Center for Institutional Research Computing Staff
Peter Mills, Ph.D.
Deputy Director
As Deputy Director of the Center for Research Computing, Dr. Mills guides the design of the university’s flagship high-performance computing (HPC) cluster, while managing staff and user support services. His leadership draws from decades of experience in parallel computing, programming language design, software engineering, and systems administration spanning both academia and industry.
Prior to WSU, Dr. Mills held research positions at Duke University, Applied Research Associates, and Nortel Networks. As an entrepreneur, he also founded a company focused on advanced software research and development, where he secured millions in SBIR defense research contracts and gained expertise in large-scale project management.
Peter Mills holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Idaho, an MS in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in Mathematics, summa cum laude, from Duke University.
Rohit Dhariwal, Ph.D.
Computational Scientist
Rohit Dhariwal received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2016 and then joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University for his postdoctoral research work. His doctoral and postdoctoral research has focused on particle-laden turbulence, which is important in various environmental and astrophysical problems such as droplet formation in clouds, plankton distribution in oceans and planetesimal formation in the early universe. He uses high-performance computing to simulate and analyze these problems.
Dr. Dhariwal also has extensive experience in developing computational fluid dynamics software and performing large-scale direct numerical simulations of particle-laden turbulent flows on some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. His research interests lie in high-performance computing and multiphase turbulent flows. He is also the university’s Campus Champion for the NSF ACCESS program.
Roy Obenchain
HPC Systems Administrator
Roy Obenchain has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington and worked for a decade as a research and testing engineer for companies including Honda and Boeing. After a lifelong interest in computers, he made a career change to Unix computer support at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He spent 10 years supporting data gathering and analysis for international HIV/AIDS clinical trials.
He then moved to the University of Washington department of Genome Sciences to manage their HPC team supporting 700+ compute nodes, 8+ petabytes of storage, and 4+ petabytes of backups. Looking for a more rural lifestyle, he moved to WSU in 2017 to support the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostics Laboratory for the college of Veterinary medicine before moving to CIRC. He brings over 20 years experience in Unix system administration and architecting computer systems.
William Aoki
HPC Systems Administrator
Will Aoki joined WSU from the Natural History Museum of Utah, where he supported office and research computing and built embedded systems for exhibits. Recent projects include monitoring a living microbialite from the Great Salt Lake and creating an electromechanical interactive used for exhibits about wildfires, pigeon breeding, and urban forestry.
He holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of Utah.