November 16th, 2016
Data Vortex President Carolyn Coke Reed Devany delivered the opening remarks at the annual DV Supercomputing Party held in Salt Lake City. Drawing upon the company’s history and personal dedication to improving the role of women and minorities in high performance community, her words navigated a tested industry through a period of political and financial uncertainty. An abridged version of her words:
“On behalf of Data Vortex, we welcome and thank you for being here with us this evening.
I’d like to start by introducing the team we have here at SC:
- Chief Engineer, Ron Denny and his darling wife Nancy
- Chief Software Engineer, Jay Rockstroh
- Plexus Principal Engineer, Mike Ives
- HPC Systems Manager, John Lockman
- Director of Finance, Keith Lackey
- DV SC16 Event Coordinator, Dee Cadena
- Outreach Coordinator/Data Vortex Gen 3, Reed Devany
- Data Vortex Chairman and Inventor, Coke Reed and his wonderful wife, Sylvia
This summer Coke and I were visiting friends in Cheltenham, England in mid-June, just prior to ISC in Frankfurt. One week later, on June 23, the Brexit Referendum passed. As Americans we felt the same shock as our friends in the EU and Great Britain – grave concerns about the potential uncertainties that this action would have on the future of British and European funding toward HPC and scientific pursuits.
Last week, here in the United States, we experienced another stunning shock that has the frightening potential to dramatically alter our community’s landscape not just in terms of funding, but the very nature of the critical research in science and security that everyone of us here participate in every day to assure the ongoing discovery and protection of this wondrous planet and all of its inhabitants.
Thankfully thoughtful members of our community are drawing on their wisdom and vision in an attempt to keep the importance of HPC on the radars of our country’s new leadership. But there are efforts that all of us need to pursue, and while we cannot yet define what our actions will be we know that our industry is committed to moving forward with a dedication to inclusiveness and diversity. We applaud the steps the Committee has taken in this direction. The women in this room, across this community will not step aside and their numbers will continue to grow. Data Vortex is proud to support Women in HPC and I am honored to call our leader, Toni Collis, a friend.
Let’s step back a moment though and look at the history that brings us all here together tonight:
In 1936 the famous Polish mathematician, Stanislav Ulam, posed a mathematical problem involving the movement of particles within a defined space.
40 years later, in 1976, Coke Reed, who had the privilege of visiting with Dr. Ulam at Los Alamos, solved that problem with the Polish mathematician Krystyna Kuperburg.
20 years later, in 1996, Coke realized that an instantiation of the solution to this problem could be used as a design of a dynamical system that would carry data rather than particles and thus the Data Vortex network was born.
20 years later, in 2016 (80 years after Ulam posed his mathematical problem), we find ourselves here: in this beautiful place and time celebrating the incredible relationships we have formed with friends, users, partners, and customers.
Tonight, I have invited two Data Vortex visionaries to speak: Dr. Adolfi Hoise Director of PNNL’s Center for Advanced Technology Evaluation, and Dr. Thomas Sterling Director of Indiana University’s Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies.”