Jonathan Carter is the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The Computing Sciences Area at Berkeley Lab encompasses the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Division (NERSC), the Scientific Networking Division (home to the Energy Sciences Network, ESnet) the Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division, and the Scientific Data Division.

Carter's research interests are in the evaluation of system architectures and algorithms for high-performance computing, and in computational chemistry and physics simulations. Recently he has been engaged in a project to look at computer architectures beyond the end of Moore's Law and has focused on techniques to perform simulations for computational chemistry using newly developed quantum computing test beds. He brings a unique perspective to his work, formed from using computing resources as a domain scientist, from performing performance analyses of computer architectures, and from his experience in moving large-scale computational systems from idea to reality.

Carter joined Computing Sciences as part of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Division at the end of 1996, working with a broad range of scientists to optimize applications, transition projects from shared-memory vector systems to massively parallel systems, and providing in-depth consulting for materials scientists and chemists using NERSC. He became group leader of the consulting group at the end of 2005. During his time at NERSC, he led or played a lead role in teams that procured and deployed three of the fastest computing systems in the world.

Before coming to Berkeley Lab, Carter worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center with the Center for Computational Chemistry with a focus on developing fast, accurate and usable electronic structure models and software, and generally on chemical problems relevant to IBM's business. During his postdoctoral work at the University of British Columbia, Canada, he participated in some of the first work to use Density Functional Theory to calculate the electromagnetic properties of small molecules. He holds a Ph.D. and B.S. in chemistry from the University of Sheffield, UK.

Area of Interest

• Distributed Computing
• Computer Software
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Other Physical Sciences
• Quantum Information, Computation and Communication

Recent Publications