Federal 100: Michael Ernst

Name: Michael Ernst
Title: Director of RHIC and ATLAS Computing Facility
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Agency: Energy Department

Bigger-than-big data. Ernst oversees U.S. participation in a 30-nation, high-energy physics consortium that analyzes data collected by the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. "Big" doesn't accurately convey the scope of the data involved. The level of computing that Ernst's group conducts is unprecedented: The project's current dataset is about 200 petabytes and involves moving 2 million files a day. To avoid slowdowns, Ernst spearheaded the consortium's transition to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, and the ATLAS solution has become a model for the international science world.

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