New Employee Profiles - March 2016

Quincey Koziol, NERSC

Quincey Koziol

As the new Principal Data Architect in NERSC’s Data & Analytics Services Group, Quincey Koziol will help lead the facility’s data management efforts. Some of his day-to-day tasks will include investigating object storage technologies, helping to define the storage sub-system for the NERSC-9 supercomputer, as well as providing technical leadership on the HDF5 project.

Koziol comes to NERSC with extensive experience—more than 25 years—in tackling data management challenges. As the Principal Software Architect for the HDF5 project, Koziol spent the last 11 years developing the HDF5 I/O (input/output) middleware package. He led the project’s HPC development efforts and headed its technical division. Before that Koziol spent 15 years at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he helped ensure that scientists were using the appropriate software to accomplish the task at hand, and that they were getting the best HPC performance possible.

“I first became interested in computing around age 10, after tagging along with my father to play on the mainframes that he was writing business applications on.  I started writing games on an Apple 2+ when I was 14, and have been building software ever since,” says Koziol.

Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Koziol moved to Champaign, Illinois to pursue his Bachelors of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign. He would stay in Champaign for another 30 years, before relocating to California to work at NERSC.  

In his free time, Koziol enjoys spending time with his four children and wife of 20 years. He also participates in activities at church, plays tennis and hopes to resume studying martial arts again.