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ScienceIT Department

Published on by Gary Jung.

The Laboratory Research Computing (LRC) and Scientific Cluster Support (SCS) programs are managed by the ScienceIT Department (also known as the High Performance Services group) within the IT Division at Berkeley Lab. These services are available for all LBNL Principal Investigators (PIs) and their collaborators. Currently, more than 1400 scientists across over 800 research projects use our facilities to perform basic scientific research across a wide range of disciplines, including climate modeling, research into new advanced materials, simulations of the early universe, analysis of data from astrophysics sky surveys, carbon geosequestration, geochemistry, and a host of other scientific endeavors.

ScienceIT also manages the high performance computing service for the UC Berkeley Research Computing program. This service, offering and supporting access to UC Berkeley’s Savio Institutional/Condo Cluster, is intended to provide Berkeley’s campus researchers with state-of-the-art, professionally-administered computing systems and ancillary infrastructure. Beyond its central mission of meeting the campus’s computational research needs, some auxiliary benefits of the cluster include improving competitiveness on grants which favor or require institutional resources, providing an incentive for recruitment and retention, and achieving significant economies of scale with centralized computing systems and data center facilities.

ScienceIT Department Photo, June 2025

Department Head

Wei Feinstein| WFeinstein@lbl.gov

Wei Feinstein began her career as a software engineer. She transitioned to HPC during her postdoctoral research on drug-protein interactions. Her two decades of diverse experience in computing across private, academic, and government organizations, combined with executive education at Stanford, have shaped her user-centric, collaborative approach.
Wei holds a master’s degree in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Computational Biology. Wei’s interests include travel, international cuisine, and sports, especially equestrian.

Staff

Saroj Adhikari | SAdihikari@lbl.gov

Saroj joined LBL as a Science IT Consultant in October 2023. Before joining LBL, Saroj worked as an assistant professor of physics for four years and as a postdoctoral research fellow in cosmology for three years. In cosmology research, Saroj worked on understanding the effects of the initial distribution of matter in the early universe on the inference of cosmological model parameters from data
Saroj holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Penn State University. He spends his free time with his family and hopes to resume some of his past hobbies such as table tennis and badminton.

Kuldeep Chawla | KChawla@lbl.gov

Kuldeep is a Linux systems administrator who recently joined the SCG. He currently manages our new Scientific Virtual Machine service offering and has extensive experience helping people make use of cloud computing. Prior to SCG, he was working in the IT Division’s User Support department is a Virtualized Services Engineer. He is a AWS DevOps Certified Professional and VMWare VCP.
An innovator at heart who loves to travel, explore new places, try new cuisines and understand different cultures. When he isn’t glued to his digital screens, he love spending time cooking, listening to music and reading.
Kuldeep has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, NZ and is actively pursuing a MBA at Cal State.

Abhiram Chintangal | AChintangal@lbl.gov

Abhiram is a Site Reliability Engineer focused on providing workflow and computational systems support for Lab researchers. He holds a Masters Degree in Science from Florida State University.
Prior to joining the Lab, he worked with Dr. Eva Nogales’ Lab at UC Berkeley as a Bioinformatics/Systems Specialist, where he was responsible for implementing and maintaining computation and data workflows used by leading structural biologists for their Cryo-EM (Cryo Electron Microscopy) based research. Abhiram is really excited to join the group and aid researchers working on real-world scientific problems.
While he is away from his laptop, he enjoys cooking where he likes to experiment with different cuisines and on the weekends, he likes to bicycle and explore Northern California’s many scenic cycling routes.

Karen Fernsler | KMFernsler@lbl.gov

Karen Fernsler is a HPC Systems Engineer who builds and maintains HPC LInux clusters at the Lab and on the UC Berkeley campus for the Berkeley Research Computing program. In addition to being the group’s Globus expert, she also supports Linux in various flavors for servers and workstations for the ALS and Molecular Foundry national user facilities.
Prior to joining the Lab in 2009, she worked as a Systems Engineer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. At the NCSA, she was proud to be on the team that deployed Tungsten, one of the largest clusters in existence at the time when it debuted at fourth on the Top 500 in 2003. Karen lives to enable scientists in their pursuit of knowledge.
Karen holds bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Computer Science from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. She likes to cook, hike, swim, garden, and craft in her free time.

Tim Fong | tyfong@lbl.gov

Timothy Fong is a ScienceIT consultant providing expertise in data science and the use of AI tools. Before joining the Lab, he worked in the private sector as a Data Scientist across a variety of industries, including computer vision, people analytics, and casino gaming.
Timothy holds an M.S. in Statistics from Baruch College and a J.D. from University of San Francisco. When he’s not trying to develop the perfect Instant Pot recipe, he enjoys hiking and being outside.

Gary Jung | GMJung@lbl.gov

Gary Jung is a HPC advisor for ScienceIT at the Lab and Research IT on campus. He has been in the HPC field for over 20 years and started the Scientific Computing Support program at the Lab in 2003 — one of the first such programs at a large Tier 1 research institution. He also led the effort to launch Lawrencium in 2008, a Top500 list HPC Linux cluster at the time, in order to make institutional HPC available to all Lab researchers. Other projects include a strategic role in the development of the highly successful Berkeley Research Computing program at UC Berkeley in 2014. Gary Is one of the recipients of the 2023 Director’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Gary holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from San Francisco State University. His hobbies include traveling, cooking and working on HPC (high performance cars).

