We are pleased to welcome Hannah Inzko and Rob Smith to Wake Forest University IS!

Hannah joins Information Systems as the Director of Academic Technology. Most recently Hannah served as the Director of Learning Innovation and Faculty Engagement at the University of Miami. She has received broad recognition as a leader in educational technology. In addition to working closely with IS teams, Hannah will work in close collaboration with the Teaching and Learning Collaborative, The Office of Online Learning, ZSR Library staff, and the Instructional Technology Group (ITG) to enrich educational technologies and the support services that enhance teaching, learning and research.

Rob joins Information Systems as the new Director of IT Infrastructure. Most recently Rob served as the Director of Systems and Networks at Davidson College. His expertise and track-record in higher education IT infrastructure have earned him widespread recognition as a creative thought-leader in the transformation of IT services as well as in fostering a spirit of partnership, teamwork and excellence.

Hannah’s office is 2004 and Rob’s office is 2045. Please take a moment to drop by and introduce yourself!

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HPC Happenings

The WFU DEAC Cluster provides the critical infrastructure necessary for researchers to reliably upload research code, perform large scale computations and store their actively utilized results. Compute clusters provide the computational power needed to tackle more advanced scientific problems, opening up the possibility for our students to gain a unique perspective on topics at the forefront of research today. From sciences to the humanities, all Wake Forest University or Wake Forest University School of Medicine faculty members are encouraged to request use of the WFU DEAC Cluster for a course they are teaching. Several courses have already used the cluster to enhance student exposure to the advanced computing environment provided by the University.

Current Projects

iPhone HPC App

The iPhone HPC app will help WFU DEAC cluster users manage and view their submitted computational jobs. The app will allow users to see their list of jobs currently running and/or waiting from SLURM, the job and resource manager. Another goal of the app is to enable users to perform basic job management actions such as cancelling or viewing job details. The project is headed by Prof. Sam Cho and Prof. Daniel Canas from the Computer Science Department, and the work will be developed by a CS graduate student.

Software Engineering Course Project

A group of five students from the Computer Science department are developing HTML and javascript applications for the WFU DEAC Cluster for a class project. The goal of the project is to visually represent a high level cluster status, as well as provide detailed information on node health, job numbers, and cluster utilization. Additionally, the project will refresh these various reports hourly by querying SLURM (the job and resource manager) and integrate them into the cluster's website. The Software Engineering course is a graduate-senior level course in the CS department taught by Prof. Victor Pauca.

Performance Modeling of the DEAC Cluster

Computer Science graduate student and former HPC Team summer-intern, Riana Freedman, is currently employing five distinct benchmarks on the DEAC cluster that provide meaningful metrics of processors, memory, I/O, network and GPU performance. The goal of this project is to model the performance behavior of the different hardware components utilizing algorithm numerical methods. This work is part of her Independent Studies course with Dr. Damian Valles from the IS department and Intro to Numerical Methods course with Prof. Grey Ballard from the Computer Science department.

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