Speakers

Sustainable Reality 2024

Meet Our 2024 Sustainable Reality Speakers

Welcome to our second Sustainable Reality event! This year, we’re bringing together the community to learn from the pioneers shaping our future. Join us as we delve into how supercomputing and AI are tackling new challenges, explore innovative ideas, and gather insights that will guide us into 2025 and beyond.

What better place than Bletchley Park, a site renowned for its history of disruptive thinking, to host this event? Here, we will focus our minds on the possibilities ahead. Our speakers come from diverse professions, backgrounds, educations, and experiences, each bringing a unique perspective to the table.

Dr. Emma Barnes

Emma Barnes is Head of Research and Faculty IT at the University of York and has spent the last nine years building the research IT offering at the University. This includes establishing the Research Software Engineering group and project managing York’s first major cluster offering at the University (Viking). We recently replaced the Viking hardware and moved to a more sustainable datacentre in Sweden. Emma became a programming and Linux enthusiast whilst studying for her PhD in Astroparticle physics in Edinburgh and now aims to share her passion to support research at the University.

Zara Birch

Zara Birch hails from Belfast, Northern Ireland but has just returned from living in Sydney, Australia for the past 17 years with her partner and two young kids.

She has 25 years’ experience in comms across various sectors including FMCG, Pharma, Government and Education and has recently started a communications role at Queens University as part of their NI-HPC team.

A novice on the topic and not a ‘techie’ person, she was attracted to the human side of the role and the fascinating research enabled by HPC. She is responsible for promoting NI-HPC internally and externally and for connecting and collaborating with users, investors, and colleagues. She is setting up a chapter of women in HPC in Ireland – where there is an obvious gap in the market.

Marcel van Drunen

Marcel van Drunen is the Director of HPC & AI Technical presales and partnerships at Borealis Data Center. Marcel is well connected to many of the key players in the HPC and AI industry. He assists customers in designing their large HPC and AI systems to run in the reliable and sustainable Borealis facilities. The second part of his role at Borealis is to maintain and extend his already vast technical and commercial network, fostering powerful partnerships that will help Borealis Data Center guide their HPC and AI customers towards a more sustainable future and help shape the roadmap of Borealis Data Center to accommodate future technologies.

Before joining Borealis Data Center, Marcel led the technical pre sales team for HPC and AI at Dell Technologies in EMEA for seventeen years. In this role he and his team of experts helped world-class academic and commercial customers design and build world-class HPC and AI systems. Some of those systems were ranked high in the TOP500 and Green500 lists. Before his time at Dell Technologies, Marcel held various technical consulting positions in storage, high availability and data management, including seven years at Unisys EMEA. Marcel studied applied mathematics and computer science at the university of Delft in the Netherlands.

Dr Marta Camps Santasmasas (MCS)

Dr Marta Camps Santasmasas (MCS) holds a Doctorate in Aerospace Engineering by the University of Manchester and is currently working as a lecturer at the University of Salford. She has been working on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) 2010 both in academic and industrial settings. Marta’s work focuses on real-time and interactive CFD applied to urban wind flows and external aerodynamics. She is also the lead developer for the GASCANS software suit, a GPU accelerated lattice-Boltzmann solver for turbulent flows. Marta is an advocate for collaborative software development and software sustainability; GASCANS is shared and collaboratively developed by different members of Marta’s research group, including academics and PhD students. She is an advocate for EDI, being an active member of the Women in HPC community, part of the Athena Swan team at the University of Salford and part of the A-Team for the Move the Needle project.

Karen Lewis

Karen Lewis is Head of HR at the Numerical Algorithms Group, where she has established a Neurodiversity Group and chairs the NAG Women in Tech Group. With a background in finance and over 10 years HR experience, Karen has successfully introduced numerous HR initiatives at NAG, including a values set, a performance management system and an internal grading system to allow a clear career path for technical staff. She holds the CIPD level 7 qualification and is known for her empathetic approach to HR. Karen has a strong interest in and family experience of Neurodiverse conditions.

