Prof. Mark Parsons joined EPCC, the supercomputing centre at The University of Edinburgh, in 1994 as a software developer working on several industrial contracts following a PhD in Particle Physics undertaken on the LEP accelerator at CERN in Geneva. In 1997 he became the Centre’s Commercial Manager and subsequently its Commercial Director. Today he is EPCC’s Executive Director (Research and Commercialisation) and also the Associate Dean for e-Research at Edinburgh.

He has many interests in distributed computing ranging from its industrial use to the provision of pan-European HPC services through the PRACE Research Infrastructure. His research interests include highly distributed data intensive computing and novel hardware design.