Organizers and Advisory Board

Conference Organizer

Logo for organiser Tabor Communications

TABOR COMMUNICATIONS INC.

Tabor Communications Inc. (TCI) is a media and services company dedicated to high-end performance computing. As publisher of a complete advanced computing portfolio that includes HPCwire, Datanami, EnterpriseAI, QCwire, and HPCwire Japan, TCI is the market-leader in online journalism covering emerging technologies within the high-tech industry, and provides events, audience insights, and other services for those engaged in performance computing in enterprise, government, and research. www.taborcommuications.com

Advisory Board

Headshot of Advisory Board member and speaker Kristin Boggiano

Co-Founder and President, CrossTower

Kristin Boggiano, Co-Founder and President of CrossTower, was formerly the Chief Legal Officer of crypto exchange software provider AlphaPoint. Before that, she served as a structured products lawyer at Schulte Roth, where she handled cases related to CDOs, CLOs and credit derivatives. Kristin has also worked as a regulatory lawyer on Dodd-Frank policymaking and rulemaking, as well as cases involving hedge funds and other institutions invested in digital assets. Kristin is the founder of the Digital Asset Regulatory Legal Alliance (DARLA) for general counsels. For more see www.crosstower.com.

Jay Boisseau is an experienced, recognized leader and strategist in advanced computing technologies, with over 25 years in the field. Jay is CEO and co-founder (June 2014) of Vizias, a small consultancy with expertise in high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), technology community building, and technology event support. Jay also serves as the executive director and founder of The Austin Forum on Technology & Society, which he created in 2006 and is now the leading monthly technology outreach and engagement event in Austin–and now attracts national and international attendees online.

Recent major work included serving as the HPC & AI Technology Strategist for Dell Technologies (September 2014-April 2023) to develop high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) strategies and new solutions for use by companies, government organizations, and universities. Jay evaluated new technologies, worked with strategic customers on their workload solution designs, and helped develop both optimal current solutions and potential future solutions. Jay also led and greatly expanded the Dell HPC Community, now a global online community that Vizias continues to support.

Prior to Vizias and Dell, Jay created and led the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin (2001-14). Under Jay’s leadership, TACC deployed numerous world-class computing systems for U.S. open scientific research, including two systems ranked in the Top 10 in the world, and developed new programs and tools to enable thousands of researchers to accomplish more with these powerful technologies. His previous positions were at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. He received his doctorate in astronomy from UT Austin, and his undergraduate degree in astronomy and physics from the University of Virginia.

headshot of Roman Chwyl

Roman Chwyl is a seasoned Wall Street technology executive with over 25 years of experience, specializing in the fusion of High Performance Computing/Grid workloads and Public Cloud solutions. His proficiency encompasses onboard and operate models crucial for supporting large-scale computing environments and their requisite business frameworks. Throughout his career, Roman has held pivotal roles at major public cloud providers. He led the Azure FinTech division at Microsoft, contributed to the incubation of the AWS FinTech Market at Amazon, and established and managed the Financial Services vertical at Google Cloud. Currently, Roman directs strategy for large-scale computing and data-intensive workloads at IBM within the Wall Street sector. Roman is also the co-founder of Concourse Labs, a venture-backed SaaS company specializing in automated cloud governance solutions. These solutions facilitate the secure and efficient adoption of Cloud Computing for the Financial Services vertical. Roman’s decade-long tenure at Platform Computing solidified his reputation as a business architect of Grid Computing for Wall Street, particularly with Symphony, recognized as the industry standard Grid Software solution. He effectively managed IBM’s 2012 acquisition and its integration into the Financial Services Vertical, serving top-tier financial institutions. Roman holds a B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Toronto and currently resides in New York.

A passionate leader with a track record of building high performing engineering teams, Sagar Gaikwad demonstrates daily that hard work can be fun. At Capital One, Sagar led teams to build a real-time cybersecurity platform processing petabytes of data, several big data initiatives, infrastructure-as-a-service to modernize data science for the cloud, and an AI-based recruitment sourcing tool. Sagar is currently scaling the cloud engineering team to handle the rapid adoption and growth of the data science infra-as-service platform. Before Capital One, Sagar spent seven years building data engineering products at Micron Technology. Sagar earned his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mumbai and earned his Masters from George Mason University, where he studied Information Systems and Software Engineering. Sagar is an occasional speaker at technology and leadership conferences as well as a startup advisor.
Headshot of Keynote Speaker Ritesh Jain

Ritesh is an Entrepreneurial Technology Leader and Board Advisor with two decades of global experience in Digital Technology, Business Transformation, and Operations with Fortune 500 companies such as HSBC, VISA, and Maersk, to name a few. Most recently he was building an enabling function to build the bank of the future at HSBC. Ritesh is a visiting lecturer, regular speaker, author, Diversity and Inclusion Advocate, member of the G20 initiative for financial inclusion, and mentor to the UK Parliament Digital Service and various start-ups. He is also an Advisor to Harvard Business Review (HBR), payment regulators, and government bodies for women empowerment and child rights protection, and is working on initiatives in social and financial inclusion along with Open Banking in the EU and Africa.

