NEW to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Team
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August 31, 2009
Jihan Kim, NERSC User Services Group
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Jihan Kim |
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Alex Kaiser |
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Lawrence Pezzaglia Jr. |
As a postdoctoral fellow in NERSC's User Services Group, Jihan Kim will be helping scientists run their simulations on the center's supercomputers.
Kim began his new post at NERSC on August 17, 2009, after earning his doctorate degree in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. For his dissertation, Kim wrote a quantum Monte Carlo code in C. He also worked on the device simulator Charon, during a summer internship at the Sandia National Laboratory.
Originally from South Korea, Kim and his family relocated to Los Angeles when he was in second grade. He migrated north to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in electrical engineering. Kim says he instantly fell in love with the Northern California weather, diversity and scenery. On his spare time, he enjoys producing music and playing soccer.
Alex Kaiser, CRD Future Technologies Group
As a researcher in CRD's Future Technologies Group (FTG), Alex Kaiser is investigating algorithms for the 13 motifs, or "dwarfs," of parallel computing. The motifs encapsulate a comprehensive set of algorithms and types of data-movement for a spectrum of scientific computing problems. Anyone developing a parallel computing system can get an idea of its performance by its interaction with these motifs.
Before joining the FTG group, Kaiser worked as a student researcher on error-correcting codes at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and on David H. Bailey's experimental mathematics project at LBNL. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009.
"I like that HPC is grounded in abstract math, which has been dear to me since childhood, but that it also has practical power," says Kaiser. A Bay Area native, when not at the Lab, Kaiser spends time playing drums with his band Tempo No Tempo.
Lawrence Pezzaglia Jr., CRD
This summer Lawrence Pezzaglia transitioned from a student assistant helping with computer infrastructure and production support for CRD to full-time computer systems engineer. His career at CRD began more than five years ago as a 16-year-old participant in the High School Student Research Participation Program (HSSRPP), which is run by the Berkeley Lab's Center for Science and Engineering Education (CSEE).
"When I first applied for the HSSRPP, I didn't know anyone at Berkeley Lab. I expressed a strong interest in technology, and I was placed with Chip Smith in CRD and learned a lot," says Pezzaglia.
He continued to assist Smith in CRD the following summer and part-time throughout his undergraduate years at the University of California at Berkeley. Pezzaglia received his degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science this past spring, and says that he looks forward to continue his work with CRD while he mulls over the prospect of attending graduate school. Pezzaglia is a native of Walnut Creek, California.
