CERN Board of Sponsors meeting
10-11 March 2016
Biographies of the Participants
Intel
Marie-Christine Sawley has been the Intel Director of the Exascale Lab in Paris since its
opening at the end of 2010. Prior to this, she worked for 3 years as senior scientist for the ETH
Zurich in the CMS computing team at CERN. Between 2003 and 2008, she was the director of the
CSCS, the Swiss national supercomputing centre, boosting significantly the development of the
center during this period. During her career at EPFL, between 1988 and 2003, she managed a
number of high profile HPC projects across a variety of disciplines, worked for the introduction
of new technology including grid computing. Marie-Christine holds a degree in Physics and a
PHD in Plasma Physics (1985) from EPFL. She spent two periods in Australia: for a postdoc at
Sydney Uni in 1987-88 and for a sabbatical in 1999. Marie-Christine is a Swiss and French
national.
Oracle
Cris Pedregal-Martin is a member of the technical staff at Oracle Database Development in
California. Prior to Oracle he worked for the Computer Science faculty of the University of New
Mexico, in Albuquerque.
SIEMENS – ETM
Thomas Hahn, born in 1960, is Chief Expert Software at Siemens AG since 2011. After studying
computer science at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen he joined in 1986 the company
and worked as a product developer in the field of industrial networks in Erlangen. 1993 moved
Thomas to Nuremberg, where he worked in product management for SIMATIC and as a project
manager responsible for the development of SIMATIC STEP7. From 1997 he worked for two
years as Head of Development in Traffic Control Systems in Munich. In 1999 he returned back to
Nuremberg, where he took over the management of software product development for
Industrial Automation Systems, which he held until 2011. In addition to his function as Chief
Expert software he took from 2011 to August 2013, the responsibility as head of the technology
field Business Analytics and Monitoring. Thomas is also a member or board member on various
committees, including the OPC Foundation, Big Data Value Association, Openlab CERN and
Platform Industrie 4.0.
Elisabeth Bakany studied computer science and then worked for 10 years at the International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).Ms. Bakany has been the Chief Technology Officer
at Integriertes Ressourcen Management AG (IRM) from 2004 until 2014.Since then Elisabeth
Bakany serves as Director WinCC Open Architecture at ETM Professional Control.
Rackspace
Mr. Giri Fox, nearly 25 years’ experience in infrastructure services, software development and
systems integration working across the Asia-Pacific region and Europe. Previously serving
successful tenures with cloud management company RightScale, also Apple and IBM in his native
Australia -- he has also worked with Cisco for several years including running the firm’s global
services relationship with BP in the UK. A vibrant evangelist for next-generation technologies,
Giri’s industry knowledge is diverse as a result of years working with customers in defence,
federal government, retail banking, utilities, media as well as oil and gas. After his first career
role as a database developer, Giri now fulfils a more strategic position but remains conversant
with both cloud technology and business-level language.
Brocade
Pierre Hardoin is the Account Manager for CERN at Brocade Switzerland. In this role, he is
responsibility for driving the overall sales revenue in the French part of Switzerland, while
increasing Brocade’s strategic value for specific products and solutions. He is also responsible
for maximizing awareness of, and interest in, Brocade networking solutions (IP and Fiber
Channel) among customers and partners. Pierre joined Brocade in December 2012 after
spending a few years at IBM and Oracle. Pierre has a Master of Science (Information Technology)
from Bond University, Australia and holds a degree in Bachelor of International Business from
the Institut Supérieur de Gestion in France.
Frederic Muffat-Es-Jacques
Cisco
Artur Barczyk
Januj Jain
Seagate
Dan Chester is responsible for worldwide cloud, software-defined and scale-out object storage
for Seagate's System business. With a background in electronic engineering, Dan is focused on
delivering leading-edge solutions with web-scale data storage and analytics requirements. He is
deeply involved in building technically and commercially optimized solutions with Petabyte to
Exabyte scale requirements. Dan has presented at a range of conferences (OpenStack Summit,
NG Telco, STAC Finance) on the economics, technologies, opportunities and threats for on and
off premise storage services with particular emphasis on "True TCO" comparison. Dan was CEO
of a Data Centre technology company before joining Seagate and holds several patents in the
field of infrastructure efficiency.
Comtrade
Goran Garevsky joined Comtrade Group in 1993, reaching the highest technical level in 2001.
