Panelist 1 : Cristina Beldica, Intel Corporation

Cristina Beldica is a Senior Director at Intel, leading the organization responsible for software products that accelerate HPC and AI workloads, including oneMKL, oneTBB, OpenMP, and other critical technologies for parallel computing. Previously, she led Intel's communication software portfolio, including Intel MPI, oneCCL, Intel SHMEM, and OFI/libfabric. With more than 30 years of leadership experience in high-performance computing, distributed systems, and performance-critical software, Dr. Beldica has overseen the development and deployment of software for some of the world's most advanced computing systems, including the Aurora Exascale supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory. Prior to joining Intel, she served as Associate Director at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and co-Principal Investigator for Blue Waters, a $500+ million leadership class computing system. She conducted independent research and contributed to numerous scientific initiatives spanning materials science, cosmology, and dark energy, with a strong focus on enabling computational science through advanced computing technologies.

Panelist 2 : Neil Mehta, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)

Neil Mehta is a computational chemist with experience in molecular dynamics and kinetic Monte Carlo methods. He has served as an HPC performance engineer, optimizing molecular dynamics codes. Neil has been a co-lead for the NESAP Pathfinding and NESAP for NERSC-10 projects. NERSC Science Acceleration Program (NESAP) is a collaborative activity where NERSC works with the DOE science teams to enable these multi-area science teams from across the country to productively use cutting-edge high-performance computing resources. As co-lead, Neil Mehta provides management guidance to liaisons and teams to set goals that benefit both, NERSC's institutional and resource knowledge while helping science teams achieve goals

Panelist 2 : Peter A Dinda, Northwestern University

Peter Dinda is a professor in the CS Department at Northwestern University and also holds an appointment in the ECE Department. He headed the Computer Engineering and Systems division for five years within the previous EECS Department. He holds a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. He works in experimental computer systems, particularly parallel and distributed systems, and has authored over 140 scientific papers, authored or is a major contributor to several large publicly available codebases, and holds five patents. His research currently involves virtualization and operating systems for distributed and parallel computing, programming languages for parallel computing, privacy in IoT environments, and empathic systems for bridging individual user satisfaction and systems-level decision-making. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. You can find out more about him at pdinda.org

Panelist 4: Dr. Mathias Puetz and Ilan Tayari, NextSilicon

Dr. Mathias Puetz is Director of Technical Pre-Sales at NextSilicon, where he identifies new market areas for Maverick and helps customers reach the full potential of the technology.

He brings 30 years of experience across academic research and industry. His career began at IBM in 2001 as a software consultant and benchmarker, followed by technical and management roles at Cray, HPE and ParTec in HPC benchmarking, solution engineering and technical pre-sales, giving him broad expertise in computing and networking technologies.

Mathias holds a Dr. rer. nat. in theoretical physics from the University of Mainz, conducted his doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, and spent nearly two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Sandia National Laboratories.

He sees himself as an enabler: making things more efficient and unlocking applications that were not possible before

Ilan Tayari is co-founder and vice president of architecture at NextSilicon. He oversees NextSilicon’s research and architecture teams, and also leads all aspects of design and delivery. His teams are responsible for perfecting the system and algorithms that lie at the core of NextSilicon’s technology. Ilan is an accomplished engineer and architect, and brings 20+ years of experience leading the design and development of drivers, compilers, firmware, and software.

Before NextSilicon, Ilan was a senior staff engineer (software) at Mellanox Technologies, where he led the design and development of drivers and software for a high-throughput unicast and multicast router and cryptographic-offload NIC. Before Mellanox, Ilan was a distinguished architect at Integrity Project (acquired by Mellanox Technologies) and held positions at Nocturnus Systems and Cogniview Systems.

Ilan earned a BS in physics and computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is the author of multiple patents.