International Strategic Advisory Committee

In October 2008, Cybera formed an International Strategic Advisory Committee (ISAC). The ISAC provides strategic advice and a diverse international perspective to Cybera, its Board of Directors, and the Government of Alberta. The leading minds who make up this committee include:

		Bill Appelbe, Victorian Partnership For Advanced Computing Bill Appelbe is the founding CEO and Chief Scientist of Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC). VPAC is a state-based research service provider. Appelbe obtained an honours BSc at Monash University and his MASc and PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. Subsequently, he was employed at the University of California, San Diego, then as an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech. He has been employed or funded by companies and organizations including IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, Los Alamos, and Motorola. Appelbe’s research interests include parallel programming tools, software engineering, and software frameworks.
		Richard Fujimoto, Georgia Institute of Technology Richard Fujimoto is Regents’ Professor and the founding Chair of the Computational Science and Engineering Division at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his PhD and MASc from the University of California, Berkeley, respectively in computer science and electrical engineering, and two BSc degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana in computer science and engineering. His publications include three books and several award-winning articles on parallel and distributed simulation. Fujimoto has served as Co-Editor-in-chief of the journal Simulation: Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International, as well as a founding Area Editor for the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation journal.
		Kate Keahey, Argonne National Laboratory Kate Keahey is a Scientist in the Distributed Systems Lab at Argonne National Laboratory and a Fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago. Her research interests focus on virtualization, policy-driven resource management, as well as the design and development of cloud computing infrastructure and tools. Keahey created and leads the open source Nimbus project, which provides an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud computing platform as well as other virtualization tools supporting a science-driven cloud ecosystem.
		Alexander Reinefeld, Zuse Institute and Humboldt University of Berlin Alexander Reinefeld is the Head of the Computer Science Department at Zuse Institute Berlin and a Professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He received his  PhD and MASc from the University of Hamburg. He has been awarded a PhD scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Service and a Sir Izaak Walton Killam Post Doctoral Fellowship from the University of Alberta. Reinfeld has served as an Assistant Professor at University of Hamburg and as the Managing Director at the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing. He co-founded the North German Supercomputing Alliance, the European Grid Forum, the Global Grid Forum, and the German e-science initiative D-Grid. He received an IBM Faculty Award and he has published numerous scientific papers.
		Debashis Saha, eBay Debashis Saha is the Director of Kernel Systems Engineering at eBay. He has held senior management roles at Oracle Corporation’s Server Technologies. Debashis has extensive experience in managing and developing software in areas of distributed computing, database systems, Internet, and grid technologies. He has several patents and publications related to computer systems and very large-scale integration design. Debashis holds a MASc in electrical engineering and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BTech in computer science and engineering from Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur.
		Rob Simmonds, Grid Research Center, University of Calgary Rob Simmonds is the Director of Research for the Grid Research Centre at the University of Calgary. The Grid Research Centre performs research and development into solutions for grid, utility and cloud computing, as well as the use of social networking tools for scientific applications. In addition, Simmonds is the Chief Technology Officer for WestGrid, which provides high performance computing, storage, and collaboration facilities at universities across western Canada. Simmonds holds a PhD in mathematical sciences from the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary.
		Gregor von Laszewski, Center for Advancing the Study of Cyberinfrastructure, Rochester Technical University Gregor von Laszewski is conducting state-of-the-art research in cloud computing and green IT at Indiana University. He has served as the Director of the Service Oriented Science and Grids Laboratory and an Associate Professor of the PhD program in computational science and cyberinfrastructure at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Prior to this, he worked at the University of Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratory as a scientist and a Fellow of the Computation Institute. He received a MASc from the University of Bonn in Germany and a PhD in computer science from Syracuse University. His research interests include green IT, grid, and cloud computing, and general-purpose computing on graphics processing units.
		Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, San Diego Supercomputing Center Nancy holds a BA in mathematics and philosophy and an MASc in aerospace engineering. She has held engineering positions with General Dynamics and General Atomics in San Diego. Since 1993, she has held a variety of positions related to user services with the San Diego Supercomputer Center, including Associate Director of Scientific Computing. Currently, Wilkins-Diehr is the Area Director for the TeraGrid Science Gateways program, which enables scientists to develop web and client server interfaces to high performance computing, data, and visualization resources.
		Brian Unger, University of Calgary Brian Unger is the Executive Director of the Grid Research Centre at the University of Calgary. Unger is a Special Advisor for the joint Cambodia-Canada project, Informatics for Rural Empowerment and Community Health, and a Co-Principal Investigator for WestGrid. He has served as the founding President and Chief Executive Officer of iCORE, the founding President of Netera Alliance (now Cybera), the founding Chair of C3.ca Inc, and the founding President and Chief Executive Officer of Jade Simulations. His list of awards includes the IWAY Public Leadership Award for outstanding contributions to Canada’s information society and the ASTech award for Innovation in Alberta Technology for his research in parallel simulation and distributed computation.