Seager honored by Federal Computer Week

Mark Seager, LLNL assistant department head for Advanced Technologies, has been selected by Federal Computer Week magazine as one of this year’s "Federal 100" top executives from government, industry and academia who had the greatest impact on government information systems in 2008.

Seager was selected because of: "the difference you made in the way agencies, companies and government officials develop, acquire, manage and use information technology." The nomination was submitted by industry collaborators for Seager’s leadership of the Hyperion Project, a collaboration with 10 industry leaders to advance next-generation Linux high performance computing clusters.

"Hyperion represents a new way of doing business. Collectively we are building a system none of us could have built individually," Seager said when the project was announced at SC08 last November. "The project will advance the state-of-the-art in a cost-effective manner, benefitting both end users, such as the national security labs, and the computing industry, which can expand the market with proven, easy to deploy large-and small-scale Linux clusters."

Hyperion brings together Dell, Intel, Supermicro, QLogic, Cisco, Mellanox, DDN, Sun, LSI and RedHat to create a large scale testbed for high-performance computing technologies critical to the NNSA’s work to maintain the aging U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without underground nuclear testing, and industry’s ability to make petaFLOP/s (quadrillion floating operations per second) computing and storage more accessible for commerce, industry and research and development.

Most recently, Seager led the Laboratory’s procurement of the Sequoia supercomputer and its predecessor system, Dawn, both next generation BlueGene machines built by IBM. Sequoia, a 20-petaFLOP/s (quadrillion floating operation per second) system to be delivered in 2011, and Dawn, a 500-teraFLOP/s (trillion floating operation per second) machine currently being installed in the TSF, will be used for stockpile stewardship research by the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program.

Those named to the Federal 100 list will be recognized in the March 23 issue of Federal Computer Week magazine and at a black-tie gala held March 25 at the Ritz-Carlton in McLean, Va. During the event, Federal Computer Week will bestow Eagle awards on two Federal 100 winners, one government official and one industry executive to recognize their extraordinary contributions to the federal IT community in 2008.

Look for a more in-depth profile of Seager’s contributions to LLNL high-performance computing programs in an upcoming edition of Newsline .