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Here are some quick bios and pictures of the bloggers and writers. As you will see they have a great deal of experience despite their youthful appearance. If you run into one of them, don't hesitate to say hi! They enjoy learning that people read their material and found it useful.



Dr. Jeff Layton


Jeff Layton, Ph.D. | Enterprise Technologist

Dr. Jeffrey Layton is the Enterprise Technologist for HPC within Dell. Dr. Layton’s Ph.D. is from Purdue in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. In his 25+ years experience with Supercomputing technologies, Dr. Layton has served in roles as a Professor, Engineer and Scientist at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and Clarkson University, and has led technical efforts for High Performance Computing companies such as Linux Networx, Panasas, and Dell. In these roles he has been a cluster builder, a cluster user and code writer, a cluster administrator, as well as a systems engineer, manager, and benchmark engineer for HPC vendors. He is also an active contributor to multiple open source projects and actively contributes to technical publications both for magazines, books, and for websites.		 Jeff Layton

Dr. Glen Otero:


Glen Otero, Ph.D. | HPC Computer Scientist

Dr. Glen Otero received his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from UCLA in 1995 and his B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois-UC in 1988. Dr. Otero has 20 years of life science industry and research experience and 10 years of high performance computing experience. Dr. Otero has led technical efforts at DoubleTwist, Blackstone Computing, Linux Prophet, Callident, and Orion Multisystems. Before joining Dell, Dr. Otero was a Bioinformatics/HPC Project Leader at SAIC. As a Product Technology Consultant in Dell's Advanced Systems Group, Dr. Otero is responsible for capturing computational biology requirements from customers and incorporating them into HPC design recommendations for Dell's HPC Group. He also works closely with Dell's partners to research and document various aspects of bioinformatics application performance. Dr. Otero is a member of the Board of Directors at Bionformatics.org where he hosts BioBrew, an open source bioinformatics cluster toolkit.
Glen Otero


Dr. Mark Fernandez


Mark Fernandez, Ph.D. | Computer Scientist, Advanced Systems Group

As a Computer Scientist in Dell’s Advanced Systems Group, Dr. Mark Fernandez supports customer/end-user technical efforts for the HPC at Dell group. Dr. Fernandez is responsible for working with customers to capture user requirements and incorporating those requirements into future Dell systems. He also works closely with Dell Engineering throughout the product development cycle.

Dr. Fernandez is an active HPC Community member, discussing HPC technology trends and incorporating that input into Dell roadmaps and future products. His focus remains HPC and other complex solutions.

With more than 20 years of experience with a variety of scientific HPC projects, Dr. Fernandez brings the customer perspective to the HPC at Dell team. Before joining Dell, Dr. Fernandez was a principal systems engineer with SGI for 11 years.

Dr. Fernandez earned his Ph.D. in Scientific Computing from the University of Southern Mississippi, his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern Mississippi and B.S. degrees in Chemistry and Mathematics from Spring Hill College.
Mark Fernandes

Blake Gonzales


Blake T. Gonzales | HPC Computer Scientist

As a Dell HPC Computer Scientist, Blake Gonzales brings a valued end-user perspective to the HPCatDell Team. Having served as a design and installation HPC engineer at ATK, and formerly as a system administrator at Texas Instruments Defense Systems, Blake understands the challenges of architecting computing systems for maximum performance and ROI. One of Blake’s areas of expertise includes designing HPC systems for fault tolerance and reliability.

From a systems standpoint, Blake has worked with a variety operating systems, schedulers, cluster management software, file systems, and applications. His application experience includes:
  • Finite Element Analysis (FEA): Abaqus, ANSYS, NASTRAN, Optistruct, LS-DYNA, STAR-CD, STAR-CCM+
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD): Fluent, CFD++, TetrUSS, Cart3D, Overflow
  • Multi-Physics/Shock/Detonation: ALE3D, CTH
  • Numerics: Matlab, R
Blake received his Master of Computer Science from Colorado State University, where he concentrated on operating systems, computer architecture, and parallel programming. He also has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Louisiana State University with an emphasis in computer engineering, microprocessor/digital design.

Blake Gonzales

Garima Kochhar


Garima Kochhar | Systems Engineer

Garima works in the Dell HPC Engineering team in Austin, Texas. Her current focus is on performance benchmarking. She has has worked on several aspects of HPC in her 6 years at Dell.

Garima has a Masters degree in Computer Science from The Ohio State University. Her Bachelor of Science is in Computer Science as well and from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India.		 Garima Kochhar

Calvin Jacob


Calvin Jacob | Senior Development Engineer, Massively Scale-out Systems Team - BDC

Calvin works with the HPC Solutions Engineering Team at the Bangalore Design Center. He has a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology-Sikkim, India. His is currently focused on cluster packages and interconnects. His area of expertise is server and hardware technology. He has been with Dell for the last 4 years where the initial 2 years were spent with the Product Test and System Test Teams. Prior to Dell, Calvin has worked with IBM and HP. 		Calvin Jacob

John Fragalla


John Fragalla | HPC Senior Technologist

As a High Performance Computing (HPC) Senior Technologist, John Fragalla brings global expertise to Dell’s HPC team. He is a leader on many HPC opportunities globally, providing technical advisement on future product development and direction within Dell and the industry to architect solutions that meets customer requirements. He leads training sessions to increase Dell’s HPC knowledge and is one of the HPC solution development leads. John works with engineering on product definition by providing global customer requirements to influence product specification on new product direction for the HPC community. John is considered one of the primary HPC resources, working with the global HPC community, and is viewed by customers, external partners, and Dell employees as a leader in his field.

Prior to joining Dell’s HPC team, John Fragalla was a Global HPC Principal Engineer at Sun Microsystems and a software developer previous to Sun. John holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Irvine and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, specializing in Computer Architecture and Parallel Computing, from the University of Southern California.

Christine Fronczak


Christine Fronczak | HPC Marketing Manager

Christine Fronczak is the HPC Marketing Manager at Dell responsible for all marketing programs across Dell HPC solutions. In this role, Christine utilizes innovative marketing programs to enrich the HPC Community including Multimedia Supplements from Scientific Computing (e.g., www.HPCSource.com/Visualization), Enabling Discovery technical workshops (https://www.etouches.com/HPCBoston2011), as well as helping to drive the growth of Dell's active HPC Community at www.HPCatDell.com. Examples of comprehensive technical materials can be found at www.DellHPCSolutions.com.

Christine holds a BA in Mathematics/Computer Science and Secondary Education from Augustana College in Rock Island, IL and an MS in Computer Science from Iowa State University. Prior to joining Dell in 2009, Christine’s 25+ year career at HP included extensive experience in both engineering and marketing positions across multiple businesses including networking, servers and storage along with a role as HP’s WW Business Development Manager for Computer Aided Engineering(CAE). Christine is also a Nationally certified Referee/Starter for USA swimming. When she is not pursuing her passion for HPC, you might find Christine volunteering her time on the deck of swim pool in Northern California or at an NCAA college swim meet.
John Fragalla














Christine Fronczak

David Duncan


David Duncan | Systems Engineer

David is a Systems Engineer in Dell's Massively Scalable Solutions group. He is a Lustre resource for the engineering team and works closely with Dell partners on the DT-HSS solution.
David holds a Bachelor's degree from St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM. His industry certifications include Red Hat Certified Architect, Qlogic Infiniband Specialist, and VMware Certified Professional.
In his spare time, David volunteers as coordinator for the Central Texas Linux Users Group and is a Fedora Project ambassador. He has two HPP's (High-Performance Puppies!) who participate in Lure-coursing for sport. 		David Duncan