Biography

Putchong Uthayopas is the Head  of  Department of Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kasetsart University, Thailand. He got his bachelor and master degree in electrical engineering from Chulalongkorn University in 1984 and 1988. He also got a master and Ph.D in computer engineering from University of Louisiana in 1994 and 1996.  His research interest is in cluster computing, grid and cloud computing system and tools. He published more than 100 refereed works in national conference, international conference, and journal in this area. In 2012, he received a distinguish computer engineer award in system integration from the Engineering Institute of Thailand.  He is the President of Computational Science and Engineering Association, Thailand since 2012. 

In 1999, he and his colleague at Kasetsart University built a 72 nodes Beowulf cluster named Pirun which was the largest computing system in Thailand at that time. Putchong received an appreciation award from the national invention award by  National Research Council of Thailand for his cluster and HPC work in 2000. He collaborated with Microsoft to open the first Windows HPC laboratory at Kasetsart University and with Sun Microsystems to establish a SUN APSTF center in his department. 

Putchong  is  the co-founder of  the Thai National Grid project which consisted of 22 member organizations. He was the Director of Thai National Grid Center under SIPA, Ministry of ICT during 2006-2008. In 2006,  he lead a team of engineers that built a Thai National Grid system that span over 16 sites  throughout Thailand. He is also one of the main architects behind the first Teraflop machine in Thailand.  

Putchong is actively involved in many Cluster and Grid Computing activities in Thailand and Asia Pacific. He served as a co-chairman of Grid computing committee under APAN (Asia Pacific Advanced Network) forum.  Putchong is also a steering committee of NSF funded PRAGMA project.  During summer of 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 he was a visiting scholar at Argonne National Laboratory working with MPICH team on cluster computing environment.