INDUSTRY

Rob Pennington, long a key member of the leadership team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been named deputy director of the center. As deputy director, Pennington will oversee the activities in all of NCSA's directorates -- Persistent Infrastructure, Cyberenvironments and Technologies, Cyberapplications and Communities, the Innovative Systems Laboratory, and the Advanced Visualization Laboratory -- 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 also will be responsible for coordinating major campus- and region-wide efforts to build an integrated cyberinfrastructure. "This is a critical position at NCSA," said NCSA Director Thom Dunning. "As we build the new Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies, it is critical that we maintain our focus on the unique contributions that NCSA, as a national supercomputing center with 20 years of invaluable experience, can make to enabling scientific discovery and advancing the state of the art in engineering." Pennington also will continue to serve as the leader of NCSA's Innovative Systems Laboratory, driving the center's efforts to realize the future of computing by researching and deploying innovative systems that decrease the cost and/or extend the range of computational science and engineering.