Richard Gerber

Richard Gerber is NERSC's Senior Science Advisor and Head of the HPC Department. Richard has been involved with leading-edge High Performance Computing systems for 30 years, using early Cray vector systems at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the Connection Machine while a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA-Ames Research Center, and many generations of distributed-memory parallel computers as a staff member at NERSC since 1996. He holds a B.S. in Physics from the University of Florida, and a M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

At NERSC he has been at the forefront at providing scalable HPC consulting services to NERSC's users, gathering HPC needs from scientific communities and getting them implemented at the center. As HPC Department Head he oversees the Advanced Technologies, Application Performance, and User Engagement Groups at NERSC. As Senior Science Advisor he coordinates science outreach and engagement efforts and helps communicate the value of scientific computing and science in general.

Richard is keenly interested in automatic collection of HPC performance and runtime data and making it available on the web to help users monitor, debug, and optimize their applications.

Richard was the Deputy Project Lead on the "NERSC 7" procurement of the NERSC Edison Cray XC30 system and leads the Application Performance and User Support effort for the "NERSC 9" Perlmutter system.

Richard has a Ph. D. in physics, specializing in computational astrophysics, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After obtaining his Ph.D., he completed a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at NASA Ames Research Center. His specialty is using N-body and Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics to study colliding galaxies, "ring" galaxies in particular. He has a broad interest in science and particularly in the physical sciences.