Ty Panagoplos has held very senior C-level roles at large global firms over the past 25 years, including JP Morgan, Lehman Brothers, Barclays, TD, and Santander. Ty has extensive global experience having led and built out teams in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, spanning many financial services business lines including both Retail and Capital Markets. He also has a detailed understanding of the regulatory environment and requirements in many global jurisdictions. Formally educated as an electrical engineer with extensive hands-on software development experience, Ty has a deep technical background, which is critical for making multi-million dollar architecture, design, and technology decisions, and for ensuring delivery of the most effective technology in support of the business. Ty has been responsible for technology vison and strategy, and has a strong track record of helping FinTech firms to align their strategy and capabilities to current needs and gaps in the market.
Ryan Quick headshot

Ryan Quick received degrees in English and Philosophy from Vanderbilt University and went on to study American Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School. His Lifelong hobby of working with computers provided a means to support himself through college and he has been a part of the Internet and Linux communities since the early 1990s. He has focused on distributed systems for the last 25 years, with special attention placed on the interaction between applications, operating systems, and the hardware and networks underlying them. He started his professional career consulting for high-throughput transactional platforms, security, and systems integration for health care, banking, and large campus computing environments.

Ryan holds patents for messaging middleware systems and is a pioneer in bridging High-Performance Computing technologies with enterprise best-practice infrastructure. His most recent work in leveraging HPC concepts for real-time analytics with his colleague Arno Kolster have garnered provisional patents, IDC HPC Innovation awards (SC12, SC14) and HPCWire Reader’s Choice awards.

Ryan is an expert at scale-out systems, UNIX kernel design, and profiling, and has been recognized for innovation in hardware and application design, as well as in messaging ontology and distributed event-driven systems. His current efforts bring machine learning, real-time streaming, set-selection, and digital signal processing technologies to bear on predictive analytics to provide self-healing for command and control systems. Always a systems integrator at heart, he is always looking for “cross-discipline” solutions to bring novel technical solutions to some of the toughest problems in the world today.

J Ram serves as the VP/Co-Founder and CISO at Concourse Labs, a company specializing in automating and managing cloud governance and posture for multi-cloud environments. Before joining Concourse Labs, J Ram held the position of Head of Cloud at Goldman Sachs, where he oversaw cloud for RISK and Pricing (secBD). During his tenure, he successfully streamlined operations, facilitating significant growth in the secDB cloud, which in turn enabled new business opportunities. In his earlier career as the CTO of Morgan Stanley Infrastructure, J Ram played a pivotal role in developing the Aurora Platform and Compute Grid. His innovations and automation efforts resulted in the creation of a cutting-edge compute grid, ushering in a new era of financial products. J Ram’s contributions have been instrumental in shaping the landscape of cloud technology and financial services.
Harvey Stein headshot

Harvey J. Stein is the Senior VP, Research Analytics and Methodology, Two Sigma Labs. He was previously head of the Quantitative Risk Analytics Group at Bloomberg LP, where he did research on credit risk modeling, market risk analysis, and portfolio optimization, and worked on the ‘Risk-Neutral Risk Measures’ project. Harvey’s experience and expertise include Numerical Analysis, Risk Management, Stochastic Processes, High-Performance Computing, Asset Pricing, Quantitative Finance, Parallel Programming, Numerical Methods, and Stochastic Analysis.

Ankit Manoj Vasa headshot

Ankit Manoj Vasa leads global initiatives to improve processes and infrastructure by aligning to the research and mission of his organization by collaborating with multiple teams and management to improve performance and scalability for existing applications by leveraging new technologies. Ankit Vasa’s interest in technology along with a penchant for management skills have enabled him to visualize complex real-world problems into smaller modules and thus develop and expand his analytical skills. Ankit Vasa’s hybrid background of technology and management have centered his belief in the power of technology to drive transformation in business.

Dino Vitale is the Director of Cloud Big Data Engineering, TD Securities.  He is an HPC professional with expertise in building shared services environments for multiple application architecture models (Grid computing, private Cloud – PAAS, SOA, high speed messaging, Hadoop/data warehouse) and operational support models. Managing an engineering team focusing on HPC/BI/Big data products on public cloud platforms.

Experienced with line-of-business Application Development teams leveraging micro-services, streaming architectures, creating next generation self-service Data Platforms for Data Scientists/Analysts for machine learning. Leading efforts on public multi-cloud for Data Archiving and HPC bursting.

Specialties include: parallel computing, building large scale grids, GPUs/CUDA, MPI, OpenMP, Processor architectures, Linux optimization, scale out storage, workload schedulers, server scavenging, infrastructure performance tuning, sizing of Hadoop environment, data caching over grid, operational automation for large-scale clusters (provisioning, elasticity, utility billing, monitoring…)

Steve Yatko

Steve Yatko has over 20+ years of experience in advanced enterprise IT systems and technology as a result of leading his own boutique consulting firm, Oktay Technology, as well as his software development firm, Renascence Development, and Credit Suisse. Over the past eight years, he’s lead Oktay Technology into multi-year strategic technology advisory partnerships with some of the most innovative and successful firms on Wall Street, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Liquidnet and Bridgewater Associates. Over the past year, he’s also lead Renascence Development into strategic partnerships with the development of modern informatics, AI and Machine Learning systems for firms on Wall Street and Health Care, including Legg Mason and Care Finders Total Care. Steve is an industry advisor to Starr Investment Holdings (SIH), and also a co-founder of DynamicOps, a Credit Suisse spinout acquired by VMware.

Previously, Steve was a Managing Director and Global Head of the IT Research & Development at Credit Suisse including over fourteen years of driving innovative technology into solutions that differentiated Credit Suisse’s Trading and Analytics technology platform. In this role, Steve was responsible for setting the direction of the Firm’s next-generation computing environment across all of its IT divisions. During his tenure at Credit Suisse, Steve also served as Head of Global Core Technologies and CTO of Mission Critical Systems, including the Firm’s World Class Global Equity Trading and Analytic system. Throughout his career, Steve has worked closely with serial Entrepreneurs, top Venture Capital firms around the world, and some of the world’s largest technology providers including being a selected member of several CTO Advisory boards such as Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, EMC, HP, IBM Research, Veritas, and Cisco.