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Summary
Research computing and AI executive with 30+ years in technology,
from Navy radar to high-performance computing to generative AI. As
Director of Research Computing at UC Riverside, I lead a matrix team
of about 20 across ITS and the colleges and run the cloud, cluster,
storage, security and AI services behind about 1,000 researchers in
22 colleges and schools, and I still build the platforms myself, now
with a team of AI agents. I led UCR's first-of-its-kind
research partnership with Google Cloud, served as Co-PI on a $498K
NSF CC* research storage award, and chaired the UC Research IT
Committee across every UC campus. I have been building with AI since
the GPT-2 era, running GPU jobs for it on the National Research
Platform in 2020, and shipped an LLM assistant for HPC users in
2023. The number I manage to is time to science.
Career Highlights
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Google Cloud partnership: led Ursa Major,
announced by Google in 2023 as a first-of-its-kind research
subscription; 170+ research projects under one governed, budgeted
cloud.
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NSF award: Co-PI on CC* award 2346636 ($498,553),
which delivered 2.09 PB of research storage on the 100 Gbps
Science DMZ, 422 TB shared with the National Research Platform.
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AI for research: built UCR's governed AI
stack (MCP servers, AI Gateway, elastic GPU cluster) and ship it
with AI agents: 240+ releases across ten tools in five weeks.
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Campus and systemwide leadership: founded and
lead UCR Research IT Leaders; Research Advisory Board and Academic
Senate research committee; Chair of the UC Research IT Committee
(2022-2024), uniting research IT leaders from every UC campus.
Professional Experience
Lead research computing strategy, services and AI for about 1,000
researchers in 22 colleges and schools through a matrix team of
about 20: direct reports and student staff, the ITS systems team
(dotted line for research) and research IT staff in colleges,
centers and units across campus.
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Run Ursa Major, the Google Cloud research partnership:
per-project budgets, automated spend throttles, security
baselines and FinOps across 170+ projects.
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Wrote NSF CC* proposal 2346636 and its budget (Co-PI); designed
CephRDS (2.09 PB usable) and its cost recovery model; six
science driver labs migrated, 422 TB federated to the National
Research Platform.
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Built the AI-for-research stack: MCP servers with per-user
Google sign-in, roles and a full audit trail; the UCR AI
Gateway; and an elastic Slurm cluster on Google Cloud (CPU,
high-memory, NVIDIA L4 GPU) with zero compute cost when idle.
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Built Nexus, the system of record Research Computing runs on:
943 researchers, 431 org units, 176 cloud projects, 12,000+
links.
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Data security plans and secure enclaves for P3/P4 and CMMC
research with the ISO.
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Founded and lead UCR Research IT Leaders, which coordinates
research IT across campus; serve on the Research Advisory Board
and the Academic Senate research committee.
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Official UCR PI status (2024); grant strategy; ship software
with a team of AI agents under written specs, test gates and
human approval.
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Rebuilt the Research Computing website and service catalog (live
Oct 2026).
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Built nrp-mcp (AI-assisted jobs on the National Research
Platform, pilot) and Skywalker, the audit engine for UCR's
research cloud.
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Developed research computing grant strategy and managed budgets
for research technology initiatives within Information
Technology Solutions (ITS).
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Lead systems architect for research computation, advanced
statistical computing and network interoperability with the
campus Science DMZ.
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Served as proxy for the CIO and CTO in academic senate
technology discussions.
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Directed a team of professionals in HPC, data and
cyberinfrastructure research and technology projects.
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Supervised and mentored technical staff; set fiscal, HR and
resource allocation policy for the unit.
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Coordinated research technology efforts within ITS with BCOE,
HPCC and library partners.
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Onboarded UCR researchers to the Pacific Research
Platform's Nautilus GPU cluster: Kubernetes job templates,
TensorFlow and PyTorch GPU pods (2019), GPT-2 GPU jobs on NVIDIA
RTX 8000 (2020) and UCR Nautilus cluster tools.
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Published Google Colab notebooks for researchers: action
recognition, object detection and image enhancement (2020),
Stable Diffusion and Disco Diffusion (2022).