Dr Paul Calleja

Dr Calleja is Director of Research Computng Services at the University of Cambridge where he oversees one of the UK’s leading large-scale National High Performance Computing centres supporting a diverse community of UK frontier science, engineering, and medical research programmes.

Dr Calleja has a strong academic/industrial HPC co-design background focusing on commodity open standard-based solutions. Recently he has pioneered the convergence of OpenStack and Research
Computing use-cases, working with industry partners to develop the “Scientific OpenStack”, a software defined supercomputing middleware solution making large scale cloud native supercomputing a reality.

Dr Calleja is also Director of the Cambridge Open Zetascale Lab, a prominent UK academic/industrial collaboration aimed at the development and democratisation of exascale computing solutions. The
Zetascale Lab is hosting Dawn, the UK’s fastest artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer, created via a highly innovative long term co-design partnership between the University of Cambridge, UKRI, UKAEA and Intel and Dell Technologies.

Richard Fuller

Richard Fuller is Assistant Director of IT (Technology & Cyber) at the University of York.

His work encompasses a portfolio that includes infrastructure, security, research IT and enterprise architecture. He has a background in computer science (Emmanuel, Cambridge) and cybersecurity, so Bletchley Park is a wonderland, and believes in creative solutions that deliver genuine sustainability benefits.

Richard was the person who asked the question “Can’t we put an HPC cluster somewhere cold?” – a question that started the journey for the university to look at the real possibility of net zero HPC.

Dominik Wojtak

Dominik Wojtak serves as a Marketing Associate for Alces Flight. With a degree in International Business Management from the University of Oxford Brookes, Dominik brings a wealth of expertise in marketing strategy and execution. His focus is on enhancing brand awareness and driving customer engagement through comprehensive marketing project management, market research, and digital content distribution.

Michael Rudgyard

Michael Rudgyard is an entrepreneur and ex-academic with extensive experience of High Performance Computing and data-centre markets. He has acquired a broad set of technical and management skills during a 38-year career in research computing and as an executive director of four high-tech start-ups — notably as a founder of the parallel debugger company Allinea Software, and in his current role at Alces Flight. Michael also holds a part-time role as a technical consultant to the French research centre CERFACS where he is actively involved in research in numerical methods and parallel computing.

Wil Mayers

Wil Mayers has 20 years experience in high-performance compute and storage systems having built large environments for UK government, University and commercial customers. He has worked for both corporates and SMEs, helping customers to optimise their scientific computing workflows across many different domains including engineering, bioinformatics, physics, media and finance. In 2010 Wil joined Alces Flight, where he is responsible for building and delivering solutions for customers utilising a wide range of open-source and custom-developed software.

Cristin Merritt

Cristin Merritt, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Alces Flight, boasts over 20 years of enterprise technology experience, with 8+ years dedicated to High Performance Computing (HPC). Specialising in navigating technology market trends, Cristin’s work explores the convergence of technical and social sustainability in the drive towards successful supercomputing solutions. Her tenure at Alces Flight has seen her spearhead intricate integration projects, three of which garnered global acclaim for their achievements in multi-platform (hybrid) HPC. Cristin’s leadership has cemented Alces Flight as a trailblazer in HPC integration and managed services, delivering solutions tailored to current and future workload demands.

Max Starr

Max Starr joined AWS in August 2022 as a Specialist Solutions Architect focused on High Performance Computing, where he helps customers who have outgrown – or don’t have – on-premises compute to explore their options using Cloud compute.

Max has a nearly two decade background of Aerospace Engineering and Computational Fluid Dynamics; the 7 years prior to joining AWS were spent designing America’s Cup Racing Sailing boats. His journey to sustainability in engineering grew there in a sport powered by wind and human muscle.

Learn more!

From the latest talks on HPC and AI to hands-on history, we have a great agenda planned. Find out more about the main event by visiting our event page.