January 13 , 2005

Nine SCD staff receive awards for exceptional achievement

SCD Special Recognition Awards presented at annual ceremony

Each year, the Scientific Computing Division (SCD) conducts an awards ceremony to recognize staff whose exceptional achievements further SCD's mission. SCD, part of NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL), presents these awards at the end of the year. Nine SCD Special Recognition Awards were presented for 2005.

Aaron Andersen and Gary New were recognized for their outstanding stewardship of the NCAR/CISL/SCD Data Center. This award honors Aaron and Gary for their work over the past two plus years carrying out the development of studies, risk analysis assessments, and architectural designs for the new data center that has positioned NCAR to provide leadership in the Petascale Collaboratory for Geosciences. This unique body of work is over and above what might by any reasonable means be expected of these two individuals in the conduct of their normal duties. It was initiated by them in concern for the future wellness of the NCAR computational facilities. It also acknowledges the professional engineering leadership they have provided to the two major refurbishment projects designed to extend the useful life of the current data center, namely the standby generator installation and the chiller refurbishment project.

Irfan Elahi received an award for fulfilling the responsibility of bringing five new supercomputer clusters into production and decommissioning two others. He played a leadership role in all of these deployments, and he served as the technical lead for the Aspen Systems cluster coral and IBM cluster bluevista procurements, installations, acceptance tests, and releases to production use. Throughout, he provided leadership, innovation, and professional project management disciplines for all parties involved.

Siddhartha Ghosh was recognized for his extraordinary efforts in making things better in the scientific computing facility. He developed a Message Passing Interface (MPI) wrapper for the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM T85) and demonstrated that CAM T85 would run favorably with it. He developed a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script for Consulting Services weekly progress reports. He retooled the libncaru distribution package for an existing set of executables and one binary library. He assisted in bringing lightning from a little-used computer showing 15-20% daily utilization to a full production machine showing 70-80% utilization daily. And he led the way on compiler support for SCD Linux clusters, including installing the compilers, patching them, and developing a document that shows the rest of the Consulting Services Team how to do this. His contributions demonstrate his prodigious application of software engineering to the needs of the computing center.

Rick Grubin received an award for his dedication, initiative, and perseverance during his porting, testing, and installation of software on the Linux cluster systems lightning, sparky, pegagus, and coral. Rick was instrumental in bringing these to production mode with a full complement of analysis and visualization applications and libraries, some with multiple versions. He developed some scripts to help automate this whole process, and worked with SCD's Supercomputing Systems Group and the SCD Consulting Services Group to help standardize directory structures and files for keeping track of all these versions.

BJ Heller was recognized for developing the Web application for registering participants in the Computing in the Atmospheric Sciences workshop. For the first time, conference registrations could be completed at the site of the event. This improved efficiency for the onsite registrations and up-to-date reports. In addition to her regular job duties, BJ performed a service to both CISL and the UCAR Finance Office by establishing a reusable, online, Web-based registration process that includes credit card payments. These Web-based processes are now available to be used for future workshops.

Linda LaBrie and Dorothy Bustamante received awards for their outstanding work to sell back SCD's stock of 9840 media through a bid process. This has resulted in significant savings as the return from the sale of SCD's used media has resulted in a return of $158,541.00 this year. Linda's and Dorothy's efforts have resulted in significant cost savings, because only a small percentage of the initial value has been recouped in the past, and sometimes SCD had to pay to have old media recycled.

Juli Rew was recognized for her development of a Web monitor for the SCD Acceptance Test Period system and a weekly reporting tool for SCD's Consulting Services Group. Both of her contributions are now being used regularly, and they will continue to save money and time by increasing the efficiency of the organization. Juli's work demonstrates leadership, as she developed both products on her own initiative. The work arose from her ideas about how to improve Acceptance Test Period monitoring and Consulting Services weekly reports.