William Kramer has been selected as the next director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, a joint research center of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Kramer, currently project director and principal investigator of the Blue Waters Project and the senior associate director for @Scale Science and Technology at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, begins his role in the fall of 2019.

"It's our great fortune to recruit Bill, who is known and honored nationally for his leadership and innovations in the world of supercomputing," said Rob A. Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research at the University of Pittsburgh. "In many ways, his career path is emblematic of the role of supercomputing in modern scientific research. The field has grown specifically because of his innovations and commitment."

Following his first academic appointment at the University of Delaware, Kramer held leadership roles at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and at NASA Ames Research Center. Over the course of three decades, his award-winning career has focused on making large-scale, complex computational and data analytics systems extremely effective, and making the organizations that create and use them highly productive.

Most of the systems Kramer has helped create are among the largest supercomputers and storage repositories of their time. He has helped stand up 20 of the world's most powerful supercomputer systems, six extreme-scale storage systems and five best-in-class high-performance computing facilities.

"I am extremely honored to be selected as the director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The center, which is supported by two world-class universities, is well positioned to help current and future generations of scientists, engineers and researchers create insights into a wide range of challenges in fundamental science, health care, security and other areas that will expand our understanding of phenomena that are of critical importance to society," said Kramer.

William Kramer Chosen to Lead Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center from University of Pittsburgh on Vimeo.

Founded in 1986, the PSC is a national leader in supercomputing. The center has enabled breakthroughs in many scientific disciplines by providing researchers nationwide with access to the most advanced computational systems available. It is supported by several federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry. It is a leading partner in XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment), part of the NSF's cyberinfrastructure program.
 

To learn more, read the PSC’s official announcement.