A Brief History

As a Fellow and a senior leader at Micron, I work on understanding data center workloads to improve products in the deep-memory/storage hierarchy and build novel solutions therein.

Prior to this, I worked for two decades in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) national lab system, working in the supercomputing and extreme-scale data center programs. I was the Director of the Scalable Data Infrastructure for Science Program in the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Lab (a U.S. DOE lab). In this role, I led an initiative to build and deploy scalable, distributed storage infrastructure and rich data/metadata management services to capture and support mountains of scientific data emanating from computer simulations, experiments and observations conducted at the various ORNL facilities.

In addition, I also contributed to the co-design and deployment of supercomputers and associated solutions for the nation’s premier supercomputing center, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). OLCF is home to the world’s No. 2 supercomputer, Summit, the future Frontier exascale system and the fastest storage system, Spider, providing billions of core hours to a scientific user base from academia, government and industry, to perform breakthrough research in science. For around eight years, I led the Technology Integration (TechInt) group of around 16 researchers, building solutions for supercomputers in several areas such as file and storage systems, non-volatile memory, data management, system architecture, networking and distributed systems.

I was also a Distinguished Scientist at ORNL and studied the fundamental underpinnings of supercomputers and data centers in many of the aforementioned areas. 

Previously, I was a Research Scientist in the Computer Science Research group of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at ORNL, for over nine years. I joined ORNL in August 2003. In this role, my work had straddled both basic and applied distributed systems research. I have worked on large-scale scientific data management, HPC I/O, storage systems and multicore architectures. 

I received a Ph.D. and Masters in Computer Science from the University of Mississippi in 2003 and 1998 respectively. My doctoral work (partly at Argonne National Laboratory, in Chicago, where I was on a Wallace Givens Fellowship and a Dissertation Fellowship) addressed data access issues in the Globus Data Grid environment. In what appears to be my previous life, obtained a bachelors degree in computer science from Karnatak University in India in 1996. I grew up in Madras, South India.