After earning his master’s in materials science, Dr. Zacharia says “the call came from India” to get married. His cousin introduced him to the eldest of six daughters from a local family, and they got engaged immediately. He allows that arranged marriages may seem odd now, but he was delighted to be matched with Sindhu, whom he found “stunning” in every way. “I happened to be at the right place at the right time,” he says. “We’ve been married 38 years and have two wonderful children.
To present his work on “computational modeling and simulation” at a conference in Gatlinburg, Tenn., Dr. Zacharia and his advisor drove 15 hours from Potsdam. After his presentation, someone from ORNL asked if he would like to join the lab as a postdoctoral fellow. “Fortunately my advisor was within earshot,” Dr. Zacharia recalls. “He said ‘Good enough for Oak Ridge, good enough for me. Write your thesis and you can go.’”Until then, Dr.
Scientists around the world now come to Oak Ridge for its leadership in supercomputing. This year the lab unveiled Frontier, a system capable of over one quintillion calculations per second—the fastest in the world, according to the supercomputer ranking project Top500. By modeling and mapping everything from earth systems to new drugs, supercomputers “allow us to imagine what the future looks like and develop solutions that address the most important challenges of our time,” Dr. Zacharia says.
Job well done