We are a vendor-neutral, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization comprised of members from industry, government, and academia worldwide. Our mission is to educate and connect the HPC & AI user community with the latest technologies and best practices to optimize business processes and promote workforce advancement.

We focus on the high-performance systems used for AI, simulation, cloud computing, quantum computing, and visualization. Our members utilize these technologies in their work in oil & gas, renewable energy, climate modeling, life sciences, manufacturing, financial services, cybersecurity, government, and academia.

Doug Norton, President & Board Chair

Inspire Semiconductor

Kannan Venkataraman, Vice President

WesternGeco, Schlumberger

Kannan recently retired from Schlumberger 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.

Dave Montana, Executive Director

Computer Modelling Group

Dave is the Global VP of Sales for CMG Group. He is deeply involved in Reservoir Simulation, and with CMG’s acquisition of Bluware, also Geology, Geophysics and applying Artificial Intelligence to subsurface interpretation.

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 an effort to expand, he moved to Ubuntu, running the sales operations there, until he was enticed back to Energy with an offer from CMG where he now runs the Global sales org.

Never fully leaving HPC behind, he was 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.

Steve Lutz, Treasurer

SL Consulting

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.

Scott Denham, Secretary

Hewlett Packard Enterprise 

Scott is a solutions architect for HPE, working on current and future HPC and storage solutions in the Pre-Sales team, following their acquisition of Cray. He began his career in IT after being introduced to digital electronics while studying as an avionics technician for the U.S. Air Force Reserves. After training in inertial navigation and radar, he went on to study Electrical Engineering at the University of Houston, and during this time joined Western Geophysical, where his interest in geophysical processing began.

During a 28 year career at Western, he worked in a number of roles on systems ranging from SEL minicomputers to Fujitsu, Thinking Machines and Cray supercomputers.  He served as a member of SHARE’s Numerically Intensive Computing committee, and later as Project Manager of the SHARE SP Project. Scott joined IBM’s HPC Center of Competency / Deep Computing technical team from 2000-2014, assisting customers in design and implementation of HPC solutions, including a number of Top 500 systems.

Lara Kisielewska, Marketing Director

TCI Media

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

Rachel Bielstein​, Board Member

Baltimore Air Coil

Rachel Bielstein has over 12 years IT industry experience, focusing over past 3 years on High Performance Computing in the Oil & Gas Sector. During that 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.

Melyssa Fratkin, Board Member

Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)

Melyssa Fratkin is the Industrial Programs Director at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. In this role, she oversees TACC’s corporate partnerships and government relations activities. Melyssa focuses on developing and managing strong collaborations between industry and academia with the Science & Technology Affiliates for Research (STAR) program.

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.

Tonya Cosby Carter, Board Member

Shell

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.

Lou Marchant, Board Member

Rescale

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.