Dave Cowley

Cowley is the capability lead for EMSL’s Molecular Science Computing capability. Primarily, he provides terascale supercomputing and petascale data storage services for EMSL users. His operations team performs engineering, as well as implementation and operations of high-end computing hardware, operating systems, and software. Since joining PNNL, Cowley has been managing large computer systems to support PNNL business and research. Since the early 1990s, he has been at the forefront of PNNL’s UNIX and Linux system administration, instituting many practices that remain in use today. When he took responsibility for a 128-node IBM SP/2 supercomputer in the late 1990s, Cowley made the transition from business-oriented database server administration to high-performance technical computing. Following that success, he joined EMSL in 2001, where his technical work has focused on large-capacity commodity storage. He is the architect of three generations of the EMSL data archive.