Valerie Taylor: Division Director/ Argonne Distinguished Fellow

Valerie Taylor is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991. She then joined the faculty in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Northwestern University, where she was a member of the faculty for 11 years. In 2003, she joined Texas A&M, where she served as head of the computer science and engineering department and senior associate dean of academic affairs in the College of Engineering and a Regents Professor and the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Some of her research interests are high-performance computing, performance analysis and modeling, and power analysis. Currently, she is focused on the areas of performance analysis, power analysis and resiliency. Valerie Taylor is also a fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (IEEE) and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Pete Beckman: Co-Director, Northwestern Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering

Pete Beckman is the co-director of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering. Dr. Beckman has a Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University (1993) and a BA in Computer Science, Physics, and Math from Anderson University (1985). He is a recognized global expert in high-end computing systems and has designed and built software and architectures for large-scale parallel and distributed computing systems during the past 25 years. Pete helped found Indiana University’s Extreme Computing Laboratory. He also founded the Linux cluster team at the Advanced Computing Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Turbolinux-sponsored research laboratory that developed the world’s first dynamic provisioning system for cloud computing and HPC clusters. Furthermore, Pete became vice president of Turbolinux's worldwide engineering efforts, managing development offices in the US, Japan, China, Korea, and Slovenia. Pete joined Argonne National Laboratory in 2002. As director of engineering and chief architect for the TeraGrid, he designed and deployed the world’s most powerful Grid computing system for linking production high performance computing centers for the National Science Foundation. He served as director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility from 2008 to 2010. He is currently a Senior Computer Scientist and Co-Director of the Northwestern Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering. Pete is also a co-founder of the International Exascale Software Project (IESP).