Presenter

Thomas Durbin, P.E., LEED AP, is the Data Center Facilities Manager of the National Petascale Computing Facility at NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has over 17 years of experience at UIUC in designing, building, evaluating, demonstrating, and operating mechanical systems and over 24 years of experience in mechanical engineering. His experience includes HPC cooling system design and operation, coal boiler renovation, chiller installations, district heating and chilled water system evaluations and designs, energy efficiency studies, HVAC design, specialty cooling systems, and other mechanical systems designs, design review, installation, operation, controls, and commissioning. Thomas designed cooling systems for many UIUC campus computing facilities while with the UIUC Facilities and Services engineering design team prior to moving to NCSA to become Data Center Facilities Manager at NPCF. Thomas joined NCSA during the commissioning of NPCF and prior to construction of the Blue Waters supercomputer. Thomas has been involved in the formation of UIUC Data Center Shared Services to consolidate computing operations at UIUC. He has also been involved with organization of the Illinois Chief Engineers & Facility Managers training conference.

He presented lessons learned in data center design and operation at SC13 based on experiences with UIUC facilities and the construction and operation of Blue Waters. He is a lead author of the EEHPCWG document "Systematic approach for universal commissioning plan for liquid-cooled systems" that was presented during their workshop at SC13. Thomas also served as a panelist, presenter, and discussion leader in the EEHPCWG workshops at SC14 and SC15.

Thomas was in invited speaker at the 6th European Workshop on HPC Centre Infrastructures in Stockholm in 2015. Thomas was an invited speaker at the HPM 2015 workshop, HPC Power Management: Measuring Effectiveness.