Vijay K. Agarwala has been named director of high performance computing for Advanced Research Computing, a unit of Information Technology at Virginia Tech. Agarwala will provide technical and strategic leadership for the group’s advanced computing infrastructure.

Agarwala comes to Virginia Tech with more than 28 years of experience in high performance computing, data sciences, and research computing. He was one of the founding members of the high performance computing group at Penn State, and served on their senior information technology leadership team for nearly ten years. 

Until June 2014, Agarwala served as senior director of the Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure group and as a member of the University Research Council at Penn State. More recently, he served as senior director of research computing at the New York Genome Center.

In his new position, Agarwala will serve as an architect and advocate for advanced computing infrastructure and the competitive edge that it provides to scientists and researchers across many fields. 

“I believe in promoting the use of advanced computing resources in teaching and research across as many disciplines as possible, including social sciences and humanities. Modeling and simulation have effectively become the third pillar of science – with theory and experiment being the first two,” said Agarwala.

“Vijay brings great expertise in the design and deployment of research computing systems, and we are very fortunate to have him join our group,” noted Terry L. Herdman, associate vice president of research computing. “Vijay has taken on the task of building and innovating the best high performance computing and data analytics environment possible to meet the requirements of Virginia Tech’s research faculty and students.”

Agarwala holds a master’s degree in engineering science from Penn State.

Dedicated to its motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), Virginia Tech takes a hands-on, engaging approach to education, preparing scholars to be leaders in their fields and communities. As the commonwealth’s most comprehensive university and its leading research institution, Virginia Tech offers 240 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 31,000 students and manages a research portfolio of $513 million. The university fulfills its land-grant mission of transforming knowledge to practice through technological leadership and by fueling economic growth and job creation locally, regionally, and across Virginia.

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