CIQ Employee Spotlight: Yoshiaki Senda
We’re excited to spotlight Yoshiaki Senda, another highly valued team member at CIQ. In this interview, you’ll find out the connection between Yoshi’s passion for race cars and HPC, what drew him to work at CIQ, and why he values our company culture.
What's your role in the company, and what do you enjoy most about it?
My role at CIQ is an HPC Solutions Architect. The thing I enjoy the most is that we have the opportunity to work with a wide range of different stakeholders, both inside and outside the company – from customers, prospects, partners, and collaborators to various teams at CIQ, including business development, sales, PR, product, engineering, and finance. The opportunities to grow and be inspired in this role through a variety of projects are limitless.
How did you become interested in a career in the HPC field?
I love cars, from Formula 1 cars built by big automotive companies to restmod cars built by small local shops, and I was actually in the student formula (F-SAE) team. The process they go through to design, build, and optimize their car, managing the team and their strong passion for it, inspires me a lot. I see the same passion in the HPC field.
I started my career in HPC as a parallel programming engineer. Clients usually have an approximate fixed budget and want to maximize the outcome. I really enjoyed profiling, designing a solution, making a prototype, and benchmarking. Comparing MPI and CUDA was an interesting project for me: there is a wide range of items to compare, such as what libraries we use, achievable simulation size and performance, price and specs for various hardwares from CPU, GPU to storage, and interconnects.
The end users are the drivers, and we as a team build the car that we can win with, both in the drivers' championship and the constructors' championship.
What drew you to CIQ?
While I was spending my time on parallel programming, HPC systems design, and HPC systems provisioning and operation, I gradually became interested in container solutions and I came to strongly agree with the concept of "mobility of compute" that our founder Gregory Kurtzer (et al.) coined in this paper. It solved many pain points we had at that time. After I spent time using Singularity (renamed to Apptainer) for various projects, I began to rethink the HPC computing environment from the ground up. What if we were to design a system that would use the container as a central pillar? And that is when I came across Fuzzball. I talked more and more with the team at CIQ, which ignited my passion and drew me to CIQ.
What do you think sets CIQ apart from other organizations?
We are unique as a team. From operating systems, container solutions, and HPC/AI applications to Enterprise Linux solutions, provisioning, and orchestration frameworks, we cover everything HPC from the toenails to the head. We have world-class engineers for every layer, working together as a team.
The most important thing I want to emphasize here is our company culture at CIQ. Gregory Kurtzer, our founder, is very good at igniting the people’s passion around him and this permeates to the whole team as a culture.
What do you do to stay motivated and inspired in your work?
Working on what I am passionate and excited about keeps me motivated, and I am always inspired by the work around me. I am more than happy when these efforts are recognized both inside and outside the company. Meeting HPC folks through work, both in person and online, is also a fun part of the work. The most important driver for me is that I always want to be a good role model for my beloved children, which definitely keeps me motivated and inspired.
What advice would you give to someone considering a similar career, especially at CIQ?
Share your passion with us :). If you are an HPC enthusiast who wants to revolutionize the HPC landscape, tell us about yourself!
