Keynote Speakers

Andy Mason

Director Europe, D Wave UK Limited

Topic : Unlock the Power of Practical Quantum Computing Today

Andy joined D-Wave in 2014 as European Sales Director, (based in the UK), leading D-Wave’s business across European where there are now many customers across a diverse range of industries. Prior to joining D-Wave Andy spent 8 years with Cray in the supercomputing business, where he formed partnerships that included UK government, weather forecasters (UK Met Office and ECMWF) as well as UK universities, and major research laboratories. Andy has also held marketing and technical roles in the telecommunications industry including Nortel Networks, Newbridge Networks and Gandalf Digital Systems. He has a wealth of experience in sales, marketing and technical support and holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Nottingham.

Murray Thom

Vice President of Quantum Business Innovation, D Wave UK Limited

Topic : Unlock the Power of Practical Quantum Computing Today

With over 20 years of experience in the quantum computing industry. In previous roles at D-Wave he was responsible for the development and delivery of the Leap quantum cloud service and the Ocean open source tools. He has led teams engaged in customer projects related to algorithms, applications, and performance testing. He has even assembled a few early quantum computers by hand.

Andreas Fichtner

Professor of Seismology & Wave Physics, Department of Earth Sciences , ETH Zurich

Topic: Fast and Automated Global-scale Waveform Inversion

Andreas Fichtner is Professor of Seismology and Wave Physics in the Department of Earth Sciences at ETH Zurich. His research is focused on the development of waveform inversion techniques, including a diverse range of aspects, such as numerical wave propagation through complex media, high-performance computing, large-scale data analysis, Bayesian inference and Monte Carlo methods, as well as effective medium theory. Though most applications are in seismic imaging for deep Earth structure, his group actively engages in technology transfer to medical imaging and material testing. Andreas Fichtner is the author of 5 books on applied mathematics and geophysics, and of around 130 research papers in various international journals. He received early career awards from the American Geophysical Union and from the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics. In addition to ETH Zurich, he has been affiliated with LMU Munich, Utrecht University, Stanford University and the Australian National University.

Aaron Andersen

Group Manager - Advanced Computing, NREL

Topic: NREL HPC Systems - Applications Transforming Energy

Aaron Andersen oversees NREL's Advanced Computing Operations group within the Computational Sciences Center, providing highly energy-efficient, high-performance computing (HPC), on-prem cloud, and cloud technologies for research across the laboratory. He has crosscutting expertise in system architecture, engineering, and operations. Aaron is interested in data center design, advanced computing, and optimization.

His professional experience includes:

HPC oversight: program manager and project manager for Top-500 Systems, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
Management: team leadership and management of primarily systems engineers
Leadership: planning, design, construction, and transition to operations of the NCAR Wyoming Supercomputing Center.

Peter Messmer

Director of EMEA HPC Devtech - NVIDIA

Topic: Towards user centric workflows in HPC

Peter Messmer is the director of EMEA HPC Devtech at NVIDIA. He and his team work on tools and technologies to help clients use the NVIDIA compute platform to accelerate their scientific discovery processes. Activities include the acceleration of HPC codes, incl seismic applications, as well as visualization and interactive digital twins, incl Earth-2. Peter holds an MSc and PhD in physics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, with a specialization in kinetic plasma physics and nonlinear optics.

Stéphane Requena

Directeur Technique & Innovation - CTO, GENCI

Topic: Jules Verne, toward a European Exascale and Quantum Computing ambition

Stéphane Requena is Director Technology and Innovation at GENCI the French agency in charge of implementing the national strategy in HPC, HPDA, AI and now hybrid HPC+quantum computing.

At GENCI since 2007 Stéphane and his team with the support of the 3 national computing centers are involved in upfront technological watch activities, participation into procurements activities at the national and international level, dissemination of the use of HPC and awareness rising within academia and industry, participation into European projects (EPI, PPI4HPC, PRACE-xIP, EXDCI, EUPEX, HPCQS, EuroQCS-France…) and initiatives (PRACE aisbl, EuroHPC INFRAG and now Jules Verne Exascale consortium), roadmapping exercise (EESI, EXDCI, PRACE Scientific Case) and development of new services toward quantum computing (HQI), link with scientific instruments, urgent computing / decision making…

Previously he has been during 10 years in charge of the HPC facilities at Institut Français du Pétrole and involved into optimisation and parallelisation of oil & gas (geology, seismic, reservoir modelling) and automotive applications. He also worked in CS a French service company in parallelising applications in the field of energy for EDF and CEA.