Meet the Consultants

The NCSA National Consulting Office employs the expertise of a variety of staff who are part of the Scientific Support group. The Scientific Support team is responsible for consulting, training, and computational scientific services for the center. Staff are assisted by members of the Performance Engineering & Computational Methods team. These dedicated personnel man the phones and answer email to assist NCSA-allocated users. The Consulting Office hours are 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. CT, Monday through Friday. Calls to the Consulting Office phone number outside of those hours are forwarded to the Technology Management Group, who are the operations staff for the Center.

The expertise available in the National Consulting Office includes many programming languages and hardware platforms so staff can offer assistance on an variety of questions. If consultants lack the resources within the group to answer a question, they can call on the expertise of colleagues in other groups at NCSA and from vendors to insure that complex or difficult problems get answered.

Consulting Office Staff Profiles

Yiwu Chen

Yiwu Chen is a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the Computer Science department. Yiwu came to NCSA and UI from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He has helped to install a new search engine for the NCSA and PACS partners' web sites and arranged for NCSA to mirror the NASA Mars web site for the current exploration missions that are expected to draw much interest.

Jim Ferguson

Jim Ferguson manages the NLANR distributed applications support team in addition to working in the consulting office. A staff member since 1987, Jim has served in various roles and worked on all major high-performance computing platforms since the center opened. Jim also works with the Partners for Advanced Computational Services (PACS), a group that drives user support within the Alliance. Before coming to work at NCSA, Jim was a senior applications engineer for Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, West Palm Beach, Fla.

Roy Heimbach

Roy Heimbach has been a member of the NCSA staff since 1991. Roy's strengths are in Fortran and MPI, with solid C experience. Before joining NCSA, Roy worked in user services at the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) in Syracuse, New York.

Susan John

Susan John, on staff since 1994, is a user consultant and SGI Technical Lead. Susan's main focus is working on projects on the SGI Origin systems. Her consulting role is supporting users in NCSA's high-performance computing environment -- responding to users' problems and needs, as well as training and writing web-based user documentation.

Scott Koranda, Ph.D.

Scott Koranda is the newest full-time staff member to join Scientific Support staff, arriving in fall 1999. Scott brings experience in C and is rapidly becoming familiar with NCSA's hardware. Scott will concentrate on the NT Supercluster, but will provide support for all systems. Before joining NCSA, Scott worked at Wolfram Research in Champaign, Illinois, makers of Mathematica and other software.

Bruce Loftis, Ph.D.

Bruce Loftis is the manager of the Scientific Support team that works on consulting, training, and computational science services. He oversees the development of high-performance user support for the center and as part of the PACS. Bruce has worked at several high-performance centers in several states. His technical interests include environmental modeling, parallel numerical methods, large-scale mathematical optimization, and large-scale distributed applications. He is organizing the student support staff for SC2000.

David McWilliams

A staff member since 1986, Dave McWilliams works in the Performance Engineering and Computational Methods group. He has worked on all major high-performance computing platforms at NCSA since the center opened. Dave has held a variety of positions at NCSA, including consultant, system programmer, and NCSA Affiliate Program Coordinator. Before joining NCSA, Dave worked at a System Programmer at the University of Illinois.

Sudhakar Pamidighantam, Ph.D.

Sudhakar Pamidighantam is a computational chemist who splits his time between two parts of the Scientific Support group: consulting and computational sciences. He joined NCSA in 1992 and has worked on various projects supporting computational chemistry and biochemistry. Sudhakar has done web interface design and is strongest in Fortran on HPC platforms. Before joining NCSA, Sudhakar was a graduate student at the University of Alabama - Birmingham.

Beth Richardson

One of NCSA's original staff, Beth Richardson is a user consultant and trainer and holds the position of HPC Training Lead. Prior to her work in Scientific Support, Beth was the team leader for mathematical and statistical software in the former NCSA Applications Group. Beth's strengths are in code optimization and performance analysis for parallel computing.

Sirpa Saarinen, Ph.D.

Sirpa Saarinen is a member of the Performance Engineering and Computational Methods (PECM) Group. Before coming to NCSA, Sirpa was a member of the Kernel Development group at Wolfram Research Inc., where she developed numerical software. She has also worked as an instructor in the Computer Science department of Bradley University.

Jeyandran Venugopal

Jey Venugopal is a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the Computational Science & Engineering department. Jey joined NCSA in the summer of 1999. He has done code optimization projects on the SGI Origin array and is strong in several programming languages.