20th ECMWF workshop on high performance computing in meteorology

Katherine Evans (Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL))

Katherine J. Evans is the Division Director for the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She is also an active researcher in the areas of Earth system model (ESM) evaluation, developing and implementing scalable numerical algorithms to improve the efficiency and accuracy for multi-scale configurations of ESM, and analysis of large-scale persistent weather patterns in global atmospheric models. As part of her numerical methods research with ESM, she also makes connections to other applications, including ice sheets, more general fluid flow, disease propagation, and oncology.  Evans earned her PhD in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences with an emphasis in math from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2000 and led the Computational Earth Sciences group at ORNL for 6 years before her current role. She is the outgoing chair for the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematicians Mathematics of the Planet Earth activity group and serves as the 2024 co-chair for the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing conference.  

Torsten Hoefler (ETHZ)

Torsten Hoefler is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE.  Following a “Performance as a Science” vision, he combines mathematical models of architectures and applications to design optimized computing systems.  

Before joining ETH Zurich, he led the performance modeling and simulation efforts for the first sustained Petascale supercomputer, Blue Waters, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also a key contributor to the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard where he chaired the "Collective Operations and Topologies" working group.  Torsten won best paper awards at ACM/IEEE Supercomputing in 2010, 2013, 2014, 2019, 2022, and at other international conferences.  He has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles and authored chapters of the MPI-2.2 and MPI-3.0 standards.  For his work, Torsten received the IEEE CS Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award in 2022, the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2019, the ISC Jack Dongarra award, the IEEE TCSC Award of Excellence (MCR), ETH Zurich's Latsis Prize, the SIAM SIAG/Supercomputing Junior Scientist Prize, the IEEE TCSC Young Achievers in Scalable Computing Award, and the BenchCouncil Rising Star Award.  Following his Ph.D., he received the 2014 Young Alumni Award and the 2022 Distinguished Alumni Award of his alma mater, Indiana University. 

Torsten was elected to the first steering committee of ACM's SIGHPC in 2013 and he was re-elected for every term since then.  He was the first European to receive many of those honors; he also received both an ERC Starting and Consolidator grant.  His research interests revolve around the central topic of performance-centric system design and include scalable networks, parallel programming techniques, and performance modeling for large-scale simulations and artificial intelligence systems.  Additional information about Torsten can be found on his homepage at htor.inf.ethz.ch.

Estela Suarez (JSC)

Prof. Dr. Estela Suarez is head of the department “Novel System Architecture Design” at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, which she joined in 2010. Since 2022 she is also Professor of High Performance Computing at the University of Bonn. Her research focuses on HPC system architecture and codesign. As leader of the DEEP project series she has driven the development of the Modular Supercomputing Architecture, including hardware, software and application implementation and validation. Additionally, since 2018 she leads the codesign efforts within the European Processor Initiative. She holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and a Master degree in Astrophysics from the University Complutense of Madrid (Spain).