Dr. Rob Pennington,
CTO National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Rob Pennington, the Deputy Director for NCSA, oversees the activities in all of NCSA's directorates to ensure that the scientists and engineers using NCSA's resources and services see a unified, seamless environment that brings the most advanced technologies to bear on their problems. He is also responsible for coordinating major campus- and region-wide efforts to build an integrated cyberinfrastructure and he continues to lead the center's Innovative Systems Laboratory, which explores the applicability of new technologies to scientific and engineering applications.
He is the Deputy Project Director for the NCSA Blue Waters "leadership computing" project for the acquisition and deployment of NSF's sustained petascale system. He has served as the Chief Technology Officer and interim NCSA Director and was the architect for the first generation TeraGrid cluster systems as well as leading the software program for the first years of the NSF TeraGrid. His Ph.D. in Astronomy was granted by Rice University in 1985.