Computer science alumni Sam Ellis at IBM continues association with Iowa State and department

Sam Ellis and Mike Margitan

Ellis, who has been with IBM since his graduation, is a frequent visitor to the Ames campus as he and other Iowa State alumni help develop relationships between the University and its academic departments and the computer giant.

"This is a volunteer role that we have," he said. "This is on top of our regular jobs."

Ellis, along with other computer science alumni like Mike Margitan ('78), works with faculty and students in the technological driven departments on campus. They attend career fairs on campus and advocate for exceptional students by placing their resumes in front of IBM's hiring managers. Recently Ellis made the rounds on campus promoting a new academic initiative for increased collaboration between IBM and major universities. Ellis works with Department of Computer Science faculty members who nominate Ph.D. students for the IBM fellowships at the company's Rochester, Minn., campus. Both Ellis and Margitan work in Rochester.

When he isn't coming to campus, Ellis is the Software Technology Manager for IBM's Blue Gene project. Blue Gene is an IBM research project dedicated to exploring the frontiers in supercomputing - in computer architecture, in the use of computation to advance understanding of important biological processes and in the software required to program and control massively parallel systems. The recently published Top 500 list of supercomputers included 16 Blue Gene machines among the world's 100 fastest systems. The fastest is the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. That is also world's fastest supercomputer. ISU recently installed a BlueGene system on campus that is ranked 73rd fast in the world. Ellis manages a team of computer scientists and computer engineers who write the system software for Blue Gene. Margitan is an IT manager whose account team oversees the installation of Blue Gene.

A number of Iowa State graduates at IBM have contributed to the development and deployment of the Blue Gene systems. Former Iowa Staters are involved in system software development, hardware design and development, systems installation and customer support.

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