Leadership

Jon Summers, Ph.D.

RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

Email Jon Summers

Scientific Leader in Data Centers, Adjunct Professor in Fluid Mechanics at Lulea Technical University in Sweden and a Visiting Professor to the Institute of Thermofluids at the University of Leeds in the UK. During the last 25 years, Jon has worked on a number of government and industry-funded projects requiring the use of computation. Having built and managed compute clusters to support many research projects, he chaired the High Performance Computing User Group for 20 years at the University of Leeds. In the last eight years, his research has focused on a range of thermal management and energy flow projects within the Data Centre, Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning and industrial sectors. Since early 2013 he has been involved in liquid cooled IT research projects, focusing both at the data centre and the microprocessor scales, which has been further transformed by the opportunities of integrated digital infrastructure research at RISE. His current research focuses on thermal and energy management of microelectronic systems, which has led to many invited talks around the globe within the data centre community.
 

John Shalf, Ph.D.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

John Shalf is the Department Head for Computer Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He also formerly served as the Deputy Director for Hardware Technology on the US Department of Energy (DOE)-led Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and prior to that was CTO for the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at LBNL. He has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in parallel computing software and HPC technology, including the widely cited report “The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley” (with David Patterson and others). He is also the 2024-2027 distinguished lecturer for the IEEE Electronics Packaging Society.  Before joining Berkeley Laboratory, John worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitation Physics/Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), where he co-created the Cactus Computational Toolkit.

Vikrant Soman

Uber

Data driven and results oriented technologist working in the datacenter industry for 10+ years. Intimately familiar with server infrastructure for the hyperscale cloud

Weifeng Zhang, Ph.D.

Lenovo Research

Dr. Weifeng Zhang is a Vice President of Lenovo Group and the Head of Intelligent Computing Infrastructure Lab, Lenovo Research. Prior to joining Lenovo, Weifeng was the Chief Architect and VP of Software at Lightelligence Inc, responsible for hardware software co-design and software ecosystem to empower optical computing and interconnect technologies. Before that, Weifeng was a fellow of Alibaba Group and the Chief Scientist of Heterogeneous Computing at Alibaba Cloud Infrastructure. He also was a founding member of the Board of Directors at MLCommons™ (MLPerf™) and currently serves as the Chair of AI Co-Design Workgroup at Open Computing Project Foundation (OCP). Weifeng received his PhD in Computer Science from University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Lucas Beran

Dell'Oro

Prior to joining Dell’Oro Group, Mr. Beran spent five years as an analyst at Informa and IHS Markit covering data center infrastructure markets, including UPS, single-phase and three-phase power distribution, precision cooling, modular data center deployments and IT racks and enclosures. During his time, Mr. Beran advised clients on market size and forecasts, vendor landscapes, product development, marketing initiatives and consulted on prospective acquisitions. Mr. Beran also has two years of IT Operations experience from the Danish Institute of Study Abroad (DIS) in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he maintained the universities’ server rooms and network closets.

Miranda G. Gardiner

iMasons Climate Accord

With 16+ years of experience, Miranda is a driven, professional manager with extensive industry experience in green buildings, energy and water efficiency, and sustainable master plans and policies. She is passionate about the environment and improving sustainability practices through local and global engagement, with a proven record of working for internationally recognized organizations like the US Green Building Council. She now focuses global carbon accounting of digital infrastructure to influence market-based decisions and drive the data center industry to achieve carbon neutrality.

Rich Kenny

Interact

Rich is the Managing Director at Interact, a world leading environmental consultancy utilizing circular economy machine learning software, and Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Engineering at London South Bank University (LSBU). His research and development focus are hardware energy efficiency and the environmental and economic impacts of IT hardware during creation, use and disposal. He is a firm believer in the circular economy and sustainable solutions for IT hardware. He has contributed to the UK’s Industrial Strategy, European Legislation (EcoDesign Directive, EU taxonomy on Energy Efficiency) and his research has been published in internationally renowned academic journals (IEEE, Elsevier), conferences (LCM, GECOST) and anthologies.

Bernard HL Lee, Ph.D.

