2022 Speakers and Panelists

Jose L. Alvarez has over 20 years of experience in the Life Sciences, Healthcare, R&D, High Performance Computing, and IT Infrastructure disciplines. Before joining Cambridge Computer in 2015, Jose worked as a Principal Engineer, Healthcare, and Life Sciences World Wide lead at Seagate’s Cloud and Systems Solutions. Prior to his tenure at Seagate, Jose led DDN’s Healthcare and Life Science HPC practice as World Wide Director. Jose also led Dell’s Healthcare and Life Sciences research computing practice as a Business Development Manager. Jose has been a guest scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratories, where he collaborated with Exxon/Mobile conducting research in Molecular Imaging and Modeling. Jose holds degrees in Chemistry and Computer Sciences.

Lior Balan is Director of Sales and Cloud at Run:ai. His background is in Fintech, PE, and business strategy, and it is his passion to find technological edges that can bring competitive advantages to a company. In order to achieve these goals, Lior believes it is essential to align technological teams and top management with a company’s strategy and priorities.

Mike Bernhardt is one of the most recognized strategic marketing and communications professionals in the HPC-AI advanced computing arena. His experience covers three decades of engagements with companies of all sizes, from startup organizations to Fortune 50 firms. He is the founder and CEO of Team Libra, a strategic market relations and communications advisory group founded by Bernhardt in 2010. Team Libra offers a wide range of services, including strategic communications planning, spokesperson coaching, and end-to-end tactical execution of strategic plans. Team Libra supports customers at various points along their go-to-market journeys, from the ‘how to get started’ phase of launching a new business or entering a new market, to creating or refining an organization’s storytelling capability.

Jay Boisseau is an experienced, recognized leader and strategist in advanced computing technologies, with over 25 years of experience in building and leading computing programs, departments, and organizations. As the AI & HPC Technology Strategist at Dell Technologies, Jay evaluates new technologies and approaches for HPC and machine/deep learning, assesses customers’ workloads needs and plans, and helps design new solutions to increase customers’ innovation, productivity, and efficiency. His current primary focus areas are cloud-enabled HPC for simulation, data analytics (HPC on demand), contributing to the Omnia cluster software project, working with strategic HPC/AI customers, and developing strategies for new HPC/AI solutions in key emerging verticals. Additional projects include evaluations of several new AI & HPC technologies, assessing quantum computing prospects for HPC/AI, leading the Dell Technologies HPC Community, and some confidential (NDA required) projects.

Alex Challans is CEO of The Quantum Insider, the leading provider of news and market intelligence on the quantum technology industry. He previously worked as an Investment Director in a London-based private equity fund. Alex is passionate about all things quantum and is focused on how the quantum market can commercialize in a sustainable fashion.

Will is the Head of Quantum Software at Agnostiq, where he leads the design and implementation of Covalent. Will received his Ph.D in theoretical physics from Northeastern University under the supervision of Dmitri Krioukov. He subsequently worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Perimeter Institute in the quantum gravity group. He has published on a variety of topics, including lattice QCD, multiverse cosmology, causal set and spinfoam quantum gravity, discrete geometry, and machine learning.

Jeff Denworth is the VP of Products and Marketing and a co-founder of VAST Data. Jeff has over a decade of experience with big data and cloud storage technologies. Prior to VAST, Jeff managed at companies such as CTERA Networks, DataDirect Networks (DDN), and Cluster File Systems, where he oversaw marketing, business, and corporate development during times of rapid sales growth.

Earl J. Dodd is World Wide Technology’s Global HPC Business Practice Leader. He provides HPC/HPDA/Supercomputing strategy, technology enablement, business development, and ESG/Sustainability support to WWT’s global enterprise and government customers. Earl helps enterprises achieve desired ROI/ROC by leveraging HPC+AI technology, extreme data in motion, data center sustainability, and the cloud for secure ultra-scale architectures and collaboration environments. This effort drives the next generation of computationally-steered workflows in decision support environments for real-time situational awareness, institutional learning, and ESG compliance.

