Dan Parker has been an advocate of Free and Open Source software solutions for over 25 years. He has worked in higher education since 2001, starting at Hampshire College. In 2009 he made the leap to UMass Amherst and discovered the wonderful world of High-Performance Computing. When he is not digging into the arcane details of a storage system, he enjoys reading, writing, drawing and the hi-res graphics of the great outdoors.
Kevin Bryan is the Manager of HPC systems at URI, as well as supporting the Unity Cluster and its users after a URI’s contributions of 55 machines between 2021-2022. He has been doing general systems administration since 2004, and started with HPC in 2015. He has a programming background in languages including C/C++, Python, Java, R, MATLAB and enjoys digging deep to discover the root cause of bugs and performance issues. Free time is spent watching birds and playing chess.
Simon Leary is an undergrad at UMass Amherst (computer engineering 2024). He started at Unity as a junior systems engineer in 2021. He has learned a lot in his first year (special thanks to Hakan and Kevin) and intends to continue doing so. He always enjoyed coding, and is honored to write code that actually gets used. At home, he likes to go rock climbing (indoor bouldering), fix broken things, and play video games.
Sol Jerome is an HPC Systems Engineer at UMass Amherst. He graduated from UT Austin with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. He has supported Research Computing in some way for the majority of his career. He is interested in creating well-defined, reproducible systems to support the advancement of research. His free time is spent trying to keep up with his kids’ hectic schedules.
Wm. Josiah Erikson, who goes by Josiah, came to UMass Amherst in the fall of 2022 after 25 years at Hampshire College, where he served in a variety of roles, including student, Sysadmin, Network Engineer, Staff Trustee, HPC Engineer, academic support for the School of Natural Science and then Cognitive Science, Assistant Director of IT for Infrastructure and Telecommunications Systems, Associate Director of IT for Infrastructure and Web Services, and Hampshire College rep to the Five College CIO Meetings. He loves to solve problems creatively, appropriately, and in context, build and lead invested, inspired teams, and build solutions that are reliable and right-sized. He finally graduated from Hampshire College in 2020, and during the course of his 23-year-long undergraduate career, worked on several animated short films and mobile games, and his Division III was an oral history of the events of 2019 at Hampshire College as seen through the eyes of its employees. He also loves to ride bicycles, go on road trips, play music, and hike. He is excited to be part of the team at UMass Amherst!
Cecile Cres is a PhD student at the University of Rhode Island. She has been an HPC facilitator for the Unity Cluster since Fall 2021 and started using HPC since 2018. She has a background in biology and computer science and develops bioinformatics tools using deep learning. Her free time is spent playing card games and practicing oenology.
Connor Kenyon is a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He was previously an HPC facilitator for UMass Dartmouth, and has been a facilitator with the Unity Cluster since 2022. His research background is in Numerical Relativity, Ocean Modeling, and Performance Evaluation of Novel HPC Hardware. His free time is spent rock climbing and playing music.
Georgia Stuart is an HPC Research Scientist and Facilitator at UMass Amherst. She’s particularly interested in HPC workflows, how people interact with HPC systems, and uncertainty quantification. Georgia received her PhD in mathematics from UT Dallas where she worked on computationally efficient uncertainty quantification for seismic inversion. She was a Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow at UT Austin, where she worked on oil spill uncertainty quantification for the Computational Hydraulics Group. Georgia spends her free time playing with her young son, taking long walks with her family, and practicing calligraphy and lettering.
Lauren Saloio graduated from UMass Amherst in the spring of 2023 with a B.A. in English and a Certificate in Professional Writing and Technical Communication. During her time at UMass Amherst, she interned at The Center for Data Science as a Technical Writer and worked at the HFA Advising and Career Center as a Student Ambassador and Administrative Assistant. After graduation, Lauren spent the summer interning at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as a Technical Writer for the Flight Microwave and Telecommunication Systems Branch. She continues to do Freelance Technical Writing for some of NASA’s projects. Lauren enjoys reading, writing, spending time with her family and friends, browsing bookstores, and visiting coffee shops.
Anshul Saha is an undergraduate student studying Computer Science, expected to graduate in 2026. He joined Unity in Fall 2022 and has been actively involved in frontend and backend development of the Unity Portal. With almost a year of experience, he has gained valuable knowledge and contributed to the development of the portal. He finds joy in witnessing his code being utilized and aims to continue growing in his role. In his free time, he enjoys playing table tennis, building Lego models, and exploring robotics.
Hakan was a student employee at UMass Amherst from 2019-2022 where he built and maintained the Unity cluster in its initial form. Hakan’s background is in electrical engineering, and he now pursues an MS in electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst. Hakan now works for Boston University as an engineer on the MassOpenCloud Alliance team and continues to promote collaboration between the universities in the MGHPCC data center. After his time working at UMass, Hakan continues to act as the maintainer of the Unity web portal. He hopes to mature the Unity web portal code base with the help of talented developers to enhance the experience on the Unity cluster, as well as open the project to other HPC clusters.