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Ran a Terraform infrastructure-as-code workshop for AWS and
Google Cloud (2020).
Vice Chair, Jun 2021 - Jul 2022.
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Led the UC Research IT Committee, liaising with the UC IT
Leadership Council (ITLC) and the UC Office of the President
CIO.
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United research IT leaders from every UC campus around shared
priorities; set and met annual goals and advocated systemwide
for UC researchers' computing needs.
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Rebuilt the HPCC campus cluster and the server room it runs in,
including new power and cooling.
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Moved cluster configuration management to Ansible and set up PXE
bare-metal provisioning.
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Architected, installed, administered and supported UCR's
campus HPC systems.
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Built the HPCC Cloud Service (2017-2018): lab-private HPC
clusters in AWS on demand, created from the HPCC cluster with
hpcc_cloud, a cfnCluster wrapper I wrote (GPU, high-memory and
autoscaling nodes, per-minute billing, budget alerts); wrote its
manuals and maintained its software modules.
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Maintained the cluster's software environment (130 commits
to the HPCC module tree, 2017-2019) and the HPCC website (94
commits).
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XSEDE Campus Champion: connected UCR researchers and students to
NSF supercomputing centers and national laboratories.
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Taught 19 HPCC workshops for UCR researchers and students (Jul
2017 - Jun 2019; sole instructor on 10): Linux and cluster
basics, Python, software installation, and an HPCC + AWS cloud
cluster service; wrote the four training decks.
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UCR representative to the UC Research IT Committee and to the
Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC).
Lead HPC architect and administrator for Corning's research,
development and engineering computing.
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Linux clusters with thousands of cores; Lustre, InfiniBand, SAN
and NAS storage.
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60+ network-licensed science codes (Ansys, COMSOL, Abaqus; Intel
MPI, OpenMPI; MKL, FFTW) under FlexLM, RLM, LM-X and MathLM.
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400+ server, storage and network support contracts; 150 kVA+ of
data center power and cooling.
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Provisioning and configuration (iLO, Cobbler, iPXE, Kickstart);
monitoring (Nagios, ELK); virtualization (VMware, XenServer,
oVirt KVM); OpenStack and AWS.
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Led internal and external projects; customer training and
documentation.
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Founded and ran a systems administration and IT outsourcing
business: billing, accounting, infrastructure and support
systems.
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Research computing support, Linux and Windows servers, email and
web hosting, networks and procurement consulting for individuals
and small businesses.
Technical Account Manager
STCR, Endicott, NY
Apr 2008 - Aug 2009
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Web, email, NAS, DNS, RADIUS and file servers, firewalls,
intrusion detection and packet inspection for an internet
provider; customer support for connectivity and hosting.
Hardware Test Engineer
IBM, Endicott, NY
Aug 1997 - Mar 1998
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Hardware test, troubleshooting and root cause analysis;
documented performance trends for production.
Technical Support
AOL, Jacksonville, FL
Mar 1997 - Aug 1997
- Dial-up and DSL support; led internal training sessions.
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System- to component-level troubleshooting and maintenance of
radar and communications systems, including IFF (Identify Friend
or Foe), aboard an Aegis cruiser.
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Trained operators; managed IFF maintenance records and testing.
Grants
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National Science Foundation, CC* Data Storage: Foundational Campus
Research Storage for Digital Transformation, award 2346636,
$498,553, Mar 2024 - Feb 2026. Co-PI. Wrote the full proposal,
budget and justification, and the PI and Co-PI documents under the
NSF PAPPG, in one month. Delivered CephRDS: 2.09 PB usable (3.2 PB
raw), 20 nodes on the 100 Gbps Science DMZ, 422 TB federated to
the National Research Platform.
AI Work Timeline
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2019: TensorFlow and PyTorch GPU pods for UCR
researchers on the National Research Platform.
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2020: GPT-2 GPU jobs (NVIDIA RTX 8000) on
Nautilus; deep learning notebooks for researchers.
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2022: Stable Diffusion and Disco Diffusion
notebooks for researchers, before ChatGPT launched.
