Thomas Hauser is the former director of the Computational and Information Systems Lab (CISL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and a HALO member — one of the most consequential HPC facilities in Earth system science. In this episode, he traces his career from computational fluid dynamics and Cray-era supercomputing to leading the team behind Derecho — NCAR's newest system, deployed in 2023 with nearly 4x the throughput of its predecessor, Cheyenne, and with 20% of its capacity built on GPUs.

Hauser explains how CISL tackled the challenge of migrating million-line Fortran-heavy atmospheric codes to GPU architectures — not by mandate, but by showing scientists the energy savings. He describes the integration of NCAR's fragmented data silos into GDEX, a modernized data infrastructure now connected to the Open Science Data  ...