H. Birali Runesha

Hakizumwami Birali Runesha is the Director of Research Computing for the University of Chicago, where he provides leadership and vision for advancing all aspects of research computing strategies at the University. He is responsible for the design, configuration, and administration of centrally managed High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems and related services across the University. In addition, he provides access to advanced technical expertise, user support, advice and training, and access to the University’s HPC facility to the research community.

Runesha is a seasoned professional who brings to the University of Chicago HPC management leadership and more than 17 years of experience in high performance computing and scientific software development. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil engineering at Old Dominion University. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he served as Director of Scientific Computing and Applications at the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) managing the scientific computing, biological computing, visualization and application development groups. In addition to overseeing strategic planning of HPC resources and leading annual procurement of supercomputing resources at MSI, Runesha created the MSI Application software development group and the MSI Scientific Data Management Laboratory to meet the evolving data management and database development needs of university researchers. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, he was a research scholar at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology developing parallel computing algorithms for engineering applications, a research associate for the Multidisciplinary Parallel-Vector Computer Center at Old Dominion University and an Assistant Professor at the University of Kinshasa.

Runesha has developed open source software programs and fast parallel solvers for large-scale finite element applications. He served as principal investigator on a number of research grants and is the author of a number of journal articles, proceedings and conference papers. He has given many invited talks, seminars, courses, and workshops on various HPC topics.