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2023: Ursa Major Ask, a GPT-3.5 assistant that
writes and runs research code and Slurm scripts.
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2024: uma, an LLM in the Linux shell for HPC
users.
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2025: Gemini multimodal video analysis,
multi-agent simulations, generative media tools, deep-research.
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2026: MCP servers for HPC, research systems and
NRP; UCR AI Gateway; Directed Agentic Engineering.
AI and Research Platforms Built
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ursa-bifrost (2026): MCP server and CLI in one Go
binary that lets Claude, Gemini, Codex and other AI assistants
work UCR's Slurm cluster through typed, audited, read-mostly
tools; submit and cancel are opt-in with two-step approval and
spend caps; per-user Google sign-in; hosted on Cloud Run. MIT
licensed. github.com/UCR-Research-Computing/ursa-bifrost
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UCR AI Gateway (2026): One governed OpenAI- and
Anthropic-compatible endpoint to Gemini, Claude, open-weight and
National Research Platform models, with per-lab budgets, per-key
spend limits, rate limits, a full spend log and an admin MCP
server.
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Nexus (2026): The system of record for Research
Computing's relationships: a Postgres and pgvector knowledge
graph of researchers, labs, cloud projects, grants, tasks and
interactions, run through a CLI and an OAuth MCP server with 41
role-gated tools.
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Ursa Major HPC cluster on Google Cloud (2026):
Elastic Slurm cluster built with Cluster Toolkit: compute created
on demand and deleted when idle; CPU, high-memory and NVIDIA L4
GPU partitions; per-lab accounts and budget guardrails.
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deep-research (2025-): CLI and web workstation
for Gemini Deep Research that produces cited reports and checks
their claims as real jobs on the HPC cluster. MIT licensed.
github.com/charles-forsyth/deep-research
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Ultra AI Workstation (2026): Keyboard-driven AI
operator desk for email, calendar, tickets, Slack, the Nexus
ledger and the cluster, with AI drafts under two-step approval.
MIT licensed. github.com/charles-forsyth/ultra-workstation
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Skywalker (2025-): Audit engine that scans
hundreds of Google Cloud projects for security risk, idle and
orphaned resources and AI spend; also a read-only MCP server.
github.com/charles-forsyth/Skywalker
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ursa-dsp (2026): Data Security Plan case tracker
and assembler built with UCR's Information Security Office;
people make every decision.
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nrp-mcp (2026): Local MCP server for AI-assisted
jobs on the NRP Nautilus GPU cluster, with NRP policy built in and
single-use approval. Pilot.
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UCR HPC Job Gallery (2026): 49 tested,
standardized Slurm workflows across seven colleges and schools
(including AlphaFold, from bioengineering to social science), with
README, index and HTML gallery generated from the scripts.
github.com/charles-forsyth/UCR-HPC-Job-Gallery
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squad-manager (2026): Directed Agentic
Engineering: orchestrates squads of specialized AI agents
(architect, test writer, DevOps, developer, security gatekeeper,
user acceptance) to design, build, test and release software.
github.com/charles-forsyth/squad-manager
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Generative AI media tools (2025): CLIs for Google
Veo 3.1 video, Lyria music and Gemini TTS, and a Gemini multimodal
video analyzer for research footage.
github.com/UCR-Research-Computing/gemini-video-analyzer
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TPU and accelerator demos (2026): JAX/Flax demos
on Google Cloud TPU v5e for science disciplines and a CUDA-to-TPU
porting demo. github.com/charles-forsyth/TPU-Demos
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Browser AI demos (2025): Live webcam hand
tracking (MediaPipe), reinforcement-learning game agents, an HPC
workflow simulator and a public voice AI agent. lordivxx.github.io
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Ursa Major Ask (2023) and uma (2024): Early
generative AI assistant that let researchers ask about the
research cloud and generate and run code and Slurm scripts,
followed by uma, an LLM in the Linux shell.
github.com/UCR-Research-Computing/uma
Publications
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"One Day on the Research Stack," Field Notes, Oct 2026.
charles-forsyth.github.io/papers/
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The AI + HPC Field Manual, 15 chapters, 2026.
