Staff | National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois

Staff

NCSA share their expertise in computing, networking, data, CAE, visualization, and more with the center’s industry partners.

Merle Giles

Industry and Economic Development Director
mgiles@illinois.edu, 217-244-4629

Merle Giles is director of Private Sector Programs and Economic Impact at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. NCSA is one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program, opening its doors in 1986.

Giles is a tireless advocate of HPC’s role as an accelerator to industrial innovation. His NCSA team has partnered with nearly 60% of the manufacturers in the U.S. FORTUNE100®, as well as with bio-medical, chemical, tech, oil and gas, and agriculture companies. He and his corporate partners are founding members of two key digital manufacturing consortia: NDEMC (National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium), a $5 million public-private partnership pilot serving small and medium manufacturers in the American Midwest, and DMDII (Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute), a $320 million partnership announced in 2014 as one of the USA's National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) institutes.

He is a co-founder, along with Germany’s HLRS and South Korea’s KISTI, of the International Industrial Supercomputing Workshop. He earned undergraduate degrees in accounting and business and holds a CPA and an MBA from University of Illinois.

Evan Burness

Program Manager
burness1@illinois.edu, 217-244-0642

Seid Koric

Senior Technical Lead for Industrial Projects

Dr. Koric has more than 17 years of experience at NCSA, conducting cutting-edge applied research and providing consulting for the national academic and industrial computational communities on the center's high-performance computing platforms. His work has resulted in numerous journal and conference publications as well as winning several prestigious awards. He earned his B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Sarajevo, M.S. in aerospace engineering and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 2010, Seid has providing senior technical leadership for the Private Sector Programs at NCSA. He also serves as adjunct associate professor in the Mechanical Science and Engineering Department.

Expertise: Large-scale multiphysics modeling; high-performance computing; thermo-mechanical modeling of steel solidification

Erman Guleryuz

Research Programmer

Erman joined NCSA in 2012. He has an academic background in materials modeling at continuum and atomistic scales, combined with industrial experience in manufacturing technologies and tool/die design. He has several responsibilities around PSP’s core operations and services that accelerate innovation at partner organizations. He performs application and hardware benchmarking and analysis in support of partners' future high-performance computing (HPC) strategies. He is part of the team that provides HPC end-user training and domain science support as an integral part of PSP’s bleeding-edge computing services. He also participates in sponsored research projects and PSP’s modeling and simulation services. He is very excited about working with technologies that pave the way toward petascale computer-aided engineering (CAE) and fully virtual product development (VPD).

Expertise: Finite element modeling

Madhu Vellakal

Research Programmer

Madhu Vellakal has an MS in mechanical engineering from the University at Buffalo. His specialization is computational fluid dynamics. He has worked with the National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium (NDEMC) and helped small and medium enterprises to adopt modeling and simulation in their product development cycle. He is part of the Illinois Manufacturing Lab (IML) and the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII) performing CFD simulations. He is actively involved in reacting flow research and high-performance computing for CFD.

Expertise: Computational fluid dynamics

Ahmed Taha

Senior Computational Resource Coordinator and PSP-CFD Lead

Dr. Taha leads the CFD arm of NCSA’s Private Sector Program, providing industrial users with the technical and domain support using the leading-edge commercial codes, open-source codes, and proprietary CFD codes on the high-performance computing resources at NCSA. He has nearly 25 years of academic research experience with experimental and computational skills in different areas of the thermo/fluids discipline; nearly 25 years of industrial research experience in thermo/fluid systems, including troubleshooting, combustion systems analysis, and energy conservation studies; and more than 10 years of applied research experience in “parallel” computations using leading CFD codes such as Ansys Suite, Starccm+, COMSOL and OpenFOAM.

Expertise: Modeling and simulation of computational thermo/fluids, high-performance computing (HPC), multiphysics simulations, reacting compressible transient flow