From 2002 to 2004, he was CTO of StorScape (storage resource management startup). Following
that he has held various business development and management roles within Comtrade,
including his current role leading the Comtrade storage and data management division. Mr.
Garevski is a storage and data management industry executive with a unique combination of
deep market understanding and comprehensive technology insight. Over the last 20 years, he
has led and contributed to numerous breakthrough projects that have influenced the storage
industry. Mr. Garevski has extensive experience in data protection, virtualization and cloud
storage. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Ljubljana.
Gregor Molan , head of Comtrade research group and software engineer, has been involved in
active research work since 1994. He got his university diploma in mathematics in 1995. He
formally started working as software engineer at Hermes Softlab in 1996. In 1999 he obtained
his master degree in computer science.
In the beginning, his research work focused on the development of informatics’
background for the complex health case system for radiation workers [Project L3-8810,
Complex health care system for radiation workers, 1997-1998].
The majority of his research and development work after his master’s degree has
focused on the development of different models describing phenomena in medicine, social
science and technology and software quality assurance. With modeling of phenomena in nature
and human science, he has achieved proficiency and knowledge in development of algorithms
that are the most adequate to the nature of problems [Projects L3-1373 and L3-2122,
Development of expert AH-model, 1999-2002]. He has integrated graph theory, artificial
intelligence and data base management in the unique model useful in the occupational health
care system [Project L3-3449, Development of model for professional counseling for children
with health problems, 2001-2004]. As for European projects, he lead the partners’ side of
preparation for the ACTIVE project - Enabling the Knowledge Powered Enterprise for WP5 Knowledge Workspace.
Besides his pure research work, his interest was focused on the development of new
software products components [Project Venus, High Level Design, 1996], development of new
features [Disk Agent on UNIX platform for OmniBack 3.5, 2000], quality assurance and quality
control procedures [Internationalization for OmniBack 4.0/4.1 and Data Protector 5.0/5.1/5.5,
2001-2004]. The results of development in work are integrated in developed products of data
storage and management and they are not public. The results of his pure research work were
presented at congresses and scientific meetings.
Gregor Molan has integrated mathematic graph theory with data management [Data
query with graph theory and mathematical logic, 1999]. He has achieved the highest level of
proficiency in the quality assurance of software products, where he has developed effective
procedures and software product’s follow up.
Current development activities on the area of storage and data management are focused
on the storage deduplication for enterprise software products (design in development process)
and providing a testing architecture for testing an enterprise software product (size: 1000
engineer/years for development of one release of the product).
As an active researcher, he initiated the forming of the research group. As head of the
research group, he is responsible for assuring an overview of the company development
activities and support of new approaches and solutions. He has successfully incorporated basic
research results from mathematics (special focus in graph theory) in development process of
products. As a head of research group, he is also responsible for the creation of network and
connections with academic institutions.
His most important current research activities are (1) Research program: Comtrade CERN and (2) The European research network on types for programming and verification
(EUTYPES); he is a management committee member of this COST Action (CA15123).
Rade Radumilo
Yandex
Andrey Ustyuzhanin is the head of the interdisciplinary research group at Yandex and Yandex
School of Data Analysis (YSDA, https://yandexdataschool.com/). His group is involved in data
science-intensive research in fundamental science. YSDA is full member of LHCb, SHiP and
CRAYFIS collaborations. Interdisciplinary research success is highly sensitive to making
research as much transparent for peers from domains involved as possible. Andrey is co-founder
of
everware
(http://everware.xyz/)
and
Reproducible
Experiment
Platform
(https://github.com/yandex/rep) projects. Yandex runs two research projects within CERN
openly V framework: data storage optimization for LHCb and anomaly detection in LHCb
detector operations.
EMBL-EBI
Dr. Steven Newhouse is head of the Technical Services cluster (formed in 2013) that brings
together the systems, web production and web development teams, and leads the Technology
and Science Integration group which works to bring technology (both new innovations and
established services) from Europe and around the world to further develop and support the
Science taking place at EMBL-EBI.Between 2008-2013 Steven was involved in the leadership of
European Grid activities. Initially, as Technical Director of the EGEE-III project and then as
Project Director of the EGI-InSPIRE project and Director of EGI.eu, an organisation established in
2010 to coordinate the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) for the benefit of its stakeholders and
its diverse user communities.