charles-forsyth.github.io/handbook/
Teaching and Training
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HPCC workshops, UCR High Performance Computing Center, 19
sessions, Jul 2017 - Jun 2019 (sole instructor on 10; others with
Jordan Hayes and Thomas Girke), Genomics Building Auditorium: HPCC
Cluster Intro (2017-2018); Linux Basics and HPCC Cluster
Introduction (2018-2019); Basic Linux, Cluster Intro and Software
Installation (Sep 2018); Introduction to Python (Oct 2018);
Research Computing in UCR's HPC Center (Oct 2018). Authored
decks: HPCC Cluster Intro (43 slides), Linux Basics and HPCC
Cluster Intro (53), Introduction to Python (30).
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HPCC Cloud Service presentation: HPC clusters in AWS on demand,
HPCC AWS Cluster deck (36 slides), Apr 2018. Workshop list and
decks:
hpcc.ucr.edu/events/events/
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Connecting to XSEDE resources (Stampede2); Windows applications on
Linux clusters (2017-2019)
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Terraform infrastructure-as-code workshop, AWS and Google Cloud
(2020)
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National Research Platform (Nautilus) researcher guide, 8 articles
(UCR KB023-KB030, 2026)
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Training decks and recordings archived at
charles-forsyth.github.io/handbook/
Professional Service and Leadership
- Chair, UC Research IT Committee (Jul 2022 - Jan 2024)
- Vice Chair, UC Research IT Committee (Jun 2021 - Jul 2022)
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Founder and Chair, UCR Research IT Leaders (RITL), coordinating
research IT across campus (Present)
- Member, UCR Research Advisory Board (Present)
- Member, UCR Academic Senate research committee (Present)
- Official UCR Principal Investigator status (2024 - Present)
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UCR Campus Champion, NSF XSEDE and ACCESS (Jun 2017 - Present)
- NSF grant peer reviewer (May 2020 - May 2021)
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Co-Chair, UCR Visualization Laboratory Steering Committee (Aug
2019 - Present)
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UCR representative, Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC)
(Jun 2017 - Present)
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UCR representative, Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation
(CASC) (Aug 2019 - Present)
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UCR representative, Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Research and
Education Facilitators (ACI-REF) (Aug 2019 - Present)
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Research collaborator, Pacific Research Platform (Aug 2019 -
Present)
Education
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B.S., Information Technology, Purdue University
Global (formerly Kaplan University), 2015. GPA 3.89.
President's List (four terms, 2013-2014); Golden Key
International, Iota Sigma Tau and Alpha Beta Kappa honor
societies.
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Networking and Technical Support Specialist,
Ridley-Lowell Business & Technical Institute, 2011. GPA 4.0.
Highest GPA Achievement Award; Dean's List; High Honor Roll.
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Advanced Electronics Technology, United States
Navy, 1997. AC/DC and solid state circuits, digital
microprocessors, radio and radar, communications systems and
troubleshooting.
Certifications
- PBS Professional Administrator (Altair)
- Mellanox Certified InfiniBand Professional, Level 1
- EMC Isilon Administration
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Kubernetes: Cloud Native Ecosystem; Learning Kubernetes (2020)
- Project Management Foundations (PMI)
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UCR Organizational Excellence: Bronze Certificate and
Collaborative Leadership (2018)
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Professional development in leadership, project management and
remote work, PMI and LinkedIn Learning (2018-2020)
Technical Expertise
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AI: MCP servers, agentic engineering, Gemini,
Claude and open-weight models, Vertex AI, RAG and pgvector
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HPC: Slurm, PBS Professional, MPI, InfiniBand,
Lustre, GPFS/Spectrum Scale, Ceph, Isilon, DDN
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Cloud: Google Cloud (Cluster Toolkit, Cloud Run,
Cloud SQL, GKE, IAM, FinOps), AWS, OpenStack, Kubernetes
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Systems: Linux (CentOS/RHEL 4 onward), Windows
Server, VMware, XenServer, KVM, Nagios, ELK
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Languages: Python, Go, Bash, C++, C#, PowerShell,
SQL