Renowned HPC Expert Joins Next Platform Editorial Team

Former Harvard Computer Science Lead Brings Distributed Systems Experience to Top Publication’s Readers

The Next Platform is proud to announce that former Assistant Dean and Distinguished Engineer for Research Computing at Harvard, Dr. James Cuff, has joined the editorial team in a full-time capacity as Distinguished Technical Author.

As the leading publication covering distributed systems in research and large enterprise, Dr. Cuff rounds out a seasoned editorial team that delivers in-depth analysis from the worlds of supercomputing, artificial intelligence, cloud and hyperscale datacenters, and the many other technology areas that comprise the highest end of today’s IT ecosystems.

Dr. Cuff brings significant real-world, large-scale systems and software experiences to bear following a twenty-year career in what he calls “practical supercomputing.” Among a host of other experiences, James supported the initial teams who annotated multiple genomes at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

We have an audio interview with Dr. James Cuff below, which is part of our regular podcast and audio interview series. Cuff talks about why he is embarking on this journey into tech analysis and what we can expect in the months to come.

Over the last decade, James built a research computing organization from scratch at Harvard.  During his tenure, he designed and built a green datacenter, petascale parallel storage, low-latency networks and sophisticated, integrated supercomputer platforms.  However, more importantly he built and worked with phenomenal teams of people who supported our world’s most complex and advanced scientific research.

Dr. Cuff and his teams often needed to quickly design and implement scalable distributed computing systems.  These systems had handle everything from annotating the human genome, to understanding the formation of galaxies in our early universe, to deep learning with high-capacity, high-speed data environments to help unravel the detailed wiring diagram of the human brain.

Dr. Cuff was most recently in his leadership position at Harvard, and holds a degree in Chemistry from Manchester University and a doctorate in Molecular Biophysics with a focus on neural networks and protein structure prediction from Oxford University.

He is excited to bring his perspectives to The Next Platform editorial team, being a sophisticated end user of technology, but more so as a life-long pragmatic and enthusiastic practitioner of what we need to do “to get the job done.”

It is this wide range of practical HPC experiences that make Dr. Cuff an excellent addition to The Next Platform as they push ahead with another year of following the most interesting computing problems (and solutions) at scale. The publication’s nearly half million monthly readers can expect weekly insights from Cuff and appearances at major industry events.

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