New to Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Team
January 31, 2012
James Botts, NERSC's Computational Systems Group
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| James Botts |
As a member of NERSC's Computational Systems Group, Botts will develop and manage the facility's computational infrastructure. Before coming to NERSC, he was the Director of Professional services at Penguin Computing—a linux hardware vendor and system integrator that specializes in HPC. In this role, he performed on-site integration and verification of computing clusters.
Botts' interest in computing sparked in junior high school when he learned to type BASIC programs into PDP-8L with an ASR33 teletype and used a paper tape reader for long-term storage. After junior high Botts took a long break from programming to pursue a doctorate in physics, but eventually came back to it as a computational physicist.
"I was given charge of a set of FORTRAN codes to derive the shape parton distribution functions using input from various types of high energy experiments. My collaborator and I were the first to extract an upper limit to gluino density in partons from these experiments," says Botts. "To produce something new as a result of messing around with computers was very gratifying."
A native of Los Angeles, Botts earned his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a doctorate in Physics from Stony Brook University in New York. In his spare time, he enjoys operating ham radios (call sign N9ZJ) and is a member of his city's Emergency Response Team.
Jaesik Choi, Scientific Data Management Group
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| Jaesik Choi |
As the newest postdoctoral researcher in CRD's Scientific Data Management Group, Jaesik Choi will be working on a traffic prediction for the Energy Sciences Network's (ESnet) 100 Gbps network. His research interests focus on machine learning and inference with large-scale hybrid models. He also has extensive experience in network security, environment engineering, robotics and video retrieval.
Choi first became interested in networking in the early 2000s, while he was working for a Korean network monitoring company. "With the dot-com boom building a high performance network monitoring system was an exciting project, but I gradually felt that intelligent systems would be one of the keys to improve high performance systems," says Choi. "So I started a graduate study in artificial intelligence and machine learning."
A native of Korea, Choi completed his undergraduate degree in computer engineering at Seoul National University. Last year, he completed a doctorate in computer science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In his spare time, Choi enjoys spending time with his sons.
Max Duarte, Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering
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| Max Duarte |
As a postdoctoral researcher in CRD's Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering (CCSE), Duarte will be working on the development and implementation of numerical schemes for the numerical simulation of time/space multi-scale phenomena molded by stiff partial differential equations.
A native of Paraguay, Duarte earned his undergraduate degree in engineering from the Universidad Nacional de Asunción. He received his doctorate in applied mathematics from the Ecole Centrale Paris (France) in 2011, and spent much of last year working as a postdoctoral researcher both at the Mathematics Department of the Université de Nice (France) and the Mechanical Engineering Department of Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut). In his spare time, Duarte likes to cook, hike and travel.
Eugene Vecharynski, Scientific Computing Group
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| Eugene Vecharynski |
As a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Research Division's Scientific Computing Group, Eugene Vecharynski will be working on large-scale eigenvalue problems. His research focuses matrix computations, specifically the development and theoretical study of efficient algorithms for solving extremely large linear systems and eigenvalue problems.
Before coming to Berkeley Lab, Vecharynski was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota and a visiting assistant professor at Georgia State University's Department of Mathematics. Originally from Belarus, Vecharynski earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Mathematics at Belarus State University. He completed his doctorate at the University of Colorado, Denver.
In his spare time, Vecharynski enjoys exploring the Bay area, spending time with friends, watching movies and skiing.
