Nate Benson to Lead High Performance Computing

Nate Benson has been appointed acting director of High Performance Computing (HPC) at Utah State University. The appointment was announced by Brent Miller, vice president for research at USU.  

 

Benson will take on the responsibilities vacated by Thomas Hauser, who has been the director of HPC@USU since 2005. Hauser leaves USU Nov. 1 to begin a new role as director of research computing at Northwestern University.  

 

Benson joined HPC@USU in October 2008 as the lead systems administrator.  He continues in that role, bringing with him nearly two decades of experience managing and designing large computer clusters, data centers and storage area networks. He also has mentored and managed many IT system administrators in business environments. For the past year, working with Hauser, Benson has designed a lean but strong hardware infrastructure of new equipment to expand USU research computing into the future.

 

“USU is grateful to Thomas Hauser for the leadership he has provided in the development of HPC@USU over the past four years” said Miller. 

 

Hauser planned and hosted two conferences, “Opportunities for HPC in Agriculture and Life Sciences” in 2007, and Utah Advanced Computing Summer Institute, in 2008. He also was the leader in forming the Utah Cyber infrastructure Consortium for research computing.

 

Several hundred USU faculty and students in five colleges have used HPC@USU to accomplish their research, and there are currently approximately 70 active users. 

 

“The USU Research office and faculty and student researchers look forward to continuing HPC activities under the capable leadership of Nate Benson,” Miller said.