2023 Speakers and Panelists

Kiran Agrahara is a Cloud Solutions Architect at Intel. He has over two decades of Data Center Technologies experience and is an SME in Data Storage and Virtualization Solutions. Before joining Intel, Kiran spent the last 10 years in several startups, building software defined storage products.
headshot for Alan Benjamin, GigaIO

Alan Benjamin is one of the visionaries behind GigaIO’s innovative solution. He was most recently COO of Pulse Electronics ($800M communication components and subsystem supplier) and previously, CEO of Excelsus Technologies. Earlier, Alan helped lead PDP, a true start-up, to a successful acquisition by a strategic buyer for $80M in year three. He started his career at Hewlett-Packard in Sales Support and quickly moved into management positions in Product Marketing and R&D. Alan graduated from Duke University with a BSEE in Electrical Engineering and attended Harvard Business School AMP program, as well as UCSD LAMP program.

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 of Vizias, a small consultancy with expertise in HPC, AI,  technology community building, and technology event support. Jay also serves as the executive director and founder of The Austin Forum on Technology & Society. Recent major work included serving as the HPC & AI Technology Strategist for Dell Technologies and leading and greatly expanding the global Dell HPC Community. Formerly, Jay created and led the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin and worked 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.

Douglas Eadline, PhD, began his career as Analytical Chemist with an interest in high performance computer methods. Starting with the first Beowulf “How-To” document, Doug has written hundreds of articles, white papers, and instructional documents covering many aspects of Linux HPC, Hadoop, and Data Analytics computing. Prior to launching and editing the popular ClusterMonkey.net website in 2005, he served as editor-in-chief for ClusterWorld Magazine and was senior HPC Editor for Linux Magazine. Doug is author of several books and instructional videos covering the practical aspects of HPC and scalable tools for data science.

headshot of Philip Farah

As VP Sales, Industries and Strategic Partnerships at IonQ, Philip Farah is responsible for developing IonQ’s strategic partnerships with a focus on revenue growth and on strengthening IonQ’s position at the center of the Quantum Computing Ecosystem. Prior to joining IonQ, Philip ran Services and Engineering Sales, Global Accounts for Worldwide Technology, a leading systems integrator and IT infrastructure value-added reseller. Philip started his career in the US as a consultant with McKinsey & Co, and has held several leadership roles at Gartner (Senior Managing Partner, Financial Services), Cisco Systems (head of Global FSI Innovation strategy practice), and Capital One Financial (head of Recoveries Analytics).

headshot for Mark Fischer

Marc Fisher is a Solution Specialist on Lenovo’s High Performance Computing and AI team. With a strong focus on complex problems at scale, Marc brings together the right resources to dig in deep and solve. Having been in this space for over a decade, he brings a wealth of knowledge on multiple facets that translates into direct value for his customers and partners. Marc lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and two children.

Headshot of Bob Fletcher

Bob Fletcher brings 20 years of new product sales and strategy experience from the Internet Backbone, Data Center, HPC, and AI markets to drive IonQ’s enterprise market development. Over the last eighteen months, he’s worked with some of the largest early adopters of quantum computing to drive machine learning, chemistry, and object detection value.

David Flynn is a recognized leader in IT innovation who has been architecting disruptive computing platforms since his early work in supercomputing and Linux systems. David pioneered the use of flash for enterprise application acceleration as founder and former CEO of Fusion-io, which was acquired by SanDisk in 2014. Previously, David served as Chief Architect at Linux Networx, where he was instrumental in the creation of the OpenFabrics stack and designed several of the world’s largest supercomputers leveraging Linux clustering, InfiniBand, and RDMA-based technologies. David has also served as Project BlackDog’s Chief Scientist and Vice President of Engineering and held positions at Network Computer Inc. and Liberate Technologies, a spin-off of Oracle Corporation that developed thin-client solutions. David holds more than 100 patents in areas across web browser technologies, mobile device management, network switching, and protocols to distributed storage systems.

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 Rob Glanzman

Rob Glanzman is a 25+ year veteran of the cloud and data industries, and currently leads Pure Storage’s Financial Services vertical worldwide. Previously at VMware, Rob was a founder of VxRail, the world’s leading hyper-converged Infrastructure Appliance and multi-billion-dollar run rate business for Dell | EMC. He also co-founded and led VMware’s Global Innovation Incubator xLabs in the Office of the CTO. Prior to that Rob managed the VMware / EMC relationship for all Global Financial Accounts and architected some of the largest storage and virtualized environments in existence at the time. Rob also worked in various engineering and executive positions at AT&T and Morgan Stanley. He currently leads Pure’s Financial Services Vertical world-wide.

