Osni Marques Assumes New Leadership Duties for the Exascale Computing Project

By Kathy Kincade

Osni Marques, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), is taking the helm of the ECP Training & Productivity effort as Ashley Barker of Oak Ridge National Laboratory leaves the role for new responsibilities. Image Credit: Thor Swift, Berkeley Lab

Osni Marques, a staff scientist in the Applied Math and Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has been tapped to lead the Training & Productivity (T&P) effort within the US Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project. He takes over for Ashley Barker of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Marques has been involved with T&P for the last five years, working primarily on two initiatives, and he will continue to lead these projects going forward in addition to his new duties as T&P group lead:

• Advancing Software Productivity for Exascale Applications (IDEAS-ECP), which evaluates and disseminates best practices and supporting methods and tools, to improve developer productivity, software sustainability, and scientific reproducibility. He leads the Best Practices for HPC Software Developers Webinar Series (HPC-BP) in IDEAS-ECP
• ECP Training, which consists of identifying training needs in the ECP community, responding to those needs, helping in the organization and implementation of ECP related activities, and coordination and communication of training activities in ECP and DOE computing facilities.

“As we know, software quality is a critical component of quality science, and that is one of the key things the T&P group is focused on,” Marques said. “I’m looking forward to working with the ECP community and facilities to identify potential software training needs going forward.”

As part of these efforts, IDEAS-ECP is already planning the transition to a post-ECP role for training and productivity. “As previous ECP reviews have noted, it is important that this work continues post-ECP, whether at the facilities or through other mechanisms,” Marques added.

At Berkeley Lab, Marques—who has been with the Lab for 26 years—has been involved in developing eigenvalue solvers for applications in engineering, biochemistry, earth sciences, and electronic structure calculations; and algorithms for dense linear algebra calculations in the LAPACK and ScaLAPACK libraries. For the last 10 years, Marques has also been instrumental in organizing and leading Berkeley Lab’s popular Computing Sciences Area Summer Program.