Gin Tan, Chris Schlipalius, Chris Hines, John Daniel Maloney
Gin Tan
Stepped away from her role as one of the Associate Directors at Monash eResearch Centre and recently joined the Project MAVERIC team as Principal Enablement Lead to oversee the research engagement strategy and support model for the MAVERIC platform. She began her career in both enterprise and research computing, eventually finding her true passion in high-performance computing (HPC). Over the past nine years at Monash University, she has been instrumental in the development and deployment of a new HPC cluster and has since grown into a technical leadership role. She enjoys diving deep into the technical aspects of her work while also excelling at translating complex needs into practical, effective solutions.
John Daniel (JD) Maloney
JD Maloney, an experienced lead architect from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) from Illinois. JD brings insights into his current projects and broader HPC initiatives. He serves as a lead instructor and steering committee member for the Linux Clusters Institute training workshops and has been training HPC professionals since 2017. His expertise includes managing heterogeneous environments driven by specialised accelerators. He is currently working with AMD on their GPUs and are beginning trial projects involving Intel Gaudi and RISC-V accelerators and can share his experience and knowledge with the HPC community.
Sarah Walters
Sarah Walters is a Project Manager and Research Computing Systems Engineer at the University of Queensland (UQ) Research Computing Centre with a strong background in supporting research and administration of advanced computing systems. She currently specialises in enabling new uses of High Performance Computing systems, helping to meet the needs of graphical and AI applications, and delivery of innovative storage and computation projects. She is passionate about working on projects that make a difference, particularly in improving researcher outcomes, and growing national capabilities.
Chris Schlipalius
Chris is an experienced presenter and Storage Manager with over 25 years of experience working on managing block storage, SANs, Tape and POSIX filesystems for large data holdings at The Curtin University of Technology and The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. He is a member of the SC25 and SCA26 Committees and has presented at and organised a number of workshops on Storage and Filesystems in Australia, USA, Germany and Singapore. He also presented at the main Spectrum Scale Usergroup at SC18 on Improving Spark work load performance with Spectrum Conductor on Spectrum Scale (for scratch).
Chris Hines
Chris has been kicking around the sector for longer than he likes to admit, even to himself. Originally a physicist he has become a jack of all trades doing a little bit of sysadmin here, a little bit of programming there. He gets excited about seeing interesting research happen and his main aim is to make advanced computing tools accessible to all researchers without them having to become a computer nerd like him.
Session description:
In Australia, the HPC sector remains relatively niche compared to the growing adoption of HPC-like models by cloud providers around the world. While large energy labs and AI-driven startups are rapidly reshaping the landscape overseas, we’re still experiencing the ripple effects of these global shifts at home.
Our HPC environments are increasingly shaped by specialised accelerators and AI-focused workloads, prompting us to rethink everything, from system architecture to user support. The traditional HPC software stack is evolving: containers, AI frameworks, and cloud-native workflows are challenging long-established assumptions and driving the need for new approaches.
As we adapt to these changes, another critical challenge emerges: how can we attract and retain skilled HPC professionals in such a competitive, fast-moving field? Building diverse and resilient teams is crucial, not only to operate infrastructure effectively but to actively shape the future of research computing.
This session will bring together HPC administrators, engineers, and strategists to explore these challenges collaboratively. Through open discussion, we aim to strengthen our community, share practical experiences, and drive the design of next-generation HPC systems.