Bill Gates and Bill Kramer at SC|05	William T.C. Kramer NERSC General Manager NERSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Mail Stop 50B-4230 Berkeley, CA 94720 Tel: 510-486-7577 Email: William Kramer <kramer@nersc.gov>

A Brief Biography of William T.C. Kramer

Bill Kramer is the General Manager of NERSC and Head of the High Performance Computing Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). He is responsible for all aspects of the NERSC Center and shares division-wide management responsibilities for the NERSC Center Division. NERSC is the DOE Office of Science "flagship" computing facility that supports a broad and diverse computational science portfolio.

At NERSC, Bill led the acquisition, testing, and introduction of the early, very large IBM SP and Cray systems, one of first large Opertron/Infiniband clusters, a new Cray XT system, the largest open access IBM SP, the first large T3E, early J-90s, one of the first production Linux clusters, and the HPSS mass storage system. He was instrumental in managing the paradigm shift for NERSC from traditional vector computing to massively parallel and is one of the primary contributors to LBNL's "Science Driven Computer Architecture" initiative, which has yielded ideas like the Virtual Vector Architecture (ViVA) and the "Blue Planet" node. Under his leadership NERSC was first to use checkpoint/restart in a MPP production environment and the first to demonstrate the ability to manage very large capability systems with utilization over 90-95%, among other innovations. Bill led the development and implementation of a new 28,000-square-foot computing facility from advocacy and requirements to implementation. He introduced project planning and metrics for the Computing Sciences directorate, negotiated $100+ million contracts, and led the effort to re-engineer Berkeley Lab’s computer support system, including support for almost 6,000 desktops.

Bill has taught classes, seminars, and tutorials on computing topics, including cluster computing, computer security, computer graphics and visualization, data intensive computing, and high performance computing. He has taught at two universities, worked in private industry, and has been active in computer security investigations. Bill’s research interests include large-scale system management, scheduling, performance evaluation, and the integration of high performance networks and computers.

Bill was the General Chair of the SC 05 conference in Seattle, and before that, served as SCinet Chair and Exhibits Chair. Before SC, Bill founded the national seminar program and the Graphics Special Interest Group for the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society. He was named as one of HPCWire’s “People to Watch in 2005.”

Prior to Berkeley Lab, Bill worked at the NASA Ames Research Center, where he was Branch Chief of the NAS Computational Services. In this role, he was responsible for all aspects of operations and customer service for NASA's principal supercomputer center. He was responsible for putting the first UNIX supercomputer into production and led the introduction of cluster computing at NAS. He also served as Chief of Advanced Air Transportation Technologies Program Office and was responsible for creating and implementing an R&D program for designing revolutionary new Air Traffic Management systems. He holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from Purdue University and a ME in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware . Bill is completing his PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. For further details see Experience. For papers and presentations see Publications.