heritage; Director General, New Media with Industry Canada and Director, Research and Technology Policy with the Department of Communications. As Director General, New Media, she was instrumental in proposing and establishing the Information Highway Advisory Council and headed the Executive Secretariat. As a skilled negotiator, she was part of Canadian delegations to numerous international negotiations including the information highway and GATS (General Agreement on trade in services). Ms. Baldwin holds an Honours BA from York University and a Masters degree from the University of Toronto.
Scott Denham - Scott Denham began his career in IT after being introduced to digital electronics while studying as an avionics technician for the U.S. Air Force Reserves. After training in inertial navigation and radar, he went on to study Electrical Engineering at the University of Houston, and during this time joined Western Geophysical, where his interest in geophysical processing began. During a 28 year career at Western, he worked on systems ranging from SEL minicomputers to Fujitsu and Thinking Machines supercomputers. His roles included software development, operations management, customer and end user support, systems support and design, and emerging technology evaluation. Scott's areas of specialization included array processing hardware, vector systems, and data ingest from field recording systems. He managed Western's System Technology group through the transition from traditional mainframes to Unix based cluster and SMP systems. He was later involved in the early evaluation of Linux cluster technology. He served as a member of SHARE's Numerically Intensive Computing committee, and later as Project Manager of the SHARE SP Project. Scott joined IBM's HPC Center of Competency in 2000, assisting customers in implementation of HPC solutions, including a number of Top 500 systems. Scott has been involved with IBM's Cluster Management software initiatives, including co-authoring the IBM Redbook Building a Linux HPC Cluster with xCAT. He has also worked extensively with IBM's parallel file system, visualization, and job scheduling products. Scott is certified as a Consulting IT Specialist through the IBM Professions program and The Open Group. Scott is currently a member of the IBM Deep Computing Technical Team, serving as a Technical Architect and lead for the Petroleum sector. He continues to work with IBM's current and potential customers worldwide in defining and implementing solutions using IBM and partners' offerings, focusing on upstream Petroleum technical applications.
Earl Dodd - Earl is the Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers, Inc. (RMSC) in Montana. RMSC is a first-of-a-kind public-private partnership that focuses on the HPC Cloud as an economic development engine for Montana and the region. Earl's areas of technical interest are in strategy formulation for Peta/ExaScale architectures and UltraScale 3D visualization and collaboration to drive the next generation computationally-steered workflows and applications. The ability to be “social imagineer” by leading RMSC is a life-long dream come true that is helping build the knowledge economy for Montana. He holds BS and MS degrees in Mining Engineering from Montana College of Mineral Science & Technology ("Montana Tech") and an MBA from Tulane University. Earl has 29 years experience in Supercomputing and High Performance Computing (HPC).
Steve Hebert - Steve is founder and CEO of Nimbix, Inc., a cloud-based HPC infrastructure and managed services company. Prior to founding Nimbix in 2010, Mr. Hebert was at Altera Corporation, where he worked with HP to enable FPGA-based hardware for accelerated computing. Previously, he held management and consulting roles in the IT industry and notably served as CEO of Industryview.com, Inc., a digital media company that deployed cloud-based streaming video for corporate communications. He began his career at Texas Instruments’ semiconductor group in Sales & Marketing. Mr. Hebert earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University.
Bill Menger - Houston HPC Manager for Weinman Geoscience: Bill holds BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Geophysics from Texas A&M University. He was a nuclear engineer in the US Navy Submarine force for five years, leaving to join Conoco R&D in Oklahoma doing work in magnetotellurics, multi-component seismic, and development of a seismic processing system for the Cray X-MP. He moved to Houston with Conoco's Advance Exploration group, building a worldwide database of all its oil and gas data using a distributed database. After a stint in Lafayette as data management supervisor, he left Conoco to join Applied Geophysical Software, where he wrote software for multiple suppression, model-building, tomography, and depth migration. Bill rejoined Conoco in 1998 and assisted with the rewrite of CPS, the seismic processing system for Conoco. From the ConocoPhillips merger in 2002 until March 2009 he supervised a software and HPC group. At ConocoPhillips, Bill was instrumental in obtaining open source licensing for CPS (http://cpseis.org), and for GeoCraft (http://geocraft.org), a framework for general purpose geophysical software. Bill is President of the Society of HPC Professionals.
Scott Morton - Hess Corporation: Scott Morton has 25 years of experience in computational and theoretical physics distributed between academia, the computer industry and the petroleum industry. Although originally trained as an astrophysicist, he switched to geophysics when he joined Shell in 1991 to do research and development in seismic imaging. Scott spent the next 7 years distributed between Shell, Thinking Machines, Cray Research and SGI, gaining expertise in both geophysics and computational science as well as earning an R&D 100 award. In 1998 Scott settled down at Hess Corporation and helped build one of the first Linux PC clusters used for seismic imaging. He has recently spearheaded the petroleum industry's effort at doing seismic imaging on GPU (graphics processing unit) clusters. Scott currently manages the Geophysical Technology Development group in Hess Corporation's Global E&P Technology department and is responsible for monitoring, adopting, developing and testing new geophysical and computational technologies.
Ebb Pye – President and Owner of Ebb F. Pye and Associates: Ebb Pye is a marketing and sales professional with over 30 years experience focused on technology companies selling into the Oil and Gas Sector. Ebb has held key management positions during the successful startup phase of Bonner & Moore Computing, GeoQuest International, Landmark Graphics and Sierra Geophysics. Inc 1993, Ebb established Ebb F. Pye & Associates, a marketing consulting organization specializing in providing services to the E&P segment of the Petroleum Industry. Over the past seventeen years, EFP&A has provided marketing services to more than 50 organizations including most of the major computer hardware vendors and several international electronics companies. Ebb holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University.
