The Advanced Computing System for Latin America and the Caribbean (SCALAC) has announced the appointment of Esteban Hernández as its new executive director starting January 2025. Hernández, with a PhD in Engineering and a prominent career spanning over two decades in the technology sector, will bring his extensive experience in High-Performance Computing (HPC) to the organization.
For the last 15 years, Hernández has specialized in HPC, leading significant projects at CyberColombia where he drove climate simulations using the WRF model and optimized distributed systems for scientific research. Additionally, he has held significant roles in the industry as a Senior ML Expert at MercadoLibre and Big Data Architect at AWS, where he scaled cloud solutions (GCP/AWS) to process trillions of events.
Esteban Hernández is also the founder of the Summer School in HPC, an initiative that in its eighth edition in 2024, saw participation from over ten Colombian universities. With multiple certifications in Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence from AWS and Google, Hernández has been a university educator for more than twelve years and an active collaborator in the global HPC laboratory community.
With his new role at SCALAC, Hernández is expected to play a crucial role in coordinating the Bella-II project with RedCLARA and work on reconnecting Latin America's supercomputing centers to create a robust and collaborative testbed.