Tin Ho | tin@lbl.gov

Tin Ho is a HPC Systems Engineer who joined the group in 2017 and was responsible for putting LR5, the latest generation of the Lawrencium cluster, through the acceptance tests and into production. He finds working on the computing system for the GRETA project, a next-generation gamma-ray detector, especially inspiring as it will require using technologies that will last into the 2030s. Prior to coming to the Lab, he worked in the pharmaceutical and software industries.

Tin holds a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Florida International University.

Edison Lam | elam3@lbl.gov

Edison Lam is a Linux Systems and Cluster Administrator. He started as a student intern supporting the HPC systems at the Berkeley Labs. Prior to the lab, Edison was a Linux Systems Administrator at a vertical mall located in Japantown San Francisco. He is a Red Hat Certified Systems Administrator.

During his free time, he enjoys attending local tech meetups, volunteering at conferences and exploring bicycle routes in the Bay Area.

Fengchen Liu | FengchenLiu@lbl.gov

Fengchen joined Berkeley Lab in 2020 as a Science IT Consultant, specializing in AI and data science solutions for scientific research computing. Prior to joining the Lab, he worked as a Senior AI Engineer at a Fintech company and as a Software Engineer at RMS (Risk Management Solutions). He also spent 7 years at UC San Francisco working on computational epidemiology, utilizing both on-premise and cloud-based HPC resources. His research background includes predictive models of infectious diseases and control of epidemic disease through contact investigation. You can view his research work at Google Scholar.Fengchen recently completed the Artificial Intelligence Professional Program at Stanford University (certificate available here). He is also pursuing a Master of Information and Data Science at UC Berkeley. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from Beihang University and was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.Fengchen continues to collaborate with UCSF on epidemiological modeling projects using agent-based simulations. In his free time, he enjoys reading, hiking, and playing tennis.

Henrik Nordberg | hnordberg@lbl.gov
Henrik first joined the Lab in 1995 as a visiting researcher in the Nuclear Science Division, where he developed software for visualizing nuclear structure data. In 1997, he transitioned to the Data Management R&D group in the Computer Science Division, focusing on data infrastructure planning for experiments at the LHC at CERN and RHIC. In 1998, Henrik co-founded Jitterbit, a data integration and workflow company, where he served as Chief Software Architect and VP of Engineering for ten years. He later returned to the Lab from 2008 to 2014 to work on the Genome Portal at the JGI, followed by nine years as a Principal Software Engineer at Optum. His technical interests include computer hardware, Large Language Models and Machine Learning. Outside of work, Henrik is an avid audiophile and a dedicated photographer. Henrik holds a Master of Science in Theoretical Physics, Lund University, Lund, Sweden & UC Berkeley.

 

Andrew Schmeder | AWSchmeder@lbl.gov
Andrew is a ScienceIT Consultant leading the ScienceIT’s delivery of AI tools to researchers. He comes with a diverse background in pure & applied mathematics, full-stack engineering, real-time signal processing, and startup entrepreneurship. His work has been published in 10 granted patents and 25 technical papers on a variety of topics including real-time networking, multi-channel audio systems, machine learning, human-computer interaction and human vision enhancement. Prior to joining Berkeley Lab, Andrew was a Co-founder & CEO/CTO at EnChroma, Inc. – a Berkeley-based startup company creating an advanced optical filter for correction of color vision deficiency, and previously served in research staff research positions at UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) and the Hafter Auditory Perception Lab. He holds a BA in Pure Mathematics from UC Berkeley (2002), and is a recipient of the SBIR Tibbets Award (2016) and the East Bay Innovation Award (2020).

Sapana Soni | SSoni@lbl.gov
Sapana is an HPC User Services Consultant. Prior to joining Berkeley Lab in 2022, she was engaged in postdoctoral research at the University of California Merced and the University of Geneva Switzerland.  She taught an undergraduate-level course on Computational Chemistry at UC Merced and mentored graduate and undergraduate students in using HPC clusters for their research. In her outreach activity as a president of Women in STEM (W-STEM) at UC Merced, she organized career guidance events on traditional and nontraditional career paths in academia and industry. On this platform she enjoyed sharing her experience and encouraging women for career path in STEAM.
She holds a Master’s degree in Chemistry and a Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry. In her free time, she likes to cook, hike, and practice yoga.

Torben Wriedt | TOWriedt@lbl.gov

Torben has joined the Scientific Computing Group as a Scientific Computing Linux and Cluster Engineer. He holds a Masters Degree in Environmental Sciences from Leuphana University Lueneburg and has worked in IT support roles at universities in Germany and the UK. Before joining the Lab, he was running the high performance computing facility at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam.
When he’s not at work he spends much of his time outdoors. He enjoys hiking, cycling, rock climbing, and wildlife photography.

Steven Wong | SJWong@lbl.gov

Steven Wong is a Linux Systems and Cluster Administrator. He joined the lab in 2019 and primarily supports the group’s SLA work including the Advanced Light Source. His journey on the road of Linux started at the City College of San Francisco, where he was also a teaching assistant and tutor for all things computer science.
In his free time, he enjoys rock climbing, video games and board games, and being a disaster in the kitchen.

Contact Us

Email: scienceIT@lbl.gov

Office Hours

We hold weekly office hours for drop-in consulting help every Wednesday from 10:30am to Noon at Building 50B-3209 suite or virtual consultation via zoom. Please come with your laptop if you would like our help.

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