Leadership & Staff

(540) 231-7667

Terry L. Herdman was appointed to the position of Associate Vice President for Research Computing at Virginia Tech, August 2005.  He is responsible for advocacy, planning, funding, and organization of research computing campus-wide.  He reports to Erv Blythe, Vice President for Information Technology, and Robert Walters, Vice President for Research.

(540) 231-1246

Kevin Shinpaugh is the Director of Cluster and Research Computing at Virginia Tech.

Dr. Nicholas Polys heads the VT-ARC Visualization Group.  He has developed interactive 3D graphic content and systems for over 9 years. His research interests lie at the heart of Human Computer Interaction: the intersection of visualization, virtual environments, and perception.

(540) 231-2054

Patrick Shinpaugh is a Computer Programmer/System Administrator for the VT-ARC Visualization Group. He maintains the VT CAVE as well as the AISB viz wall and other hardware and software related to visual computing at Virginia Tech. He is also a co-developer of the open source software project DIVERSE which is used extensively in the CAVE (and a very few other places around the world). He obtained his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Drexel University in 1998.

John Burkardt is the VT-ARC computational science specialist. He has an extensive background in algorithm development, and programming in C, FORTRAN, and MATLAB. He has experience in parallel programming with OpenMP and MPI. He expects to be available to consult or collaborate with faculty on computational research projects.

(540) 231-6262

Cal Ribbens is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and is a member of the Research Computing Advisory Committee. He chairs the System X Allocation Committee, and co-leads the Center for High-End Computing Systems (CHECS), a research center that collaborates closely with VTARC and with users of VTARC resources.

(540) 231-9754

Dr. Glenda R. Scales is a member of the Research Computing Advisory Committee and was a member of the core team responsible for launching System X, which was independently ranked as the fastest supercomputer at any academic institution and third fastest in the world on the 2003 Top 500 listing.

Dr. Scales serves as both Associate Dean for International Programs and Information Technology and Director of the Commonwealth Graduate Engineering Program (CGEP) in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. As Director of CGEP, she provides leadership for a state-wide distance learning program that has a long history - over 25 years - providing working scientists and engineers with access to exceptional graduate degree programs. Dr. Scales also manages international programs, research computing and academic computing within the College of Engineering.

(540) 231-3900

Jeff Crowder is a Program Director at Virginia Tech. With the university since 1985, his work has centered on strategic program development for high performance regional and national networks. A key goal for Jeff has been to ensure Virginia Tech's campus in Blacksburg remains connected to the national and global research network infrastructure with state of the art capacity and capability among leading research universities.

(540) 231-2730

Dr. Mark Gardner is the Network Research Manager in the Office of IT. His work focuses on making the power of networked computing accessible to faculty, staff and students. He sees his role as a catalyst in helping members of the university community accomplish teaching, scholarship and research.

(540) 231-9239

William C. Dougherty, a VT alumnus, is the Assistant Director for Systems Support in the Network Infrastructure and Services area of the I.T. unit at VT. Systems Support is responsible for hardware and system administration for many of the centrally provided I.T. systems including VT-ARC, e-mail systems, backup and storage systems, and Banner related systems. Production control for research systems became part of Systems Support's responsibilities in December of 2005.

(540) 231-9516

Tim Rhodes has 23 years of systems administration experience and has lead systems administration groups since 1998. These groups have supported systems that range from Virginia Tech's IBM mainframes to Unix systems that host administrative, academic support and research computing applications. He reports to William Dougherty, Assistant Director for Network Infrastructure and Services Systems Support.

(540) 231-7982

Bill Marmagas is a senior systems administrator for the VT-ARC systems. He has administered a variety of UNIX and Linux operating systems since 1993. He has worked with hardware platforms ranging from the small to the very large. He specializes in high availability, SAN storage, and systems and network management. He joined Virginia Tech in 2006.

Vivek Venugopal is a PhD candidate with the ECE Department at Virginia Tech. He is working on reconfigurable communication and computation aspects of FPGA enabled high-performance reconfigurable computing (HPReC) systems at VT ARC. His research interests include reconfigurable communication synthesis and cluster FPGAs.

Mehmet Belgin is a Computer Science PhD candidate at Virginia Tech and provides programming support in VT-ARC. His research focuses on sparse computation kernels that dominate most iterative solvers. His is currently working on a framework that transparently stacks multiple instances of sparse problems in process level and solve them together for improved cache locality, better FPU utilization and reduced memory bandwidth usage.

Jeffrey Nelson is a Computer Science Undergraduate who does hardware repairs and administrative work for System X in VT-ARC.  He has worked with System X since his freshman year.  His work involves diagnosing/repairing hardware, administration, system programming, and other tasks as assigned.