Wyatt Gorman, HPC Solutions Manager at Google

Wyatt Gorman is the Solutions Manager for High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure at Google Cloud. Wyatt focuses on enabling our customers’ toughest workloads and requirements on Google Cloud, along with our engineers, architects, and partners. Wyatt’s background is in distributed computing and HPC. He was an HPC & ML Specialist at Google Cloud before becoming a Solutions Manager. Before joining Google, Wyatt held roles at Seagate and Xyratex as Senior Systems Engineer. Wyatt’s first exposure to HPC was helping run the HPC lab while a student at the State University of New York at Geneseo.

Traci brings extensive experience in 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.

Travis Humble is director of the US Department of Energy’s Quantum Science Center, a Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and director of the lab’s Quantum Computing Institute. Travis leads the development of quantum technologies and infrastructure to impact the DOE mission. Travis is also editor-in-chief for ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing and co-chair of the IEEE Quantum Initiative. Travis holds a joint faculty appointment with the University of Tennessee Bredesen Center to work with students in developing energy-efficient computing solutions.

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Nick Ihli is the Director of Solutions Engineering and Cloud at SchedMD. He is a 16-year veteran of the HPC scheduling space. In that time, he’s helped hundreds of customers from all industries and workloads find ways to optimize their HPC scheduling environment. At SchedMD, Nick manages the solutions engineering organization, consulting with customers as they migrate to Slurm from other schedulers or to achieve more from their current Slurm deployment. Nick also spent some time in public cloud computing and currently spearheads Slurm’s cloud projects.

As Chief Commercial Officer at Cornelis Networks, Matt 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, where he 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 and alternative delivery and consumption models. Matt holds a BA in Spanish Linguistics and Literature from the University of Georgia.

Thomas Jorgensen heads up the AI/ML efforts at Supermicro’s Technology Enablement team. Before joining Supermicro, Thomas was VP Operations at Reniac, an Intel Capital-funded Database Acceleration company that used FPGAs and GPUs for hardware acceleration of NoSQL Databases. Prior to Reniac, Thomas was co-founder of Napatech and grew the company from garage to IPO. Napatech is the world’s leading provider of programmable Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) used for Data Processing Unit (DPU) and Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) services in telecom, cloud, enterprise, cybersecurity, and financial applications. Thomas holds several patents in Network Packet Processing and Packet Capture.

Troy Kaster is Vice President of Generative AI at Penguin Solutions. He has sold and delivered some of the largest AI factories in the world, with almost 50,000 GPUs under management. Troy prides himself on his ability to apply technology to solve a wide array of customer problems, leveraging AI/ML solutions to solve real-word problems and provide business value at scale. Prior to joining Penguin, Troy enjoyed success at Motorola, Emerson Network Power, Artesyn Embedded Technologies, and SMART Embedded Computing. His broad background includes positions in product management, sales, partner management, go-to-market strategy, and professional services. Troy is also a 5TONIC steering committee member and has collaborated with companies like Telefonica, Intel, and Ericsson to accelerate 5G technology adoption. A graduate of Algonquin College, Troy resides in Gilbert, Arizona with his family.

Frank Liu is the Head of AI & ML at Zilliz, where he serves as a maintainer for the Towhee open-source project. Prior to Zilliz, Frank co-founded Orion Innovations, an ML-powered indoor positioning startup and worked as an ML engineer at Yahoo. His passion for ML extends beyond the workplace; in his free time, he trains ML models and experiments with unique architectures. Frank holds MS and BS degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

headshot of Brian Mitchell

Brian Mitchell helps creatives make film, episodic, and advertising content — with speed, scale, and simplicity — at major studios, broadcasters, and distributors. As part of WEKA’s Media & Entertainment practice, Brian has architected several shared media systems for high-performance workflows (Color, VFX, and Playout). Some of Brian’s publicly-referenceable customers include Untold Studios, Preymaker, Outpost VFX, Parliament,  Carbon, and TRAFIK.

headshot for Doug Norton

Doug Norton is the CMO for Inspire Semiconductor, an Austin-based startup leveraging the open RISC-V CPU instruction set architecture (ISA). He began his career in product development at IBM and moved into the sales and marketing organization to expand IBM’s reach into engineering/scientific markets. He then went on to various senior leadership positions at Cadence Design Systems and early stage companies such as CoWare, Newisys, Virtana, and Nimbix. Doug is also President of the Society of HPC Professionals, serves on multiple RISC-V International committees, and is a Mentor at the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) at The University of Texas. Doug earned a BS in Electrical Engineering cum laude from Missouri University of Science & Technology.

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.

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.

Christopher Parisien is a Senior Manager of Applied Research at NVIDIA, leading the development of NeMo Guardrails, a toolkit for safety and security in Large Language Models. Chris holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Toronto, where he used AI models to explain the strange ways that children learn language. During his time in industry, Chris helped build the first generation of mainstream chatbots, developed systems to understand medical records, and served as Chief Technology Officer at NexJ Health, a patient-centered health platform. His current focus at NVIDIA is to bring trustworthy language models to large enterprises.

