Susan Coghlan is a recognized leader in the design, deployment, and operation of some of the world’s largest and most advanced parallel and distributed computing systems. With over 30 years of experience, she has led the evaluation, integration, and management of groundbreaking architectures—from one of the first commercially integrated Linux clusters in a U.S. national laboratory to large shared-memory systems, and to massively parallel, low-power architectures with on-package memory. Many of the systems under her leadership have ranked among the top 10 fastest supercomputers globally.

In 2000, Susan co-founded a research lab for TurboLinux, where she led the development of the world’s first dynamic provisioning system for high performance computing (HPC) and cloud clusters. She later transitioned to Argonne National Laboratory in 2002 as HPC Manager, where she launched the lab’s first production supercomputing facility and oversaw its initial IBM Blue Gene/L deployment.

Following Argonne’s selection as one of two U.S. Department of Energy leadership computing facilities, Susan became the inaugural Director of Operations for the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), later serving as Deputy Director. In this role, she collaborated closely with industry partners and hardware architects to deliver increasingly powerful HPC systems.

As Project Director for the Aurora exascale supercomputer, she led the successful acquisition and deployment of the system, which debuted at #1 on the AI Top500 and #2 on the traditional Top500 list. She now leads ALCF efforts to develop the next generation of leadership-class computing.