Jacob Farmer is the Founder and Chief Evangelist for Starfish Storage. He is a storage industry veteran with over 30 years of experience with backups, archives, large file systems, and research data management.

Marc Fisher is a part of the Lenovo High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence team focused on articulating the value that can be provided in these cutting edge solutions. Having been a part of the community for over a decade, Marc has a unique perspective and collaborate approach to solving end user problems. He has a passion for pushing the limits, while also providing sustainability. Marc is a native of the DC area who enjoys traveling, skiing and most fast passed, adventure seeking activities.

Bob Gaines is the AI machine-learning/deep-learning thought leader for North America. His specialty is Big Data / High-Performance Data Analytics, leveraging software-optimized heterogeneous computing environments to simplify, automate, and accelerate a client’s vision of an integrated data pipeline to improve the degree of confidence and predictability of models, while reducing the time and cost for model development. Bob has a deep history in information architecture, analytics, and AI. He has led the financial services solutions practice for many industry leaders, including Oracle, DDN, Seagate, Cray, and IBM, before joining Intel’s Accelerated Computing & Graphics Group (AXG) in 2022. Bob has spent the last 12 years helping financial firms build smarter algorithmic trading models leveraging HPC and AI technologies to address modeling in quantitative research, algo-trading strategy development, risk, compliance, payments, credit, and P&C insurance. He has an MBA (finance + computer science) from Loyola University and an advanced data science certificate from MIT School of Engineering.

Arti Garg is Chief Strategist for the AI Solutions business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. As part of her role, she oversees HPE’s advanced AI technology programs, including the AI Advance start-up program and advanced AI processor partnerships. Over her career, Arti has held several data science leadership roles in the computing and industrial sectors. In the past, she has also worked in the U.S. government at the White House Budget Office and as a legislative adviser in the U.S. Congress. Arti holds a PhD in Physics and an MS in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering.

Traci Gusher brings extensive experience leading programs focused on artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, and emerging technologies. She is responsible for leading data and analytics teams in the Americas across Consulting & Strategy and Transactions, focused on building innovative approaches and platforms to enable digital transformation journeys. Traci teams with leaders to build sustainable data, analytics, and artificial intelligence capabilities, focusing on moving beyond experimentation and prototyping. She helps organizations build processes, teams, and technology that follow modern delivery approaches for production-scale analytics and AI, and product-centered data strategies with a relentless focus on generating tangible business benefits.

Robert Hormuth is Corporate Vice President, Architecture and Strategy of the Data Center Solutions Group at AMD. Robert has 33+ years in the computer industry, joining AMD in 2020 after 13 years with Dell, 8 years with Intel, and 11 years at National Instruments. At AMD Robert is charged with creating a long-term system-level vision for DSG and identifying the technical requirements/implications to the DSG portfolio. Robert’s experience includes IO peripheral designs, x86 system design, BIOS, firmware, application software, and FPGA/ASIC design. Robert has a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and currently holds 30 patents.

headshot of Eric Hunter

Eric is a global futurist, speaker, author, and advisory member to multiple boards across the globe. He is the Chief Technology Innovation Officer with Bradford & Barthel, LLP. Eric leads the Innovation Futures Division, an industry-agnostic think tank focusing on future disruptions: how to best leverage the future of technology and human behavior in affecting change. An international keynote speaker, Eric speaks and conducts masterclasses on what is coming next: how to recognize, create, and leverage new business models in leading organizational change through the ongoing reality of global business model disruption. In this vein, Eric has worked with organizations such as Google, IBM, Shapoorji Pallonji Group in India, Polytechnic University in Hong Kong, KM Asia, KM Europe, KM Congress in India, Social Now in Portugal, Global Legal Forum in The Hague, TEDx and many more. Eric expanded his focus within the future of technology and human behavior in his TEDx: “The Future of Human Behavior.” His latest book, Travels in Time, published in May of 2022.

whurley is founder and CEO of Strangeworks, a quantum computing startup that makes the power of quantum computing easily accessible and available to all. He is an Eisenhower Fellow, Innovator in Residence for the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Founder of the Quantum Computing Standards Workgroup at the IEEE, the first Ambassador to CERN and Society, a regular contributor to TechCrunch on the topic of Quantum Computing, and the co-author of “Quantum Computing For Babies.”

