Outline

For episode 16, we interview the Research Associate Professor Karl W. Schulz. The episode starts with a discussion about High Performance Computing and how OpenHPC facilitate the managment of computing ressources. We then open the discussion towards open source tools, how they became so important for HPC and the their importance for open science. We also discussed about the inception of the OpenHPC project and its governance structure. We end the interview with our usual question in addition to a totally new one.

About OpenHPC:

OpenHPC is a collaborative, community effort that initiated from a desire to aggregate a number of common ingredients required to deploy and manage High Performance Computing (HPC) Linux clusters including provisioning tools, resource management, I/O clients, development and administration tools, and a variety of scientific libraries. Packages provided by OpenHPC have been pre-built with HPC integration in mind with a goal to provide re-usable building blocks for the HPC community. OpenHPC was formalized as a Linux Foundation collaborative project in June 2016 and has over 35 institutional members from academia, national labs, and industry.

About Karl W. Schulz:

Karl W. Schulz received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas (UT) in 1999. After completing a one-year post-doc, he transitioned to the commercial software industry working for the CD-Adapco group as a Senior Project Engineer to develop and support engineering software in the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). After several years in industry, Karl returned to UT in 2003, joining the research staff at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), a leading research center for advanced computational science, engineering and technology. During his 10-year tenure at TACC, Karl was actively engaged in HPC research, scientific curriculum development and teaching, technology evaluation and integration, and strategic initiatives serving on the Center’s leadership team. Karl also served as the Chief Software Architect for the PECOS Center within the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), a research group focusing on the development of next-generation software to support multi-physics simulations and uncertainty quantification.

In 2014, Karl joined the Data Center Group at Intel where he led the technical design and release of OpenHPC. He continues to remain actively engaged in the project and is currently serving as the overall Project Lead. In 2018, Karl returned to UT as a Research Associate Professor in an interdisciplinary role within ICES and the Women’s Health Department at the Dell Medical School.