Blake G. Fitch IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (bgfus.ibm.com). Mr. Fitch is a Senior Software Engineer. He joined the IBM Research Division in 1985 as a student. He received a B.S. degree in computer science from Antioch College in 1987 and remained at IBM to pursue interests in parallel systems. Mr. Fitch's research interests are in application frameworks and programming models suitable for production parallel computing environments. Practical application of this work includes contributions to the transputer-based control system for the IBM CMOS S/390* mainframes (IBM Boeblingen, Germany, 1994) and the architecture of the IBM Automatic Fingerprint Identification System parallel application (IBM Hursley, UK, 1996). Mr. Fitch joined the Blue Gene system project in 1999 as the application architect for Blue Matter, a scalable molecular dynamics package.

Aleksandr Rayshubskiy IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (arayshuus.ibm.com). Mr. Rayshubskiy received an M.E. degree in computer science from Cornell University in 2002. He worked in the Biomolecular Dynamics and Scalable Modeling Group within the Computational Biology Center at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 2000 as an intern, joining the group as a full-time software engineer in 2003. Mr. Rayshubskiy worked primarily on the development of the Blue Matter molecular dynamics package. His current research interests include parallel applications, load balancing, performance tuning, and lower-level hardware interfaces to the application.

Maria Eleftheriou IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (mariaeus.ibm.com). Dr. Eleftheriou is a researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. She holds an M.S. degree in engineering and a Ph.D. degree in theoretical and computational chemistry, both from Brown University. She has worked the past few years mainly on the Blue Gene Project. In particular, she has made contributions to the design and implementation of parallel algorithms, parallel applications, and parallel programming models, and studied the performance of parallel scientific applications for the Blue Gene/L architecture. Another area of Dr. Eleftheriou's interest is large-scale simulations addressing questions in the field of biology, particularly in the area of protein folding.

T. J. Christopher Ward IBM United Kingdom Limited, Hursley House, Hursley Park, Winchester, Hants SO21 2JN, England (tjcwuk.ibm.com). Mr. Ward graduated from Cambridge University in 1982 with a first-class honors degree in electrical engineering. He has worked for IBM in various hardware and software development roles, always finding ways of improving performance of products and processes. He was a member of the IBM Computational Biology Center at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 2001 to 2004, arranging for the Blue Gene/L hardware and compilers and the Blue Matter protein folding application to work effectively together and achieve the performance entitlement. Mr. Ward currently works for IBM Hursley as part of the IBM Center for Business Optimization, enabling customers of IBM to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the rapidly decreasing cost of supercomputing services.

Mark E. Giampapa IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (giampapaus.ibm.com). Mr. Giampapa is a Senior Engineer in the Exploratory Server Systems Department. He received a B.A. degree in computer science from Columbia University. He joined the IBM Research Division in 1984 to work in the areas of parallel and distributed processing, and he has focused his research on distributed memory and shared memory parallel architectures and operating systems. Mr. Giampapa has received three IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards for his work in distributed processing, simulation, and parallel operating systems. He holds 15 patents, with several more pending, and has published ten papers.

Michael C. Pitman IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (pitmanwatson.ibm.com). Dr. Pitman received his Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 1995 from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He joined the Biomolecular Dynamics and Scalable Modeling Group within the Computational Biology Center at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and continued work in the area of computational drug design methods. He began a leading role in the Blue Gene Protein Science program in 2001, focusing on large-scale membrane and membrane protein simulation. His research interests are focused on understanding the nature of protein–membrane interactions. Dr. Pitman conducts large-scale all-atom simulations of membrane proteins in explicit, biologically relevant environments.

Jed W. Pitera IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (piteraus.ibm.com). Dr. Pitera is a Research Staff Member in the Science and Technology Department at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His research focuses on the use of computer simulation to address questions in biology and chemistry, particularly in the areas of protein folding, molecular recognition, and self-assembly. He received undergraduate training in biology and chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. He subsequently pursued graduate studies in biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco. He pursued similar work in a postdoctoral position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, where his research focused on novel methods of calculating free energies for ligand design. He has been a member of the IBM Blue Gene Project Science and Application team since February of 2001. Dr. Pitera is also an adjunct assistant professor in the UCSF Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.

William C. Swope IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (swopealmaden.ibm.com). Dr. Swope has been engaged with the IBM Blue Gene Protein Science Project since 2000, with strong emphasis on biomolecular simulation methodology and the development of practical techniques to simulate protein folding kinetics and thermodynamics. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry and physics from Harvard University and his Ph.D. degree in quantum chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. He performed postdoctoral research on the statistical mechanics of solvation and condensed phases in the chemistry department at Stanford University. Dr. Swope maintains a number of scientific relationships and collaborations with academic and commercial scientists involved in the life sciences, specifically related to drug development.

Robert S. Germain IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (rgermainus.ibm.com). Dr. Germain manages the Biomolecular Dynamics and Scalable Modeling group within the Computational Biology Center. He holds an A.B. degree in physics from Princeton University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Cornell University. Since 2000, Dr. Germain has been responsible for the science and associated application portions of the Blue Gene Project. His current research interests include the parallel implementation of algorithms for high-performance scientific computing, the development of new programming models for parallel computing, and applications of high-performance computing to challenging scientific problems in computational biology. Dr. Germain is a member of the IEEE, the ACM, and the American Physical Society.

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