As Chief Commercial Officer at Cornelis Networks, Matt Jacobs is responsible for all go-to-market elements of the company, including revenue generation, partnerships, marketing, and corporate strategy. Prior to joining Cornelis Networks, Matt was Chief Strategy Officer for Penguin Computing, where he was responsible for driving the company’s future direction, corporate development, and acquisitions. He also held executive roles in sales, marketing, and product development. Matt architected Penguin’s transition to the HPC market, developed the company’s cloud strategy, and more recently led transformation efforts in the areas of solutions, software infrastructure, and as-a-service products. A 22-year veteran of the technical computing market, Matt has deep expertise in HPC and AI platforms, storage, interconnects, software infrastructure, workloads, cloud, and hybrid consumption models. Matt holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Georgia.

Kurt Kuckein is Vice President of marketing for DDN, based in Silicon Valley, with responsibilities for Product and Corporate Marketing. A storage industry veteran with a particular focus on the needs of advanced computing applications, Kurt joined DDN in 2015 and has held roles in product management and marketing. Prior to joining DDN, he was a product manager for backup and recovery solutions at EMC in the Data Protection Division, ran marketing and product management for the Storage Solutions Group at Silicon Graphics (SGI), and way back when, ran special IT projects for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Monica Livingston leads AI and Graphics technical enablement at Intel Corporation, driving implementation and deployment of AI solutions for end customers, as well enabling workloads for data center graphics. She has previously held roles in large account management, field applications engineering, and hardware design. Monica is passionate about tech, accessible STEM education, and career development. She earned a Masters of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida and an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Sam Mugul headshot

Sam Mugel, PhD is an expert in quantum computing and quantum machine learning. His PhD was jointly awarded by ICFO (Spain) and the University of Southampton (UK). Sam was formerly a computational physicist at Cortirio (UK), Technical Director at The Quantum Revolution Fund, and Founder and CTO at Groundstate Consulting. He is an advisor for the McKinsey Tech Council and the Forbes Tech Council, and a Mentor at the Creative Destruction Lab.

A seasoned IT executive, Matt Demas has built federal, healthcare, and education-based vertical solutions at companies like Dell, where he was a Senior Solutions Architect, and Pivot 3, where he led regional sales. Immediately prior to joining GigaIO, Matt served as Field CTO at Liqid. He spent seven years in IT in the US Air Force, and has a deep expertise in Federal IT procurement through his subsequent work as a Senior Consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton, and the partnerships he has built helping systems integrators win Federal contracts. Matt holds a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from American InterContinental University, and an MBA from Concordia University Austin.

headshot of Dan Olds

Dan Olds is a veteran of the High Performance Computing industry with more than 25 years of experience in the high-end server market and as an industry analyst. As Intersect360 Research’s Chief Research Officer, Dan leads the demand side and supplier-driven data analysis practice for Intersect360 Research’s forward-looking market intelligence subscription service. In addition, he supports a range of client-specific services, including custom research studies and strategic consulting. An authority on technology trends and customer sentiment, Dan is a frequently quoted expert in industry and business publications.

