
Bio
Justin Whitt is the program director for the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) and is responsible for acquiring and operating the leadership class computer systems and infrastructure that enable scientific discoveries at every scale—including breakthroughs that would not otherwise be possible. He currently leads the project to deliver the “Frontier” supercomputer, which is expected to be capable of over a quintillion calculations each second.
He previously served as OLCF deputy project director from 2014 until 2017. Justin joined the staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 2010 as a computational scientist with the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS), where he worked with scientists to develop applications capable of using the Kraken supercomputer (the first academic petascale computer). He later held several leadership positions at JICS and served on the leadership team for the National Science Foundation’s eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).
Prior to joining ORNL, Justin worked as a researcher at the University of Tennessee’s National Center for Computational Engineering where he used computer modeling and simulation to study the aerodynamics of aircraft and wind turbines. Justin brings over 20 years of experience in managing projects and organizations to his role at the OLCF.