Ricardo has 12+ years of experience working with large financial services customers to bring business value to data teams in the cloud. He has designed and consulted on solutions architecture with hundreds of customers in sub-industries from Capital Markets to Banking and Wealth Management. His previous experience was at FINRA, where he moved mission-critical workloads from on-prem data warehouses to the cloud and established a machine learning practice for financial fraud.

headshot of Molly Presley, SVP, Marketing, Inspire

Molly brings over 15 years of product and growth marketing leadership experience to the Hammerspace team. Molly has led the marketing organization and strategy at fast growth innovators such as Pantheon Platform, Qumulo, Quantum Corporation, DataDirect Networks (DDN), and SpectraLogic. In these companies she was responsible for the go-to-market strategy for SaaS, hybrid cloud, and data center solutions across a range of data-intensive verticals and use cases. At Hammerspace, Molly leads the marketing organization and is responsible for inspiring data creators and data users to take full advantage of a truly global data environment.

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Ryan Quick

Ryan Quick has been 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 has consulted on high-throughput transactional platforms, security, and systems integration for banking, holds patents for messaging middleware systems, and is a pioneer in bridging HPC technologies with enterprise best-practice infrastructure. 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.

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.

Prabhu Ramamoorthy is the financial ecosystem partner manager at NVIDIA, where he focuses on Quant and AI acceleration for financial services. Previously, he was Head of Technology of a margin software firm, Dash Regtech, that catered to leading investment banks, and he served as a director at Big Four firm KPMG/EY, where he helped 100+ financial institutions over the last 10 years. Ramamoorthy holds an MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an undergraduate engineering degree from BITS-Pilani, one of the top engineering institutes in India. He is a CFA charterholder, financial risk manager, and chartered alternative investment analyst specializing in financial transformation use cases.

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.

President & Co-Founder, Parallel Works

Matthew Shaxted serves as President of Parallel Works and plays a significant role in business

development and management. He is fluent with engineering tools for computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, optimization, and visualization, and is the primary developer of the Parallel Works infrastructure and its user interface.

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 plus 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.

Headshot of Zayd Sukhun

Zayd Sukhun has over 17 years of experience working with Tier 1 organizations to improve their compliance efficiency and effectiveness using various technologies. Zayd has spent his career focused on Risk and Compliance in KYC, fraud, and money laundering, and has been pivotal in managing global transformation projects across a wide variety of compliance areas. Zayd began his career with Arab Bank, managing an AML transformation project that spanned 30 countries across five continents, with a wide variety of regulatory and bank requirements. He has since held several leadership positions in compliance transformation, working with several financial institutions to transform their AML, sanctions, and RegTech programmes. Prior to Joining Quantexa, Zayd was the Sanctions Technology Manager at Brown Brothers Harriman.

Enrique Vargas is the Head of Quantum Sales in the Americas region for IBM Quantum. He has been with IBM Quantum since its inception, specializing in banking and financial services and working with some of the largest financial institutions in the industry. His team is responsible for establishing client relationships across all industries. Enrique’s prior roles include business development and intellectual property licensing for IBM Research in areas such as semiconductor process and electronic packaging / heterogenous integration. He has also held consulting and leadership roles with IBM Consulting and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Enrique has an undergraduate degree in computer science from Fordham University and a law degree from New York Law School. He is also a co-inventor on a number of IBM patents and is an IBM Research Division Award Recipient.
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Dino Vitale is a Distinguished Engineer in the Cloud Engineering group of TD Bank Group, leading the adoption of ML and AI across the enterprise. He is currently focusing on enabling various ML/AI cloud-based services and capabilities, including Generative AI, AI/ML ops, model risk governance/compliance, data engineering/pipelines, and helping applications teams adopt AI services (speech, language, translation). In previous roles, Dino helped revolutionize the adoption of multi-tenant HPC compute grids at various large financial services and designed/built large-scale shared compute environments and automation that supported risk management and analytics workloads. Dino has extensive architecture experience working with a wide range of technologies in designing/implementing data lakes, micro-services, HPC clusters, event streaming, data platforms, and implementing automation tooling for operational scalability and dev/sec ops.

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.

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. Alex resides in the San Diego area.
headshot of Bernie Wu, Memverge

Bernie is VP of Business Development for MemVerge. He has 25+ years of experience as a senior executive for data center hardware and software infrastructure companies, including Conner/Seagate, Cheyenne Software, Trend Micro, FalconStor, Levyx, and MetalSoft. He is also on the Board of Directors for Cirrus Data Solutions. Bernie has a BS/MS in Engineering from UC Berkeley and an MBA from UCLA.

Craig Yamasaki is the Senior Director of Product Management at Supermicro and the former Director of Product Management of HPC and AI: HW, SW, Storage, Solutions at HPE. He has a broad background, including field services, server/system firmware development, ASIC design and simulation, system and solution level program management, enterprise product management, and most recently, product management and product marketing for some of the most technical HPC hardware, HPC IaaS, and HPC software in the marketplace.
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