New Hires Added to OSC-Springfield Workforce

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio (Sep 7, 2005) — 

"These new hires will provide systems and user support for the equipment located in Springfield," said Kevin Wohlever, OSC-S Director. "We are excited to bring these quality people on board and look forward to the contributions that they will make to our operations."

As systems developer/engineer, David Bertram leads support of the Apple Cluster that will serve a large number of OSC users and provide a testing environment on this unique architecture. His future goals at OSC are to make project users' lives easier and to maintain staff machines.

Bertram graduated with a bachelor's degree from Ohio University and became a system administrator/design engineer for a small web hosting company in Ohio. He was born in Springfield, Ohio, and grew up in Fairborn, Ohio. Currently, Bertram resides in Enon, Ohio and enjoys playing golf in his spare time. He is married and has three dogs -- two German Shepherds and one Mastiff.

OSC's new systems specialist, Jayanthi Natarajan, is responsible for installing and testing the Lustre file system on a Lustre cluster and Cray XD1. Lustre is a high performance file system that enables thousands of nodes to share storage. Soon, she will be configuring the Lustre file system. In the future, Natarajan would like to delve into the fields of programming and databases.

Natarajan has professional experience in telecommunications, marketing and biomedical engineering research. She has worked as a system and application support person, programmed in C and C++, and created Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). Her experience is primarily with Sun machines.

Natarajan graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Madras, in India, and received her master's degree in computer science from the University of Kentucky. When she's not working, she likes to spend time with her family and participate in social and religious activities.

Yuan Zhang works for OSC Springfield as a systems developer/engineer. Her duties include providing support for bioinformatics software and the high performance computing (HPC) user community. She is part of OSC's Science and Technology Support (STS) group.

Zhang previously worked as a research assistant in a computational biology program at Carnegie Mellon University and also as a research associate at The Ohio State University (OSU) Medical Center.

Zhang received her bachelor's degree in biology from Peking University in China and master's degree in biology from Iowa State University. She also has a master's degree in computer science from SUNY-Binghamton. In her spare time, Zhang enjoys spending time with her 2 1/2- year-old daughter, reading, listening to music, crafting, and camping.

OSC-S is funded through a $6 million grant from a 2004 Department of Energy (DOE) Appropriations headed by Representative David Hobson (R-Springfield). Hobson collaborated with the Turner Foundation, Clark County government and The Greentree Group in support of the OSC-Springfield bill, passed in December 2003. According to Hobson, the new center will not only benefit the high-tech research community, it will also create high paying jobs in the Springfield area.

About OSC-Springfield

The OSC-S is an extension of the Columbus-based Ohio Supercomputer Center. OSC's mission is to foster technology, education and computer networking among Ohio's colleges and universities. Temporary OSC-S offices are now in place adjacent to Springfield City Hall. OSC-Springfield is anticipated to move into permanent housing at the Prime Ohio Corporate Park by summer 2006.

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