Building Relationships and Driving Results

For over 35 years, NCSA’s Industry Partner Program has played a unique role in bridging the gap between organizations wanting to solve large computational problems and the NCSA expertise and resources that can benefit them the most. For industry program managers Katherine Kendig and Jeff Terstriep, helping partners navigate and overcome their biggest obstacles makes their work both challenging and fulfilling.

Since 1986, NCSA has brought together highly experienced, award-winning experts with state-of-the-art high-performance computing resources to tackle big questions and provide meaningful results to researchers. The Industry Partner Program offers industry clients the same globally recognized expertise, comprehensive infrastructure services and access to renowned faculty and motivated students across the University of Illinois system.

The Industry team works jointly with current and potential clients to help industry partners achieve meaningful results faster and more affordably. This expertise and collaborative spirit are the driving forces behind the relationships Kendig and Terstriep have built over the years.

Communication, Communication, Communication

The key to any collaborative relationship is a solid foundation in communication. In the Industry Program, open lines of communication ensure NCSA has the information needed for a smooth-sailing project and that clients receive the services they need to solve the problems they have.

“The biggest part of my job, in some ways, is listening for understanding and asking the right questions,” Kendig said. “The challenge for things like HPC and this level of computational science is that people don’t always know exactly what they need. They aren’t saying, ‘this is the solution I need’ so much as they’re saying, ‘this is the problem I have.’ So we’re helping find ways to get to that solution.”

“We begin by drilling down trying to find people that may have needs that aren’t being met by their current research team,” Terstriep said. “For example, AI has become very important, and they don’t have the expertise to take advantage of it the way they would like. That’s where we can help.”

Industry partners can’t always reach every subject matter expert at NCSA or the University who might be able to help them. As Kendig says, it wouldn’t make sense and would be wildly inefficient. “Since there can be something like 400 users on a given system, it’s up to Industry Program managers on our side and our counterparts on the partner side to gather input and distill it, hitting the highlights of what is needed or what’s a problem and communicating that effectively.”

For Terstriep, it’s about staying connected. “Once we get a project going, we’re in constant communication with the partner. There are weekly or biweekly meetings to discuss progress, step by step, what the next challenges are, and how best to address them,” he said.

Building Relationships Achieves Better Results

Kendig began her NCSA journey in 2017 and has built a strong relationship with her industry partners. One such relationship is with Andrey Shinkarev, systems architect with AbbVie, a pharmaceutical company headquartered in North Chicago, Illinois. Kendig has been having regular meetings with AbbVie and Shinkarev in particular, since 2018.

“Our partnership with Katherine has been characterized by a strong spirit of collaboration and mutual support,” Shinkarev said. “Through our regular meetings and discussions, we have been able to explore new ideas and approaches, constantly pushing each other to think outside the box and find innovative solutions to complex problems. We also took time to discuss and understand each organization’s capabilities and respect each other’s processes. This has allowed us to tackle challenging projects together and deliver results which translated to new capabilities for AbbVie scientists.”

“We’re pretty close as colleagues now because we’ve had this long-standing, continuing connection,” Kendig said.

Relationship-building is key to achieving better results, and it’s a team effort.

“I oversee all communications efforts as they relate to the partner, checking in, and understanding the partner’s viewpoint so that I can represent that in internal meetings,” Kendig said. “But, I’m working with a lot of other people to make it happen. I’m making sure that there is a balance between NCSA and our partners.”

And as Shinkarev describes, that balance can strengthen a partner’s bottom line.

“The support and guidance provided by Katherine and the NCSA team were instrumental in ensuring a smooth and successful adoption process of new applications by AbbVie scientists. NCSA expertise in different domains and applications enabled AbbVie to quickly utilize new applications on our HPC Cluster, enhancing our capabilities, and efficiency’s played a crucial role in assisting us with the migration of our workloads from the cloud to AbbVie’s HPC Cluster. This transition allowed us to significantly reduce costs and reinvest those savings into our research and development efforts,” Shinkarev said.

A Dynamic Duo

Terstriep’s history with NCSA goes back to its beginnings, and this is his second stint at the Center. He graduated from college and worked his way up to Associate Director of Computing before starting his own business. After the dot-com bubble burst and spending more than a decade with his business, he returned to NCSA, first in the CyberGIS Center, then Data Analytics Group and now with the NCSA Industry Program.

His computing background has given him a unique perspective on the needs of industry partners and the compute resources and technical assistance that NCSA has to offer.
“What I really like is that I get to look at all kinds of different projects, talking to different people who are trying to do incredible things. I’m not focused on this one narrow area. I get to look at different technologies and work with different groups. That’s very interesting and very fun,” Terstriep said.

What our industry partners say about Kendig and Terstriep says a lot about the people at NCSA. What Kendig and Terstriep say about each other shows the strength of the Industry Program.

“Jeff is an All-star,” Kendig said. “He has a strong technical background. He’s able to prescribe the best technical solution in a lot of situations when there’s no consensus or sides are at an impasse. When the industry partner and NCSA teams don’t know if something will work, a lot of times Jeff is the one who can come in and say, `Why don’t we do this?’ He comes at problems looking at the bigger picture to come at it from the most efficient way.”

“Katherine is in an interesting position where her principal project uses a large research cluster and presents real challenges,” Terstriep said. “She has Integrated Cyberinfrastructure administrators, 400+ users, and meeting weekly with the partner. Katherine really has to blend and act as the point of all these different people doing different aspects of managing that system. She’s amazing, making sure that balls aren’t dropped, keeping everybody informed and happy. She does an amazing job of that.”

Brendan McGinty is the director of the NCSA Industry Partner Program, and in his eight years at NCSA, he has built a forward-thinking Industry Partner team dedicated to finding solutions to partner problems. “I am proud of the work our team has done in multiple sectors, including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, agriculture and other industries,” McGinty said. “For years, the Industry Partner Program team, supported by expertise throughout our Center, have helped NCSA be the computing and application force behind some of industry’s biggest success stories.”

The Future Looks Bright

Reflecting on his time at NCSA, Terstriep is excited about the current state of computing and the projects that partners are bringing to the table.

“You know, when I started back in the 80s, HPC was brand new. Right now, AI is really blowing up. And, of course, quantum is the future. There’s amazing opportunities there. It’s really changing how we think about a lot of the applications and workload.”

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ABOUT NCSA INDUSTRY

NCSA combines a highly experienced technical team with state-of-the-art, high-performance digital resources to provide grand-scale consulting to help businesses gain a competitive edge. The NCSA Industry Program has worked with many of the world’s largest companies in sectors including manufacturing, oil and gas, finance, retail/wholesale, bio/medical, life sciences, agriculture, technology and more.