Speaker Bio

William T.C. Kramer is the Executive Director for the Illinois OVCRI New Frontiers Initiative and PI/ Director of the Leadership-class Blue Waters Project (https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu). He holds an appointment as a full Research Professor of Computer Science at Illinois.
The Blue Waters system, the largest supercomputer Cray has ever built, is the first general purpose, open science, sustained-petaflop supercomputer placed into service in 2013, delivering over 35 billion core*hours of computing to date. It is the most powerful resource for the nation’s open-science researchers. Blue Waters is a project with an overall cost of over $520M to support thousands of researchers doing Frontier Science and Engineering research that is not possible any other way. Now Blue Waters is now devoted to NGA related geospatial investigations.
In addition to being the Blue Waters Director, Kramer is a full Research Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science department at UIUC and has been the PI of the NSF funded Global Initiative to Enhance @scale and distributed Computing and Analysis Technologies (GECAT) project, the DOE/ASCR funded Holistic Measurement Driven Resiliency HMDR award that studies failure and resiliency for exascale systems, several contracts with DOE laboratories and a OTA agreement with NGA/SOSSEC.

Previously, he held leadership roles as General Manager of the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center (NERSC) and was a Branch Chief in NASA’s Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation division at Ames Research Center.

He is the author of over 60 papers about high end computing and data analysis and served on HPC advisory committees around the world. He is one of the founding executive directors of the Joint Laboratory for Extreme Scale Computing (JLESC) which is a collaborative organization consisting of 7 organizations in 4 countries researching extreme scale computing and data analysis. He was the General Chair of the International SC05 conference as well has many other high level volunteer leadership positions. He is the recipient of multiple awards from NASA, the Department of Energy, the Association of Computing Machinery and the Digital Computer Users Society, including one that recognized his contributions to returning the Space Shuttle to flight after the Challenger accident and another for establishing a $400M research program for improving the effectiveness of the US air traffic control systems. He has also led the creation and was responsible for NASA’s TS-SCI computing facility and holds current DOD clearances.
Blue Waters was the 20th supercomputer Kramer deployed and/or managed. He also deployed and managed large clusters of systems, several extremely large data repositories, some of the world’s most intense networks and also been involved with the design, creation and commissioning of six “best of class” HPC facilities. He is known for developing the Sustained System Performance (SSP), Effective System Performance (ESP) and PERCU evaluation methods for large scale systems.

Bill holds a BS and MS in computer science from Purdue University, an ME in electrical engineering from the University of Delaware, and a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley. Kramer’s research interests include large-scale system performance evaluation, systems and resource management and scheduling, system resiliency and fault detection, large scale system monitoring and assessment and cyber protection. Bill has certifications in very large IT project management from GSA and DOE. Bill advises and consults around the world on large-scale systems and facilities and their use.