Nicholas A. Nystrom

Dr. Nicholas A. (Nick) Nystrom is the chief scientist of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a national computing center founded 1986 that is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. He joined PSC in 1992 as scientific programmer. He most recently served as interim director and senior research director. He has held the position of research physicist at Carnegie Mellon University since 2004. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1992 from the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Nystorm is the architect, principal investigator (PI), and project director (PD) for “Bridges”, PSC’s flagship platform that was the first to successfully converge HPC, AI, and Big Data. He is also PI for the Data Exacell, a research pilot for enabling high performance data analytics on novel storage; co-PI for Open Compass, which brings emerging AI technologies to important problems in research; co-I for the Center for Causal Discovery, an NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Center of Excellence; and co-I for Big Data for Better Health, which applies machine learning to lung and breast cancer research.
Dr. Nystorm's research interest includes data analytics, Big Data, causal modeling, graph algorithms, genomics, machine learning / deep learning, extreme scalability, hardware and software architecture, software engineering for HPC, performance modeling and prediction, impacts of programming models and languages on productivity and efficiency, information visualization, and quantum chemistry. Recent work has focused on enabling data-intensive research in domains new to HPC, scaling diverse computational science codes and workflows to extreme-scale systems, deep hierarchies of parallelism, advanced filesystems, and architectural innovations in processors and interconnects.