National lab’s Center for Advanced Technology Evaluation names new director

The Center for Advanced Technology Evaluation (CENATE), a proving ground for supercomputing technologies established by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), named Kevin Barker as its new director on Monday.

Through his new role, Barker will lead the team of researchers deploying testbeds and methods to analyze and verify new technologies such as processors, types of memory, and networks.

Barker has developed tools and techniques to model performance of extreme scale hardware and software and has also developed applications for parallel computing. Barker joined PNNL seven years ago from Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“With CENATE, its opportunities are also its challenges,” Barker said. “We want to look further out at the evolution of computers, beyond technologies that are already widely available in the marketplace. We want prototypes, systems that aren’t commercially available yet, as well as promising emerging technologies, to evaluate and guide their development.”

CENATE currently works with petascale supercomputer systems that can perform one quadrillion operations per second and handle petabytes of data. The next step is exascale systems, which can perform one quintillion calculations per second, a one-hundred to one-thousand times increase in performance and data handling capability over today’s largest systems.

“We want to have more strategic interaction with the research community at large,” Barker said. “Up to now, we’ve procured systems and then invited researchers to come test them. Now we want to solicit input and foster collaborations from the community. ‘Is there something you want to do but can’t because you don’t have the right machine?'”

Barker takes over for former PNNL computer scientist Adolfy Hoisie.