Alan Powers

Alan is a senior high performance computing (HPC) executive with over 30 years of experience delivering TOP500ranked systems for U.S. federal agencies. He currently serves as HPC CTO at GDIT and has led some of the fastest supercomputing deployments in the world. As the HPC contractor lead at NASA, Alan guided his team from delivery to production in under four months, enabling rapid operational deployment of Columbia, then the second fastest system within the TOP500. Four years later, he led the successful deployment of Pleiades, which ranked third within the TOP500. Alan has supported HPC missions across numerous federal agencies, including DOE, NASA, NIH, FBI, and NOAA, spanning research, operational forecasting, and agency requirements. As NOAA’s Chief HPC Architect, he currently supports both of NOAA’s HPC programs. The NOAA RD program spans three HPC centers, while the WCOSS mission critical program delivers HPC Platform as a Service across two datacenters with a 99.9% production workload availability requirement.