Speaker Bio

Maria Girone is the Chief Technology Officer of the CERN openlab. She leads the development of High Performance Computing technologies for particle physics experiments. She graduated from the University of Bari, Italy. She was awarded her Ph.D. in high-energy physics in 1994. Maria became a research fellow with the ALEPH experiment performing analysis and serving as accelerator liaison. She was appointed coordinator of the software and computing for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) in 2014. In this capacity, she was responsible for the operation of seventy computing centres across five different continents. She joined CERN openlab as chief technology officer (CTO) in 2016. As coordinator, Maria was responsible for 70 computing centres on five continents and more than 100 FTE of effort yearly to archive, simulate, process and serve petabytes of data. She has worked on the upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider which will require up to one hundred times more computing capacity than it did originally. This increase in capacity will come through access to commercial cloud computing platforms, data analytics, deep learning and new computing architectures.