SENKO Advanced Components

Bernard is a senior telecommunications and business strategy professional with more than 20 years of global experience in telecommunication and data communications arena especially in the field of optical fiber communications. He is currently the Director of Technology and Innovation at SENKO Advanced Components. He started his career in 2003 with Telekom Malaysia R&D as the Head of Photonic Network Research and then as the Head of Innovation and Communications. Bernard then joined the parent company, Telekom Malaysia (TM) in 2010 as the Assistant General Manager at the Group Business Strategy Division. Bernard is currently an Expert at the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), a Chartered Engineer (CEng) accredited by the Engineering Council of UK, and is also a Registered Communications Distribution Designer (RCDD).

Diego Lopez, Ph.D.

Telefonica

Diego R. Lopez joined Telefonica I+D in 2011 as a Senior Technology Expert on network middleware and services. He is currently in charge of the Technology Exploration activities within the GCTO Unit of Telefónica I+D. Before joining Telefónica he spent some years in the academic sector, dedicated to research on network service abstractions and thedevelopment of APIs based on them. During this period he was appointed as member of the High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data Infrastructures by the European Commission. Diego leads of the pillar on use cases and applications of QSNP, the European Quantum Secure Networks Partnership.

Ravi K Naik, Ph.D.

Berkeley Lab

Ravi is a Research Scientist in the Quantum Information Science & Technology division, and measurement lead at the Advanced Quantum Testbed. His current research efforts include the implementation, characterization, and optimization of novel controls on superconducting qubit and qutrit processors, as well as studying the effects of noise and error on the compilation and execution of quantum algorithms and simulation. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago for his research with Professor David Schuster on multimode circuit quantum electrodynamics.

Richard Pitwon, Ph.D.

Resolute Photonics

Richard Pitwon is a director, technologist and engineer with more than 18 years transformational expertise in optical and photonic system interconnect, integration and architectures for data centre, IoT and data-communications applications. Dr. Pitwon has extensive experience in managing international, multi-million dollar collaborative research and development programs, skilled in building multi-disciplinary teams to deliver advanced system solutions and coordinating across multiple geographies.

Laura Schulz

Leibniz Supercomputing Center

Laura Schulz is the acting department head for Quantum Computing and Technologies at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich, Germany. At LRZ, Laura has driven forward several initiatives in the realm of supercomputing – including future computing, AI and quantum as well as building large-scale global partnerships -  in her role for strategic development and partnerships.  She received her Diplom from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich in 2005. Before joining LRZ, she worked in the Computation directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), as well as in a leading role in LLNL’s High Performance Computing Innovation Center (HPCIC) aimed at connecting industry with novel technologies in HPC and beyond. Laura is the lead author of LRZ’s Strategic Plan for Quantum Computing and the co-founder of the monthly Bavarian Quantum Computing eXchange (BQCX). Ms. Schulz has served on conference and workshop program committees, including SC and ISC, and created the yearly forward-looking NextGen HPC event series, bringing together leading researchers in the field of advanced computing.

Bob Sutor, Ph.D.

The Futurum Group

Dr. Bob Sutor has been a technical leader and executive in the IT industry for over 40 years. He is a theoretical mathematician by training, with a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College. Bob’s industry role is to advance AI and quantum technologies by providing strategic and technical insight to help build strong business, partner, technical, and educational ecosystems. His singular goal is to evolve AI and quantum to help solve some of the critical computational problems facing businesses and society today. Bob is widely quoted in the press, delivers conference keynotes, and appears in the media.

Heather West, Ph.D.

IDC Research

Heather West, PhD, is Research Manager within IDC's worldwide infrastructure research organization and part of the performance intensive computing (PIC) practice. She leads IDC's quantum, analog and neuromorphic computing research and plays a supporting role in IDC's research on artificial Intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure stacks and deployments. Dr. West is deeply engaged with her clients on their solutions and services, as well as on their business and technology strategies. Her domain knowledge of the quantum computing industry including proficiency in related workloads and use cases has made Dr. West a trusted advisor to several emerging quantum and analog computing vendors and positioned IDC as the go-to vendor for market research on Quantum Computing.

Cathy White, Ph.D.

British Telecom

Although originally placed in a coding and analysis role, my real interest was the physics and technology of communications. I got involved outside my normal job with the optics team and deploying a new trial of quantum communications. This led to a move to that team, and I became deeply involved with downstreamimg quantum information technology, working with the UK Quantum hub on the UKQNTel Quantum Key Distribution network, among other projects.