ISTI Director Biographies

Gary Grider, Institute Director

As Deputy Division Leader of the High Performance Computing (HPC) Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Gary is responsible for all aspects of High Performance Computing technologies at Los Alamos.  Additionally, Gary is responsible for conducting and sponsoring R&D for keeping the new technology pipeline full to provide solutions to problems in the Lab's HPC environment.  Gary is the past national co-coordinator for the High End Computing Interagency Working Group (HECIWG) File Systems and I/O (FSIO) advisory team, which guides and coordinates all government spending on HEC FSIO R&D.  Additionally, Gary is the Director of LANL's Information Science and Technology Institute (ISTI), which includes the LANL/UCSC Institute for Scientific Scalable Data Management and the LANL/CMU Institute for Reliable High Performance Information Technology.  He is also the LANL PI for the Petascale Data Storage Institute, a DOE SciDAC2 Institute. 

Carolyn Connor, Institute Deputy Director

As Deputy Director of the Information Science and Technology Institute, Carolyn oversees institutionally-focused, strategic partnerships and collaborations with leading research universities in key technology and challenge areas to achieve workforce development, strategic capability development, and to foster scientific excellence.  Carolyn is also Technical Team Leader for the Advanced Concepts Team within LANL's HPC Division, focusing on emerging and advanced technology research and development activities.  Carolyn obtained her Ph.D. in optical science from the University of Arizona Optical Sciences Center.  Research interests have included application of optical fluorescence spectroscopy to detect atherosclerosis; optical data communications issues and technology, including fiber optics, fiber security, DWDM, and optical switching; and HPC issues and technology, including hybrid technologies and architectures and their application.  Carolyn came to LANL from Bell Communications Research where she developed technical requirements for SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) and WDM (Wavelenth Deivision Multiplexing) communications Systems.  She authored the initial technical requirements document for OC-192 (10 Gbps) SONET systems.  At LANL, she led the PixelVizion Development Team.  PixelVizion represented the first application of NPU (network processor unit) technology, an advanced hybrid computing technology, to the field of computer visualization (2006 R&D100 Award, patent pending).