Richard Gerber at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on Monday, March 13, 2017 in Berkeley, Calif. 03/13/17

Richard Gerber, HPC Department Head and Senior Science Advisor at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is taking on a new position as Hardware and Integration Director at the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), a collaborative effort across the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) labs to support exascale computing.

Exascale computing is the ability of computers to make one quintillion (1018) calculations per second, a massive upgrade in compute power that is predicted to drive breakthroughs across a broad range of scientific fields and technologies. The ECP is part of the DOE’s long-term investment in high performance computing technologies to forward its science and engineering missions.

As Hardware and Integration Director, Gerber will oversee software deployment and application integration at DOE compute facilities, as well as developer training and compute allocations for research projects – all with the goal of making sure the DOE computing ecosystem is prepared for exascale computing.

Gerber takes over for NERSC deputy director Katie Antypas and says he looks forward to collaborating further with ECP to help make exascale accessible to researchers.

“I’m happy to have the opportunity to help get capable exascale computing environments into the hands of scientists and engineers,” said Gerber. “ECP has been a driving force behind preparing applications, software, and tools for exascale systems, and I’m looking forward to joining the team and continuing the work of realizing the full potential of these efforts by enabling scientists to run productively on DOE’s largest supercomputers.”