Founded in 2009, the HPC-AI Society focuses on advanced computing systems that power AI, simulation, cloud computing, quantum computing, and visualization. Our members apply these technologies across diverse fields, including oil & gas, life sciences, manufacturing, renewable energy, climate science, financial services, cybersecurity, and academic research.
The HPC-AI Society originated from a core group of HPC leaders in the oil & gas industry, where supercomputing plays a central role. They recognized the need for a dedicated forum to address the broad range of HPC topics that professionals were eager to explore at technical workshops. Although the founders’ roots were in energy, they intentionally built a society to serve all HPC users, writing the incorporation documents and bylaws to span all industries and geographies. From the outset, they partnered with universities and educational institutions to ensure alignment between training programs and real-world needs.
The first annual “Oil & Gas HPC Workshop” held at Rice University in 2008 (now known as the Energy HPC Conference) highlighted this need for an ongoing, cross-industry community. Early collaborations with organizations such as the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG), who held an HPC Workshop as an add-on at its annual international meeting, reinforced the importance of creating a dedicated society to foster knowledge exchange and innovation.
Originally incorporated as the Society of HPC Professionals, the organization was renamed in 2025 to the HPC-AI Society to reflect the growing convergence of AI and HPC. While AI applications run on HPC infrastructure, many AI practitioners do not traditionally identify as part of the HPC community. The name change acknowledges this intersection and emphasizes inclusivity.
Membership is open to HPC and AI practitioners across all industries, from system administrators and directors of operations to researchers and educators — anyone working to harness advanced computing for innovation and impact.
The Board of Directors is comprised of experienced professionals from the HPC, Supercomputing, AI/Machine Learning, and Cloud Computing Community.
Regular meetings are held with minutes recorded to conduct the business of the Society.
President & Board Chair
Doug is the Chief Marketing Officer at InspireSemi, a chip design company that provides revolutionary high-performance, energy-efficient accelerated computing solutions for HPC, AI, graph analytics, and other compute-intensive workloads. He brings a customer-focused approach to product/market strategy, market development, creating OEM, channel, & technology partnerships, and building worldwide sales teams.
He began his career in product development at IBM and moved into the sales & marketing organization to expand IBM’s reach into new engineering/scientific markets. He then went on to various senior leadership positions at Cadence Design Systems and early stage companies such as CoWare, Newisys, Virtana, and Nimbix (now Eviden).
Doug also serves on the Venture Mentoring Service for the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) at The University of Texas, is a technology and business advisor to HealthClicks, is on the board of Technology Advisors Group, and is a member of the RISC-V SIG-HPC and marketing committee. He earned his BS in Electrical Engineering cum laude from Missouri University of Science & Technology.
When not working or mentoring startups, he enjoys travel, wine, restoring classic cars, offroad motorcycling, and SCUBA diving.
Vice President
Kannan recently retired from SLB as Vice President of Digital Operations Support for WesternGeco, after more than 48 years with essentially one company.
He started his career immediately upon completing his Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from the American University of Beirut, and thanks to company mergers and acquisitions, he has had an interesting employment journey – Geophysical Services Inc. (a subsidiary of Texas Instruments), Halliburton Geophysical Services, Western Atlas, Baker Hughes, and finally Schlumberger – all with just one job interview!
He has worked in a variety of disciplines: data processing, technical training, HPC systems design & development, Data Center and Cloud design & operations and senior corporate IT management, and has served in many locations: Beirut, Cairo, London, Madrid, and Dallas, before moving to Houston. Kannan is a member of the Schlumberger Employee Credit Union (SECU) Board and chairs the Technology Committee.
Executive Director
Dave is a senior sales leader at Canonical, the company behind the world’s most well-known Linux operating system, known as Ubuntu.
After some non-IT based career choices early in his life, such as the British Army, he decided to build a professional career and joined Schlumberger. While at SLB he was assigned to BG Group, BP, Shell and others, creating solutions across the gamut of HPC, from Reservoir Simulation to Seismic processing, and he spent many memorable years working at Western Geco.
Looking for a shift from oil and gas, Dave joined Red Hat, excited by the Open-Source world, and worked hard for them to have a solid grounding in the Energy Industry. After IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, in order to stay within the Open-Source ecosystem, he moved to Canonical/Ubuntu.
