My Journey in STEM
From Sydney to San Francisco — HPC, Cloud, and Quantum
Welcome!
Scan the QR code or visit the link to follow along on your laptop:
cameronrutherford.quarto.pub/camerons-git-site/presentations/minds-matter/presentation.reveal.html
Growing Up
Australian / American Dual Citizenship
Born in Sydney, Australia. Mum is Australian, Dad is American. Dual citizen — grew up going back and forth. Very different education systems.
Baby Cameron
Basketball Was Everything
Basketball was my life growing up. This is me at an Andrew Bogut camp — he’s the #1 NBA draft pick from Australia. I was tall, loved the game, and it shaped a lot of my high school and college experience.
High School
Sydney Grammar School
Sydney Grammar is one of the oldest schools in Australia. Rigorous academics. This is our chemistry class — lab coats, hands-on science. Great teachers who pushed us.
CAJ Tutorial
The ATAR & HSC
The HSC (Higher School Certificate) is the final exam in New South Wales, Australia.
Your ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank) is a percentile rank from 0-99.95 that determines which university programs you can get into.
- Study 10+ subjects, examined over weeks of final exams
- Your entire university future rides on one set of tests
- Incredibly stressful — imagine SATs but they’re your only metric
- I chose to come to the US instead
This is relevant to Mind’s Matter students — you’re navigating college admissions too. The Australian system is arguably more stressful because it’s a single number. The US system with essays, extracurriculars, and multiple chances is actually more holistic. You have more control over your story.
Basketball in Australia
College
Why Whitworth University?
- Small liberal arts school in Spokane, WA (2,500 students)
- Academic scholarship — Division III
- B.S. Computer Science and B.S. Mathematics
- Sometimes the less obvious choice is the right one
I could have stayed in Australia, gone to a big university. Instead I picked a tiny school in Spokane, Washington that most people have never heard of. It was the best decision I ever made. Small classes, great professors who knew my name, and I got to play basketball.
The Game Winner
Storming the Court
This is the crowd storming the court after a game-winning shot in the conference championship. College basketball at a small school is special — the whole campus shows up. I played for two years, then quit the team junior year to focus on other things.
Life After Basketball
After leaving the basketball team junior year, I became Chess Club President and Sports Events Coordinator senior year. Also worked as a Calculus Grader and Math Tutor.
College Fun
Study Abroad — Technology & Culture
Study abroad program called “Technology and Culture” — traveled through Southeast Asia studying how technology intersects with different cultures. Life-changing experience. This is Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
Exploring the World
Club Basketball
Near Space Research (2017)
Built and launched research payloads to the edge of space (~100,000 ft) with the Whitworth Near Space program.
Parallel Computing & The Mandelbrot Set
My parallel computing class is where I fell in love with GPUs. We learned to split massive calculations across thousands of cores — this Mandelbrot fractal zoom was my final project.
Embedded Systems — Bomb Defusal Game
Built a physical bomb defusal game using embedded systems — wires, switches, timers, the whole thing.
Life in the US
My Co-Worker
This is my cat. She likes to sit on my computer science textbooks and sleep while I work. Very helpful co-worker.
Career
PNNL — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
- Led software for ExaGO — deployed to Frontier, the #1 supercomputer in the world
- Worked on E3SM — Earth system climate modeling
- Taught workshops on quantum computing and ML
- Won PNNL’s highest performance award two years in a row
After graduation, I went straight to a national lab — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Started as a student intern and worked my way up to leading projects. PNNL is one of the DOE’s premier research labs.
ExaGO — Power Grid Optimization
Software to optimize the entire US power grid — running on the world’s fastest supercomputers.
E3SM — Earth System Climate Modeling
PNNL TechFest
I presented at PNNL’s annual science festival three years running.
My PNNL Desk
Adjunct Professor — Fordham University (2024)
Taught CISC2200 — Data Structures in the Fall ’24 semester at Fordham in Manhattan. Updated the syllabus from C++17 to C++23.
AWS — Centre for Quantum Computing
Now I work at Amazon Web Services in San Francisco, supporting the Centre for Quantum Computing (CQC).
What is HPC / Cloud / Quantum?
High Performance Computing (HPC)
Supercomputers — thousands of computers linked together to solve problems too big for any single machine.
- Climate modeling, drug discovery, physics simulations
- The fastest can do quintillions of calculations per second
- Think of it like having 100,000 laptops all working on the same problem
ORNL Frontier — #1 Supercomputer in the World
This is the machine my software ran on. Over 9,000 nodes, each more powerful than any gaming PC.
Cloud Computing & AWS
Amazon Web Services lets anyone rent supercomputer-level resources:
- No need to buy hardware — just pay for what you use
- Scientists, startups, and students all use it
- Powers Netflix, Twitch, and Alexa
- My job: making it easy for researchers to run HPC in the cloud
The Centre for Quantum Computing (CQC)
AWS is building a quantum computer from the ground up.
This is from our Nature paper — designing the hardware and error correction needed for useful quantum computing.
The Ocelot Chip
AWS’s quantum chip — designed to implement quantum error correction at scale.
Simulating Quantum Hardware with Palace
Palace — PArallel LArge-scale Computational Electromagnetics
Open-source software by AWS for simulating quantum chip designs before building them.
Check out the single transmon example — this is the kind of simulation I support.
This connects HPC and quantum — we use classical supercomputers to simulate and design quantum hardware. It’s all connected.
Quantum Computing
These machines have to be cooled to near absolute zero (-459F) to work. Quantum computing uses the laws of quantum physics to solve certain problems exponentially faster than any classical computer.
Inside an IBM Quantum Lab
The gold wiring carries quantum signals. Each of those cylinders is a dilution refrigerator.
Why This Matters For You
Math is the shared language across all of these fields:
- HPC, cloud, quantum, AI — they all come back to math and computation
- Computers are the machines we build to do the calculations — but the thinking starts with math
- You don’t need to know everything now — I started with just math and curiosity
- The path isn’t always straight — Australia → tiny college → national lab → AWS
Thank You!
Find Me Online
- GitHub: cameronrutherford
- LinkedIn: robert-c-rutherford