As Vice President of Commercial Sales, Tony Parkinson is responsible for sales leadership and customer engagement for Penguin Computing’s North America Commercial Solution Sales organization. This includes supporting customers across the technology areas of HPC, AI, and Cloud. Tony has over 15 years of experience in the HPC and enterprise solutions space. Prior to joining Penguin Computing, Tony was at Dell EMC and served as the Vice President, NA Enterprise Solutions and Alliances, covering Big Data, Cloud, HPC, and key Alliance partnerships for North America. He has held senior international management roles in sales, marketing, IT, and general management in Asia Pacific and EMEA. Tony earned a Bachelor of Business with a Marketing Major from the University of Technology in Sydney.

Thierry Pellegrino is a SVP at SGH (SMART Global Holdings) and President of its Intelligent Platform Solutions business, represented by the Penguin Solutions brand. He joined SGH from Dell Technologies, where he served as the executive in charge of Datacentric Workloads and Solutions, and GM of the HPC and AI business. Throughout his tenure with Dell and prior to his current role, he held several senior leadership positions, including heading the business strategy for the Server business, and leading Dell’s OEM Engineering organization to its role leading the Modular Infrastructure for Dell’s blades business. Thierry also serves on the board of GRC (Green Revolution Cooling), a leader in immersion cooling for data center equipment. Thierry earned a master’s degree in engineering at Ecole Centrale de Lyon, and a master’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering at Penn State.

Marco Pistoia, PhD, is Managing Director, Distinguished Engineer, and Head of JPMorgan Chase’s Global Technology Applied Research. He joined JPMorgan Chase in January 2020. Formerly, he was a Senior Manager, Distinguished Research Staff Member and Master Inventor at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, where he managed an international team of researchers responsible for Quantum Computing Algorithms and Applications. Marco is the inventor of over 250 patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and over 300 patent-pending applications. He is also the author of over 400 scholarly papers published in international journals and conferences.

headshot of Aparna Prabhakar

Aparna Prabhakar is a transformational senior business executive and change catalyst with deep experience in building and scaling strategies for long-term success. Currently, she is a vice president at IBM where she leads the IBM Quantum Partner Ecosystem and Alliances, driving adoption, business development and enablement of the world’s largest quantum computing network. Previously, Aparna was an executive leader at IBM corporate strategy, where she led and developed the strategic outlook and recommendations at the C-Suite level for AI, Quantum Computing, High Performance Computing systems, and Cloud Computing. Aparna was inducted into IBM’s Industry Academy in 2021 as one of the top 300 IBM industry leaders worldwide, and has multiple patents and publications. She earned an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and an MS from Louisiana State University.

Ryan Quick headshot

Ryan Quick designs and builds scalable architectures for special-purpose computing in blockchain and web3, finance, academia, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and government. As a software architect with Data Vortex, he accents the revolutionary characteristics of Data Vortex for some of the most difficult problems in distributed computing, workload orchestration, and web3 safety and security. Ryan is an expert at scale-out systems, and has been recognized for innovation in hardware and application design, messaging, and event-driven systems. He has designed high performance platforms with Data Vortex, eBay, PayPal, Qualcomm, Ampere, HPE, Texas Instruments, IBM, the DoE, and others.

Managing Editor, QCwire, HPCwire

A previous winner of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award (which has been called “the Pulitzer Prize of the business media,”), John Russell leads HPCwire’s coverage of quantum computing and helped spearhead development of QCwire, Tabor Communications’ recently-launched monthly newsletter covering quantum information sciences. John has broad science and business journalism expertise with extensive knowledge of the biopharmaceutical and advanced IT industries. He was formerly a founding executive editor for Bio-IT World, which focused on the intersection of advanced computing technology and life sciences.

