Tim Boerner is a Senior Assistant Director at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he works on different projects that support and enable research on the Urbana-Champaign campus and across the nation. Boerner is the program director for the Illinois Campus Cluster Program (ICCP), co-PI and deputy project director for the NSF-funded Delta advanced computing system recently awarded to NCSA, replacing the Blue Waters Supercomputer as an NSF-funded computing resource on campus. Also, he is the deputy project director for the NSF-funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). Boerner has a B.S. in Computer Science from Florida State University and has worked in many roles across the IT field for almost 25 years. He came to NCSA and the University of Illinois in 2010 and spent his first few years supporting research as a Network Engineer for the ICCP, XSEDE, and the Blue Waters projects before becoming a team leader and eventually moving into leadership roles for the ICCP, XSEDE, campus Research IT, and the recent Delta supercomputing award.In this talk, Boerner will start at the ground level, introducing terminology and concepts used across computing technology that scientists use to conduct research in modern supercomputing environments. He will demystify the concept of "supercomputers" to conduct research and provide advice on what it takes to learn how to use advanced computing resources. Furthermore, he will provide a view of the available high-performance computing resources we have across our campus and the nation to do the computational work necessary to answer the questions that might seem too big to fit into your local server closet.