Dave has been involved in some of the largest HPC projects in the world, including Netflix, Disney, and other technology giants who rely on computational mathematics to compress, uncompress, predict usage and stream data. Today these are some of the most advanced and complex cluster systems in any industry.
If you want to engage Dave outside of work, you don’t need to look much further than your nearest dirt trail, as an avid rider of off-road motorcycles.
Treasurer
Steve has 40 years of experience as a sales and marketing executive in the field of visualization as it applies to VR technologies both from a hardware and software perspective. He has experience in the vertical markets of Academic, Energy, Government, Manufacturing, Medical and Transportation.
He has established and managed direct sales organizations, marketing organizations and alternate distribution channels for two global computer graphics companies. Successfully established joint marketing relationships with a number of organizations in the Visualization market space allowing for significant revenue growth in the organization he has worked in. Originally from Denver, Colorado, Steve has resided in Los Angeles, CA, Portland, Oregon and currently in Richmond, TX.
He is currently President of SL Consulting, a Sales and Marketing Consulting Company and past President of the Society of High Performance Computing Professionals, an HPC 501c3 user group organization, Greater Houston Partnership Ambassador and President of Board of Governors at Pecan Grove County Club.
Secretary
Independent Consultant
Scott is a 50 year veteran of the HPC sector, starting out as a night shift computer operator at Western Geophysical while studying Electrical Engineering at the University of Houston, and working up through roles in software development, end user support, porting and optimization of seismic and navigation codes, systems support and technology evaluation. Moving to the vendor side of the table in 2000, Scott was a system architect and staff engineer for IBM, Cray Inc, and HPE, working with customers to implement HPC solutions in the energy sector, education, weather and climate modeling and engineering.
During his career Scott worked in a number of roles on systems ranging from SEL minicomputers to Fujitsu, Thinking Machines, IBM and Cray supercomputers as well as dedicated accelerators like the FPS AP120/190, Star ST100 and IBM CellBE. He also served as a member of SHARE’s Numerically Intensive Computing committee, and later as Project Manager of the SHARE SP Project. At Cray, Scott contributed to the project that led to the 7 of the top 10 HPC systems on the November 2024 Top 500 list.
Marketing Director
Lara launched Optimum Design & Consulting, a midtown Manhattan graphic design firm, in 1992. She continues to run it today with the help of a dedicated and talented staff, three of which have been with the company for more than 20 years. Optimum’s initial focus on helping small independent publishers to design and print magazines in the 90s led Lara to co-found Linux Magazine in 1999 and VoIP Magazine in 2004, and her growing communications experience in technology spurred her to start a second business, Xand Marketing, in 2005.
Xand provides marketing strategies, PR, advertising, trade show support, lead generation, and event management for high-tech companies in HPC, AI, Open Source, and related high tech spheres, and has worked with almost 50 firms over its 20-year history. In 2021 Lara returned to her publishing roots, joining TCI Media — publishers of HPCwire, BigDATAwire, and AIwire — as Chief Marketing Officer in a role that includes producing large-scale events such HPC + AI Wall Street.
Lara was an active member of the Graphic Artists Guild between 1992-2003, and served on the National Board for 25 years, including 18 years as an officer (Secretary, Vice President, President, and Immediate Past President). She has also been a member of the New York Chapter of the National Association of Woman Business Owners (NAWBO-NYC) since 1992, including Chapter President from 2004 to 2005, and has been on and off the board for the past 25 years. Lara has won multiple awards for her volunteer work from both entities.
Board Member
Rachel Bielstein has over 12 years IT industry experience, with a major focus on High Performance Computing in the Oil & Gas Sector. During this time, Rachel engaged with The NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) to bring innovative Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning content to Houston for companies in the O&G, Energy and Medical sectors.
Her focus the past 5 years has been on sustainable data center solutions, specifically Immersion Cooling. She is now doing this in a global role with Baltimore Aircoil, where her mission is to ‘Reinvent Cooling to sustain the world’.
Rachel is active in the OCP Immersion Cooling Steering Committee, The Society of HPC Professionals, and several non-profits.
Board Member
Melyssa Fratkin serves as an Education & Training Officer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), where she supports the Communications team for the EuroHPC Virtual Training Academy (EVITA) Project.
She previously served as the Industrial Programs Director at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin, developing and managing strong relationships between industry and academia. She also served as the Communications Chair for the SC20 and SC24 Conferences, and was Co-Founder of the Texas chapter of Women in HPC.
