William Kramer chosen as director of Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

William Kramer will serve as the next director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint research center of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon announced Monday.

Kramer is 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 (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He will begin his role at the PSC in the fall of 2019. In addition to his role at the PSC, Kramer will also be a research faculty member in Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“It’s our great fortune to recruit Bill, who is known and honored nationally for his leadership and innovations in the world of supercomputing,” Rob A. Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research at the University of Pittsburgh, said. “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.”

Kramer’s career spans three decades and has focused on large-scale, complex computational and data analytics system. Many of the systems Kramer helped create were among the largest supercomputers and storage repositories of their time. He has helped launch 20 of the world’s most powerful supercomputer systems, six extreme-scale storage systems, and five best-in-class high-performance computing facilities.

Kramer received his first academic appointment at the University of Delaware and has held leadership roles at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and at NASA Ames Research Center.

Kramer holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in computer science from Purdue University, a Master of Engineering in electrical engineering from the University of Delaware and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I am extremely honored to be selected as the director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center,” Kramer said. “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.”

The PSC houses some of the most powerful systems for high-performance computing, communications, and data storage and makes these systems available to scientists and engineers for unclassified research.