Transmission 001

I read my esteemed colleague’s blog post here and thought, “I should write something similar, but shorter and not nearly as inspiring.”

Hello. My name is Glen Otero and I am the Director of Scientific Computing,… checks notes… Genomics, AI, & ML at CIQ. They told me that VP of Sarcasm wasn’t a real thing. They wouldn’t even meet me half way with VP of Skepticism. So I’m settling for the next best thing I’m good at.

The 411

Who 

As you might’ve guessed, my academic background is in biology. Microbiology and immunology to be exact. During my grad school days, I only had access to first-generation DNA sequencing and no one was talking about Coronaviruses. After my post-doc in the Infectious Disease Laboratory at the Salk Institute, I became interested in computational models of the immune system. A short stint at the San Diego Supercomputing Center served as an onramp to the world of HPC and bioinformatics. That was more than twenty years ago. Since then I’ve grabbed and swung on many different vines in the HPC jungle. 

What 

What is HPC? For the past several years, I’ve been categorizing all the work I do under the umbrella of Scientific Computing because I think the various definitions of HPC people throw around are too narrow. Not wrong, just insufficient for my purposes. My purpose? Enable scientists, healthcare workers, public health officials, doctors and anyone else who has a hypothesis or time-to-treatment problem harness the requisite compute resources wherever and whenever they need it. That’s not HPC. I call that “HPCIQ.”

How 

Leverage HPC RAW

HPC RAW (my acronym; not an official product) isn’t a new professional wrestling league. It stands for HPC with Rocky, Apptainer, Warewulf. Think of these products as  the recognized toolset that we are using to deliver on the HPCIQ vision. There will be others. 

Why

During my Roy Batty moment I want to be able to say things like, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… AI assistants for hire off the shoulder of Otero… I watched sequencers glitter in the dark near the lunar gateway.” 

Where 

Everywhere

When 

Now

You have been warned.