Melyssa is the founding co-chair of Texas Women in HPC, an organization aimed at supporting women and minorities in high performance computing in industry, academia and government across the state of Texas, by engaging in initiatives to raise awareness and broaden diversity in HPC. She also serves as Communications Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC).
Melyssa received a BA from Rutgers University and MBA from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.
Board Member
As an IT Operations Engineer at Shell, Tonya specializes in HPC and AI initiatives, aligning closely with Shell’s sustainability and net-zero goals. She collaborates with industry leaders to accelerate solutions for decarbonizing the data sector.
Tonya’s journey began at Amoco Production as an Oil and Gas Analyst, where she analyzed production data and well performance trends.
Prior to joining Shell she spent 20+ years at IBM and Intel as part of the HPC teams where she was involved in the successful deployment of several large-scale HPC projects. She was deeply involved in supporting global Energy accounts, actively contributed to the advancement of technology solutions tailored to accommodate a wide spectrum of seismic and model reservoir workloads. Tonya also managed a global territory, nurturing relationships with ecosystem partners and crafting innovative solutions for scalability in broader markets.
Board Member
Lou Marchant is originally from Wyoming and moved to Texas to go to school. She received a BS in Architecture as a Master Builder from UT Arlington and a MS in Civil Engineering from Southern Methodist University specializing in structures and materials.
To put herself through school, Lou bought and sold British sports cars, worked as a Steel Detailer and was a Resident Engineer at various airports for navigational installations. After college she became Frito Lay’s Corporate Architect and Structural Engineer using Finite Element Analysis and Computational Fluid Dynamics products from the Rand Group. This introduced her into the world of HPC using larger computer systems to innovate faster.
Lou then joined the Rand Group to work on special products and was also introduced to Cray Research and the world of supercomputers. At the time, Gene Amdahl was going after Cray Research with his own idea for a supercomputer and started Elxsi Computers. Lou joined Elxsi working on special projects for the soon to be released supercomputer. In the end, the computers were 50 years ahead of their time and the materials were not available to build the systems. Lou ended up moving to Cray Research as part of the Business Systems Division. The BSD team designed a system to solve HPC business problems which were as computationally intense as engineering simulations.
Three years later, Cray Research was sold to Silicon Graphics and the Cray BSD group was then sold to Sun Microsystems. At Sun, Lou was Board Chair of the 50 Data Center Ambassadors and Product Boss for the E10k, E15K, E20k and the E25k driving the division to a multi-billion a year product line.
After 14 years Sun was sold to Oracle Corp. and Lou joined IBM as a Pureflex Computer Specialist focused on solving HPC problems for Aerospace and Defense companies. She was successful until IBM sold the Pureflex Systems to Lenovo. Lou then joined Cray Computers as an Account Executive. While at Cray Computers, Lou attended an Aerospace Conference, and the biggest request was to have the capability to run various workflows which normally takes a Cray or large cluster but do it in the cloud. Later that year, Lou was introduced to Rescale, Inc and they had a control plane for running large engineering simulations in the cloud. Shortly after learning about Rescale, she joined the company and has been working with companies to do HPC in the cloud for over five years.
Outside of HPC, Lou is a Driving Instructor at the racetrack, enjoys vintage racing, collecting classic British cars and motorcycles and traveling around the globe.
Board Member
Srikanth Gubbala is a global technology leader with over 20 years of experience in High-Performance Computing (HPC), cloud transformation, and infrastructure modernization. In his current role as Head of Global HPC Infrastructure at Applied Materials Inc, he leads a high-performing international team and drives the delivery of scalable HPC solutions while executing a strategic technology roadmap.
He specializes in the end-to-end planning and execution of HPC services, including design, implementation, maintenance, and adaptation. He works closely with CAD and design teams to develop custom solutions that enhance engineering productivity and operational efficiency. He consistently evaluates new technologies to optimize performance, streamline processes, and minimize downtime.
His current focus includes AI physics in semiconductor, computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and quantum computing. Srikanth is also an experienced speaker and panelist, frequently sharing insights on HPC infrastructure, GenAI integration, and digital transformation strategies at industry conferences and forums. He fosters a culture of innovation and continuous improvement, while applying advanced problem-solving skills to proactively address complex HPC challenges.
Srikanth holds a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering, a Program Management credential from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and a Master’s degree in Information Technology from Purdue University Global.