Previously, he was a Program Manager in the High Performance Computing group in the
Windows Server division at Microsoft, USA. At Microsoft he managed access to the Windows
Computer Cluster Server product from non-Windows environments; primarily through the Open
Grid Forum's (OGF) High Performance Computing Basic Profile (HPCBP) specification. Between
2008 and 2012 he was a member and then chair of the OGF Board of Directors.Before starting at
Microsoft in 2007, he was Director of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK (OMIIUK), and on the management or supervisory boards of several major centres and projects within
the UK e-Science programme. Previously, he was the Sun Lecturer in e-Science in the
Department of Computing at Imperial College London and Technical Director of the London eScience Centre (LeSC), also based at Imperial, where he did his early research into the modelling
of underwater acoustics using high performance computing resources.
GSI
Dr. Mohammad Al-Turanny
CERN
Olof Bärring
Education
PhD Experimental Particle Physics, Lund University Sweden, 1992
MSc Engineering Physics, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden 1986
Brief professional carrier: joined as CERN staff in IT department in 1997 after a few years at
CERN as physics researcher affiliated to Lund University, Sweden. Main responsibilities, starting
with most recent:
Section leader for Facility Planning and Procurement, part of the Computing Facilities
group since 2010. The central activity for the section is to handle the technical side of all
procurements of servers and storage to the CERN IT data center, starting from the writing
tender specifications, planning the deliveries and handle the acceptance (burn-in) and
deployment for production operation.
Section leader for Fabric Services, part of the Fabric Infrastructure and Operations group
between 2005 – 2009. The section was responsible for deployment and operation of the
production service for grid, CPU intensive batch computing and bulk storage for the scientific
(physics) end-user community.
Project leader for the CERN HSM system (CASTOR) software developments, 2003 – 2005
Project leader of Work Package 4, Fabric Management, European Datagrid (EDG) project
2001-2003
System programmer, specialized in tape archives and storage systems (HPSS, CASTOR)
1997 – 2001
Tim Bell has been the group leader of the Operating System and Infrastructure services group in
the CERN IT department since 2010. After graduating in Computer Science from Cambridge
University in 1986, he worked for IBM as a Unix developer and consultant. In 1996, he joined
Deutsche Bank running the infrastructure team for Private Banking in Europe. In 2005, he joined
CERN working in a variety of roles including large scale high throughput computing, technology
and storage management. Tim has been a member of the OpenStack management board since
2012,elected by the members of the OpenStack foundation.
Predrag Buncic
Ian Bird
Federico Carminati works at CERN, (Geneva Switzerland) where he leads the detector
simulation activities. After his degree in 1981 he worked at Los Alamos and Caltech before
coming to CERN, where he was responsible for the CERN Program Library, the worldwide
standard High Energy Physics code in the 80’s and 90’s. From 1994 to 1998 he worked with
Nobel Prize Carlo Rubbia at the design of a novel accelerator-driven nuclear power device. From
1998 to 2012 he was Computing Coordinator of the ALICE experiment at LHC. In 2013 he
obtained his PhD in physics from the University of Nantes.
Tony Cass joined CERN's Information Technology Department in 1987 after completing a PhD
in Particle Physics at the University of Liverpool. After initial assignments in the CERN Program
Library and working with CERN’s IBM/VMCMS service, Tony played a leading role in the
development of workstation based interactive computing, had major responsibilities in the
operation and management of large scale batch processing and data storage systems and was
responsible for the refurbishment of the 30-year old computer centre to meet the needs of LHC
computing. Tony currently oversees the various database services at CERN, a remit ranging from
corporate databases, through databases central to the operation of LHC, the world’s highest
energy particle collider, to databases supporting the work of the LHC physics experiments.
Eva Dafonte Perez
Alberto Di Meglio is a senior project manager at CERN with more than 10 years of experience in
leading technology projects and activities in the field of computer science and software
engineering. Alberto has a degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano and a
Ph.D. in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Birmingham. Before his
current position, he has worked as university research associate in the UK, as system engineer at
CERN and has founded and run for three years a commercial software company developing
management and monitoring tools for distributed computer systems. Alberto was the Project
Director of the FP7 EMI project, managing most of the middleware used on European grid
infrastructures and WLCG. He is currently a member of the CERN openlab CTO office. He is a
member of the Italian Board of Engineers, a Chartered Engineer of the British Engineering
Council, a member of IET and IEEE and a certified ITIL professional.
