CACR Staff to Receive Service Awards
CACR is proud to announce that five of our employees will receive recognition at Caltech’s 54th annual Service Awards Ceremony, to be held in Beckman Auditorium on Tuesday, June 2, 2009.
Many thanks to Chip, Sharon, Michael, Mark, and Santiago for their many years of service to the institute and to CACR!
- Charles “Chip” Chapman (30 years)
- Sharon Brunett (20 years)
- Michael Aivazis (10 years)
- Mark Bartelt (10 years)
- Santiago Lombeyda (10 years)
Chip Chapman has been employed at Caltech since 1976. After starting in the physics stockroom and lecture hall in East Bridge, he went on to build several microcomputers from scratch with Prof. Ricardo Gomez for data acquisition and analysis in the physics sophomore lab. The project ended as IBM introduced the personal computer. In 1981 Chip worked in high energy physics with Prof. Geoffrey Fox, supporting the first campus network and DEC VAX computers. Later, he managed the Educational Computing Project, delivering over $5M worth of IBM PCs to the campus. In 1990 Chip helped form the Caltech Concurrent Supercomputing Facility, which later transformed into today’s Center for Advanced Computing Research. He held the position of technical supervisor during the era when the world’s fastest supercomputer was running at Caltech. Chip had a central role as liaison to the architect, contractors, and physical plant in the renovation of the Powell-Booth Laboratory for Computational Science, where he presently serves as facilities manager. He was also a main contributor to the high performance computing (HPC) task force report that is helping to define the future of HPC on campus. Chip has worked with students and scientists on many projects and research programs including the CASA Gigabit Testbed, the Scalable I/O Initiative, the Beowulf Project, and Caltech’s Center for Simulation of Dynamic Response of Materials.
Sharon Brunett came to Caltech in 1989 as a Computing Analyst at the Caltech Concurrent Supercomputing Facility (CCSF). CCSF later transformed into today’s Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR), where Sharon is currently a senior computational scientist and manager of the CACR operations group. She determines appropriate hardware and software solutions to meet CACR’s resource needs, and serves as a liaison to research groups all over campus, including projects in astronomy, biology, high energy physics, materials science, and geophysics. Sharon played a major role in Caltech’s Center for Simulation of Dynamic Response of Materials, which provided significant funding to Caltech and CACR for ten years. That project’s success helped in the development of Caltech’s current Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program Center, in which Sharon also plays a significant role. Sharon’s dedicated nature and welcoming attitude have made her a key player in the history, and future, of computational science and engineering at Caltech.