Here are a few of the many talented ORNL employees behind the construction and operation of Frontier.
Denise Hoomes
Project Controls Lead
Denise Hoomes has always enjoyed puzzles. Today, Hoomes works on puzzles related to the nation’s first exascale supercomputer, leading the project controls specialists working on the Frontier supercomputer project. In her role, she pieces together information about schedule, scope and budget for the fastest supercomputer in the world.
“Oftentimes, there are a multitude of ways to solve a problem,” Hoomes said. “When we get the project controls team and the risk team and the technical leads together, we can bounce ideas off one another.”
Rick Griffin
Electrical Engineer
Charged with helping install over 15 systems at ORNL, Rick Griffin is highly experienced with getting power safely and reliably to the world’s most advanced supercomputers. His 30-megawatt masterpiece of electrical design is the OLCF’s Frontier system.
“Frontier is the culmination of 20 years of experience with supercomputer electrical infrastructure,” Griffin said. “With every new system, we learn something we can apply to the next system.”
Matt Ezell
HPC Systems Engineer
The system lead for Frontier, Matt Ezell, and his team met on a near-daily basis in coordination with the system vendor, HPE, to set up and optimize the system. Once all the hardware for Frontier had arrived in late 2021, his team began diligently working to ensure that Frontier will run smoothly and efficiently.
“At the end of the day, the project team is going to ask me specifically how things are going,” Ezell said. “But that doesn’t mean there’s not a whole host of people working on this. It takes an army — a village — to raise a system.”
Rafael Ferreira da Silva
Senior R&D Scientist, Scientific Workflows
Rafael Ferreira da Silva’s job is to make life simple — at least for the thousands of users who access the OLCF’s computing resources each year. That’s because Ferreira da Silva, a senior R&D scientist in the National Center for Computational Sciences, works on the design and deployment of scientific workflow applications and tools used on OLCF supercomputers, an important part of the user experience and success on Frontier.
“We are part of the Advanced Technologies Section at ORNL, so we are thinking about the future, and the future is Frontier,” Ferreira da Silva said. “The goal is trying to think ahead and not be deploying software as the users come on, but to have the software available already.”
John Gounley
Computational Scientist
Without scientific codes that scale, exascale would be little more than a number. That’s why computational scientists are working hard to ensure their codes run on exascale supercomputers as soon as these systems come online. John Gounley is working on codes for the CANcer Distributed Learning Environment project, which will provide deep learning methodologies to accelerate cancer research on exascale machines like Frontier.
“I work on the high-performance computing side of projects,” Gounley said. “I help take things we’ve done at small scales and get them up and running on big leadership computing systems like Frontier.”
Suzy Tichenor
Industrial Partnerships Director
From companies building the most powerful jet engines to ones developing new autonomous vehicles, Suzy Tichenor works to build trust relationships and help them apply for computing time on the OLCF’s systems, including Frontier.
“These companies are passionate about their work, and their results touch our lives in so many ways that we don’t realize. It’s very gratifying to help them gain access to our leadership systems and the expertise of our world-class researchers so they can meet their goals and dreams.”