Dirk Duellmann is currently deputy leader of the data and storage services group in CERN's IT
department, which provides storage services and develops data handling frameworks for the
physics community at CERN. He is responsible for the development and evolution of CERN's
storage components and high performance disk pools for LHC data analysis. Previously Dirk lead
the LCG persistency framework development project (2002–2008) and the LCG distributed
database deployment project (2004–2008). Before he worked on object- and relational
databases in the RD45 and Espresso projects.
Dirk joint CERN in 1995 after receiving a PhD in high energy physics from the University of
Hamburg. Since 1986 he worked in several software companies on the development of database
management systems and database applications.
Eckhard Elsen
Melissa Gaillard is the CERN IT department Communications Officer since the beginning of
2016. Melissa was the CERN openlab Communications Officer from July 2008 to December 2015.
Before joining CERN in July 2008, she has been working as the Latin America Marketing Manager
and the International Division Business Intelligence Manager with Renault Trucks and as a
Consultant and Project Manager with Frost & Sullivan, focusing on technology communication
and marketing strategies. Melissa studied Marketing and Communication at Celsa - Paris IV
Sorbonne after an hypohkagne and Khagne B/L.
Petya Georgieva is the CERN openlab Junior Communications Officer. Before joining CERN, she
has worked as a Communication Officer for International Rainwater Harvesting Alliance (IRHA),
Geneva, Switzerland. She has done various internships in the field of Marketing and Strategy for
Kodak and EPSON, Bulgaria and Communications for the Ministry of Culture, Sofia, Bulgaria.
Petya is in her final year of her second Master’s degree in Journalism and Communication,
University of Geneva, University of Neuchâtel. She has also a Masters and Bachelor’s degree in
Information and Communication, from the University of Nice and the University of Avignon,
France.
Maria Girone is the CERN openlab CTO.
Manuel Gonzales Berges is a Telecommunications Engineer since 1997. His career has been
focused on controls and data acquisition systems for large scientific installations (Grantecan
Telescope, CERN). He is currently responsible for the SCADA Systems section in the CERN
Industrial Controls group.
Eric Grancher is working on Oracle technology since 1996 at CERN, especially concentrating on
application and database performance as well as Real Application Cluster. He is currently
working as senior database administrator and team leader for a team of DBAs. Eric is an
OakTable network member since April 2005. He graduated from Telecom ParisTech (computing
engineer) and Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (fundamental computing master) in 1996.
Kristina Gunne studied social/economic sciences and communication at Lund University,
Sweden, before coming to CERN taking up a position as Liaison and Communications Officer at
the Swedish Science Council’s office. She later moved into the domain of EU projects, working
with the EGEE project as Events Coordinator. At the end of the EGEE project, Kristina shared her
time as assistant in the IT Department Head’s office and in the openlab administration. Since
January 2012 Kristina has taken on the role as the Administrative Officer of openlab IV.
Bob Jones is a member of the IT department head office with responsibilities for openlab (from
May 2011 onwards) and EC co-funded projects. Following a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science
from Staffordshire University, Bob joined CERN in 1986 as a software developer with the
information technology department providing support for the physics experiments running on
the Large Electron Positron (LEP) particle accelerator. He completed his PhD thesis in Computer
Science at Sunderland University while working at CERN. He has been involved in several
research projects for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator and has held the position of
leader of the online software system for the ATLAS experiment (http://www.atlas.ch/) at the
LHC.
His experience in the distributed computing arena includes mandates as the technical director
and then project director of the European Commission co-financed EGEE projects (2004-2010
http://www.eu-egee.org ), which established and operated a production grid facility for eScience spanning 300 sites across 48 countries for more than 12,000 researchers. The work of
EGEE was preceded as deputy project leader for the EU DataGrid project (2001-2004
http://www.cern.ch/eu-datagrid/), the flagship grid project of the European Commission in its
5th Framework Programme.
He is a member of the advisory board for several grid related European and national and
European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) projects. He regularly acts as an
expert and reviewer for the IST programme and is a leader of the Helix Nebula – the Science
Cloud initiative (https://www.facebook.com/HelixNebula.TheScienceCloud), a public private
partnership to explore the use of commercial cloud services for science applications.
Eduardo Martelli has been the leader of the Network Engineering section in the CERN IT
department since 2009. His expertise is in the field of external internet connectivity and
network security. Edoardo joined CERN in 2002 as research network engineer for the Datatag
project.
Beforehand, he worked for several years in the Internet Service Provider industry in Italy
(Nextra, Cineca) and was the owner of a small company selling network services (X.mem).
Edoardo has a master degree in Computer Science, earned at the University of Bologna in 1994.