CXL Consortium Member and Senior Product Manager & Software Architect, MemVerge

Steve Scargall is responsible for leading product management for CXL Fabric Management software at MemVerge. Steve recently joined MemVerge from Intel, where he was a member of the CXL Consortium and architected innovative memory tiering solutions on CXL for Linux, Kubernetes, and Virtualized Environments (KVM and VMWare ESXi). Responsible for influencing and enabling end-user customers, ISVs, OEMs, and partners to adopt Intel products and technologies, Steve played a pivotal role in accelerating Intel adoption by Financial Services Industry (FSI) end users by collaborating with customers and the ecosystem to architect and validate solutions that solve complex business problems.

headshot of Bob Sorenson

Bob Sorensen is Hyperion Research’s Chief Analyst for Quantum Computing. Bob’s areas of expertise include analysis of advanced computing hardware, architectures, interconnects, and performance metrics for both classical and quantum systems. Before joining Hyperion Research, Bob worked 30+ years for the U.S. Federal Government as a Senior Science and Technology analyst covering global advanced computing developments to support senior-level U.S. policy makers, including those in the White House, Department of Defense, and Treasury. Bob has a BSEE from the University of Rochester and a MSCS from George Washington University. He strongly prefers C to Python.

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.

Dino Vitale headshot

Dino Vitale is a Distinguished Engineer on the Infrastructure Technology Solutions Cloud Engineering team at TD Bank Group. Dino’s responsibilities include cloud strategy, architecture, and migration, along with the implementation of various data and analytical platform services, with a significant focus on CD/CI automation, data migration, patterns, and security controls for services such as data lakes, databases, data warehouses, and machine learning platforms. Prior to TD, Dino worked at various financial institutions, where he migrated large-scale HPC and data processing environments to the cloud and introduced new technologies like NoSQL, large-scale distributed caching, Kafka middleware, and operational automation. Dino has an extensive background in the HPC space, with expertise in building shared services environments (grid computing, messaging middleware, Hadoop) and operational support models.

Heather West, PhD, is a research manager within IDC’s Enterprise Infrastructure Practice. In this role, she leads IDC’s research on quantum computing. Other areas of Heather’s research coverage include AI and enterprise infrastructure workloads. Heather also manages primary research projects focused on end-user purchasing plans for infrastructure products and adoption of technologies shaping the infrastructure market.

Jeff Whitaker, former VP of Product at Excelero and a founding member of the cloud team at NetApp, leads the Panasas Marketing and Product Management teams. He is responsible for making inroads into new markets and expanding Panasas’ revenue growth. Jeff is a veteran technology leader with more than 25 years’ experience developing innovative storage, semiconductor, and networking solutions. For over a decade, he designed products that helped customers around the world transition their complex IT environments to run on the top three public cloud providers. Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from California State University at Chico.

headshot of Alex Woodie

Alex Woodie has written about IT as a technology journalist for more than a decade. He brings extensive experience from the IBM midrange marketplace, including topics such as servers, ERP applications, programming, databases, security, high availability, storage, business intelligence, cloud, and mobile enablement.

Steve Yatko

Steve Yatko has 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 led 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 led Renascence Development into strategic partnerships with the development of modern informatics, AI, and Machine Learning systems for firms on Wall Street.

Charlie Yu is Director of Systems Engineering for Big Memory software pioneer MemVerge. Charlie and his team are responsible for working with customers on advanced Big Memory system design and deployment in the cloud and on CXL interconnects. Prior to joining MemVerge, Charlie was Director of Systems Engineering at container orchestration leader Diamanti, and a systems engineer at all-flash array leader Pure Storage. Charlie has a BSEE from Rutgers.

head shot of Alexie Zhukov

Alexei Zhukov is an industry veteran with a diverse range of experience, always maintaining focus on the thriving edge of technology innovation. His career has spanned many roles, including delivery head and solution/enterprise architect, always emphasizing data and analytical solutions in the Financial and Business Information industries. Today Alexei leads the Data Science and AI practice at EPAM, helping to define AI strategy for EPAM and numerous EPAM clients across business verticals and locations. Alexei’s group has delivered 100+ AI-enabled solutions to production, bringing to life Advanced Analytics, Optimization and Automation, Computer Vision, NLP, privacy, security, compliance, and MLOps solutions.