Shankar

In his new capacity, Shankar will facilitate the integration of IU's computing, data storage, visualization and networking resources, as well as a number of scientific data repositories, into the TeraGrid. He also will act as IU's liaison with the national TeraGrid community. Shankar will report to Brad Wheeler, associate vice president for the Research and Academic Computing division of University Information Technology Services (UITS) and dean of computing at IUB.

Shankar is a computational astrophysicist by training After five years of postdoctoral work in astronomy at the University of Arizona and IU, Shankar switched professions. In 1997, after two years as a senior Unix systems programmer at Brown University, he moved back to IU and has spent the past seven years managing Unix support (1997-99) and massive data storage (1999-2004) at UITS. He is responsible for building IU's Unix training effort, the Common File System (currently in use by over 60,000 students at multiple IU campuses), the 2.4 petabyte, disaster-proof Massive Data Storage System (the first at any university world-wide), and high-end research computing services for IU's Indiana Genomics Initiative and other life sciences efforts.

Shankar will be designated IU's principal investigator in an upcoming TeraGrid maintenance and operations proposal to the National Science Foundation. The $30 million budget will be divided among the eight TeraGrid sites in addition to IU: San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California; National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology; Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Argonne National Laboratory; and Purdue University.