Manuel Martin Marquez
Niko Neufeld was born and studied in Austria. He holds a degree in engineering Physics from
the University of Technology in Vienna and a Ph.D in Particle Physics. Since 2000 he has been
working in the field of high-speed data acquisition and embedded processing. He has codesigned
the data acquisiton system of the LHCb experiment, a facility to study the minute differences
between matter and anti-matter sifting through almost 70 Gigabytes of data / second. He is now
in charge of the upgrade of the LHCb DAQ, which will increase the data-rate by almost a factor
50. Mr. Neufeld has published on numerous topics of high-speed networking, physics dataprocessing and embedded systems. He is a staff scientist in the physics department at CERN.
Alberto Pace is a member if the IT department at CERN where he leads the Data Management
group ensuring a coherent development process for Physics Data management activities,
strongly driven by operational and user needs. He has more than 20 years’ experience in
computing services, infrastructure, software engineering, accelerator control and accelerator
operation. He graduated in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 1987.
Maria Athanasia Pachou is a Junior Communications Officer at CERN openlab IT Department.
During her studies at the International and European Studies Department of University of
Piraeus she has developed skills in International Affairs, Economics, Management and European
Institutions. Since 2010 she has been involved in various academic and volunteering activities
like AIESEC and TEDxUniversity of Piraeus.
Sotirios Pavlou is a Junior Administration Officer at CERN openlab IT department as well as the
CERN IT-EC Department. During his bachelor’s studies at the department of Management
Science and Technology, he has developed skills in business management and IT, while at the
same time, been involved in the organization of many conferences.
Konstantinos Papangelopoulos is a Junior Administration Officer at CERN openlab IT
department as well as the CERN IT-EC Department. During his bachelor’s studies at the
department of International relations of the University of Piraeus, he was a trainee at the
Institute of International Economic Relations and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Athens,
Greece. Konstantinos has also worked as a communications representative in a number of
telecommunications companies in Greece.
Andrew Purcell is the communications officer for CERN openlab. He joined CERN in 2012 and
was previously the editor-in-chief of International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW). He has also
worked at New Scientist magazine and has freelanced for a wide range of science-related news
publications, winning the ‘Science Challenge’ writing prize in 2011. Andrew has a BSc degree in
Biology from the University of York and an MSc in Science Communication from Imperial College
London. He is also currently the European editor for The Science Node.
Fons Rademakers received his Ph.D. in particle physics from the Univ. of Amsterdam in
1991 for his work on event displays and data analysis for the DELPHI experiment at CERN's LEP
collider. Since then he has worked at CERN and been involved in designing and developing data
analysis programs. In 1991 he joined the PAW project where he developed the column wisentuples (a column-oriented storage system) and PIAF, a parallel data analysis system, which was
sold to Hewlett-Packard for 1M$. In 1995, while working as Linux evangelist for HP at CERN, he
started with Rene Brun the ROOT project and has been involved in all aspects of the system
since then. In 2001 Fons joined the ALICE collaboration and has worked as software architect on
the initial version of the AliRoot framework. In recent years his special attention has gone to
high performance parallel computing using PROOF. Fons took over from Rene Brun as ROOT
project leader in 2011. ROOT is used in all particle physics labs in the world and was the main
statistical tool used for the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Wayne Salter commenced his career in the Space Industry after graduating with a BA in
Engineering Science from Oxford University. He first worked on the design, simulation and
testing of satellite control systems at British Aerospace before moving to the Deutsche
Forschungsanstalt für Luft- und Raumfahrt just outside of Munich to work on the design and
implementation of the ground segment systems in support of manned space missions. Since
1996 he has been working at CERN in a number of different areas. Firstly, he led the Joint
Controls Project supporting the LHC experiments in the development of their control systems.
He then took over the responsibility for the CERN external networking before taking up his
current role in which he is responsible for the operation of the CERN central computing facilities.
Peter Sollander
Stefan Nikolae Stancu , a network engineer with over ten years of experience, is currently part
of CERN IT department team responsible for designing and operating CERN's IP networks. In the
past three years he has gained experience with OpenFlow and SDN through two CERN openlab
projects: recently through the project with Brocade on optimizing flows, and previously on a
project in collaboration with HP networking. Prior to joining CERN IT, Stefan worked for the LHC
ATLAS experiment at CERN, where he played a leading role in the design, deployment and
operation of the dedicated data acquisition network, a key piece of the system that transported
and filtered the physics data that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson.