Advisory Committees

CISL HPC Allocations Panel

CISL's advisory panel on high-performance computing and services is the CISL HPC Allocations Panel (CHAP). The CHAP's primary responsibility is to assess the merit of large computing requests for CISL supercomputers and related resources.

The panel accepts computing proposals from U.S. university researchers in the atmospheric and closely related sciences who are supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The CHAP recommends action with respect to a prospective user's request on the basis of the computational experimental design, computational effectiveness, and availability of computing resources.

CHAP members, most of whom are from the university community, are appointed to three-year terms by the CISL Director. Meetings are scheduled twice a year, usually in May and October. NSF's program coordinator for the NCAR and Facilities Section attends the semi-annual meetings and provides guidance from the NSF. 

Core-hours allocated and used by university projects, FY2013-2020

NCAR CISL Advisory Panel

The CISL Advisory panel, made up of leading technologists and scientists from the international community, provides input on the strategy, activities, and plans for CISL's overall portfolio of computing and data services, software development, research efforts, education and outreach activities, and collaborations.  

Convened in April 2016 and meets approximately every 18 months.

Panel members

Ilkay Altintas, San Diego Supercomputer Center

Ilkay Altintas is a Research Scientist and the Chief Data Science Officer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and a Founding Faculty Fellow of the Halicioglu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego. Her research objective is the development of methods, cyberinfrastructure and workflows for computational data science and its translation to practical applications. Since joining SDSC in 2001, she has been a principal investigator and a technical leader in a wide range of cross-disciplinary projects. Her work has been applied to many scientific and societal domains including bioinformatics, geoinformatics, high-energy physics, multi-scale biomedical science, smart cities, and smart manufacturing.

She is a co-initiator of the popular open-source Kepler Scientific Workflow System, the leader behind the now operational WIFIRE cyberinfrastructure for fire science, and the co-author of publications related to computational data science at the intersection of workflows, provenance, distributed computing, big data, reproducibility, and software modeling in many different application areas. She is also a popular MOOC instructor in the field of “big” data science, and reached out to more than a million learners across any populated continent. Her Ph.D. degree is from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands with an emphasis on provenance of workflow-driven collaborative science.

Venkatramani Balaji, Princeton University

V. Balaji has headed the Modeling Systems Group at Princeton University’s Cooperative Institute on Climate Sciences since 2003, and is Associate Faculty at the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE) and the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI). With a background in physics and climate science, he has also become an expert in the area of parallel computing and scientific infrastructure.

He is co-chair of the WGCM Infrastructure Panel (WIP), tasked with developing the scientific requirements for the global data infrastructure underlying the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), a pillar of the IPCC Assessment Reports of the state of the Earth’s climate. In 2017, he was among the first recipients of French President Macron’s Make Our Planet Great Again award marking the second anniversary of the Paris Climate Accord. He has served on scientific advisory panels for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, and is currently on the Science Review Group of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre. He is a sought-after speaker and lecturer and is committed to provide training in the use of climate models in developing nations, leading workshops for advanced students and researchers in South Africa and India. Dr. V. Balaji has an M.Sc in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a Ph.D in Physics from the Ohio State University.

Pete Beckman, Argonne National Lab

Pete Beckman is a recognized global expert in high-end computing systems. During the past 30 years, his research has been focused on software and architectures for large-scale parallel and distributed computing systems. For the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, Beckman leads the Argo project focused on low-level resource management for the operating system and runtime. He is the founder and leader of Argonne’s Waggle project for artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing.

Pete also co-directs the Northwestern University / Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering and leads the Sage project funded by the National Science Foundation to build a nationwide infrastructure for AI at the edge to support ecological research for the National Ecological Observatory Network and urban research for the Array of Things. Beckman also coordinates the collaborative technical research activities in extreme-scale computing between the US Department of Energy and Japan’s ministry of education, science, and technology and helps lead the BDEC (Big Data and Extreme Computing) series of international workshops. He also coordinates 5G wireless research activities at Argonne

Ladina Gilly, CSCS - Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

Ladina Gilly has worked for CSCS, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre since 2003. She has held the position of Associate Director for Business Services since 2008. In this position she is responsible for managing the CSCS facility, central IT services, reception and travel services. She represented CSCS interests in the construction project for the CSCS facility in Lugano Cornaredo that was completed in 2012 and provided CSCS a data centre with up to 20MW capacity and 2000sqm of office space.

Ladina is furthermore responsible for running public procurements in areas as diverse as construction (engineering and contractors), energy, IT services, cleaning. She manages a very diverse team of 16 people comprising facility managers, IT engineers and administrative staff. Her original training in hospitality management at the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne gave her a strong dedication and focus to customer satisfaction, both internal and external. She is passionate about growing people and providing her staff with the best possible framework conditions to allow them to perform to their optimum capacity to satisfy their customers. Her experience in managing the CSCS facility lead her to pursue a Master’s degree in Real Estate at the University of Zurich that she completed in 2016.

Mark Govett, NOAA

Mark leads the Advanced Technologies Division in NOAA’s Global Systems Laboratory. The division explores and applies new technologies and methodologies in computing, modeling, visualization, software engineering, and data access and delivery to advance NOAA’s earth system prediction and decision support capabilities. Technologies being explored include cloud computing, machine learning, high performance computing with CPU, GPU and ARM processors, informatics and visualization, and virtual services.

During his 30+ year career at NOAA, Mark led the high-performance computing group supporting model development including model parallelization, performance and scaling optimizations and development of tools to improve portability across CPU, GPU and hybrid systems. During this time, Mark developed two Fortran directive-based compilers: the Scalable Modeling System (SMS) for MPI based parallelization, and the F2C-ACC compiler for GPU programming. Over his career, Mark has built strong collaborations with research laboratories, and partnerships with leading HPC companies including Cray, IBM, NVIDIA, Intel, and others.

Ben Kirtman, University of Miami

Professor Benjamin Kirtman received his BS in Applied Mathematics from the University of California-San Diego in 1987, and his MS and Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Maryland-College Park. From 1993-2002, Dr. Kirtman was a research scientist with the Center for Ocean-Land- Atmosphere Studies and in 2002 joined the faculty of George Mason University as a tenured Associate Professor. In 2007, Dr. Kirtman moved to the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science as a professor of atmospheric science. Dr. Kirtman is the Director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS) and the Deputy Director of UM’s Institute for Data Science and computing.

In 2008, Professor Kirtman received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Maryland, and in 2018 the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Science Robert D. Cess Distinguished Lecture in Recognition of Outstanding Contributions to Atmospheric Sciences. In 2017-18 recipient of the UM Provost’s Award for Scholarly Activity and was awarded the Department of Atmospheric Sciences undergraduate teaching award in 2016, 2017 and 2018. In 2018, Dr. Kirtman was elected as a Fellow in the American Meteorological Society. Professor Kirtman is the author and/or co-author of over 150 peer reviewed papers focused on understanding and predicting climate variability on time scales from days to decades.

Bryan Lawrence (Chair), NCAS, University of Reading

Bryan Lawrence holds a Chair in Weather and Climate Computing at the University of Reading. He also leads on issues to do with models and data within the UK National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), is Project Scientist for the European Network for Earth Simulation (ENES), and has previously been Director of the UK Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA). Amongst other board roles, he is chair of the HPC Strategy Committee for the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), represents NERC in HPC procurement, and chairs the CEDA/JASMIN board (and currently leads the JASMIN supercomputing project).

He still imagines he is a climate scientist, but in practice never gets to do any hands-on climate science - beyond what is done by his graduate students and staff - as most of his time is now devoted to solving workflow issues in climate modelling (from HPC provision to software infrastructure and data systems). Bryan has been on the CISL advisory panel since 2016, and has been chair since 2019. More information: www.bnlawrence.net.

Nan Rosenbloom, NCAR/CGD

I am a project manager for CATALYST, an NCAR-DOE cooperative agreement. I am also a member of the Climate Change Research section within the Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory. In this role I provide scientific, technical and organizational support for multiple projects within the section. One of my primary technical roles is to implement and support scientific model simulations using the CESM model. These runs are conducted on platforms at multiple High Performance Compute centers including the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), as well as NCAR’s NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC).

Recent projects include orchestrating and conducting ensembles of high resolution (1⁄4 deg atm + (1 deg or 10th deg ocean)) CESM experiments for the International Laboratory for High-resolution Earth System Prediction (iHESP) project. Analysis of these high resolution simulations focuses on the effect of climate change on the frequency, duration and distribution of mid-latitude storm tracks and tropical cyclones. I also conduct low-resolution (1 deg) model ensembles with the CESM2 version of the model that focus on the effects of regionally forced ocean temperatures on climate variability and decadal predictability.

Isabella Weger, ECMWF

Isabella Weger is Deputy Director of Computing at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). ECMWF’s Computing Department is responsible for the strategy, design and 24/7 service provision of ECMWF’s mission-critical ICT infrastructure and services. State-of-the-art high-performance computing (HPC) facilities, storage solutions to support the world’s largest meteorological data archive and ICT solutions for the organization are core of the Department’s mission.

Before joining ECMWF in 2005, Isabella Weger was responsible for delivering high-performance computing and ICT services in scientific environments in Austria. She held various technical and management positions in IT Services at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), Austria, and was in charge of the university’s HPC infrastructure and services from 1988 onwards. From 2000 to 2005, she was Director of IT Services at the University of Graz. She joined ECMWF in 2005, where she currently holds the position of Deputy Director of Computing. Isabella holds a degree in Technical Mathematics from Graz University of Technology.

Tim Whitcomb, NRL MRY

Timothy Whitcomb is a Meteorologist (since 2008) and head of the Global Modeling Section (since 2014) at the Naval Research Laboratory Marine Meteorology Division in Monterey, CA. He completed a BS in Atmospheric Science from the University of Washington in 2003 and an MS in Atmospheric Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008. He supervises a team of civil servants and contractors performing research and development for the Navy’s global atmospheric model and is currently a principal investigator for projects under the Navy’s Earth System Prediction Capability program for developing coupled models for extended-range prediction.

His interests include the use of on-site and cloud-based high-performance computing for large modeling systems and workflow orchestration for weather prediction.

Alyson Wilson, North Carolina State University

Dr. Alyson Wilson is the Associate Vice Chancellor for National Security and Special Research Initiatives at North Carolina State University. She is also a professor in the Department of Statistics, Principal Investigator for the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, and Director of the NC State Data Science Initiative. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research interests include statistical reliability, Bayesian methods, and the application of statistics to problems in defense and national security.

Prior to joining NC State, Dr. Wilson was a research staff member at the IDA Science and Technology Policy (2011-2013); an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University (2008-2011); a technical staff member in the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she continues as a guest scientist; and a senior statistician and operations research analyst with Cowboy Programming Resources (1995-1999). In addition to numerous publications, Dr. Wilson has co-authored a book, Bayesian Reliability, and has co-edited two other books, Statistical Methods in Counterterrorism: Game Theory, Modeling, Syndromic Surveillance, and Biometric Authentication and Modern Statistical and Mathematical Methods in Reliability. Dr. Wilson received her Ph.D. in Statistics from Duke University.