The Texas Advanced Computing Centre (TACC) at the University of Texas has appointed Dan C Stanzione as executive director. Stanzione has served as deputy director since June 2009 and assumed the new post on 1 July.
The TACC provides high-end advanced computing resources and services to researchers, conducting leading research and development projects, and providing training and education for the local and national scientific community.
Thousands of users from hundreds of institutions have been using TACC's facilities to investigate issues such as gene sequencing, biofuel production, and weather and climate modelling.
‘As deputy director of TACC, Dan has demonstrated his ability to manage the organisation and deliver on its commitments to provide world-class computational facilities, research and support to benefit the nation, state and university,’ said Juan M Sanchez, vice president for research at UT Austin. ‘I am confident that under his new role, TACC will continue to be an internationally recognised centre of excellence in advanced computing, offering our faculty, students and researchers the computational tools and technical support needed to sustain our world-class research enterprise.’
Stanzione is the principal investigator (PI) for several leading projects including the multimillion-dollar National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to deploy and support TACC’s Stampede supercomputer over four years. In Stampede’s first year of operation, 3,500 researchers nationwide used it in science and engineering research. Stanzione will also oversee the introduction of the Wrangler system, a supercomputer designed specifically for data-focused applications.
He served for six years as the co-director of the iPlant Collaboration, a large-scale NSF life sciences cyber-infrastructure in which TACC is a major partner. In addition, Stanzione was a co-principal investigator for TACC’s Ranger and Lonestar supercomputers, large-scale NSF systems previously deployed at UT Austin.
Stanzione said: ‘It is an honour to lead an organisation with the tradition of excellence we have at TACC. It’s a fascinating time in supercomputing, with the underlying technology changing rapidly, and the rise of “big data” and cloud computing changing the marketplace. Computing and data are becoming pervasive in many fields of academic inquiry, including medicine. TACC is poised to capitalise on all of these trends and to help even more researchers make new discoveries in the years to come.'
