My Journey in STEM

From Sydney to San Francisco — HPC, Cloud, and Quantum

Cameron Rutherford

April 4, 2026

Table of contents

• Growing Up
• High School
• College
• Life in the US
• Career
• What is HPC / Cloud / Quantum?
• Thank You!

Welcome!

Scan the QR code or visit the link to follow along on your laptop:

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Growing Up

Australian / American Dual Citizenship

My parents in Sydney Harbor

Born in Sydney, Australia. Mum is Australian, Dad is American. Dual citizen — grew up going back and forth. Very different education systems.

Baby Cameron

Me as a baby

Basketball Was Everything

Andrew Bogut Basketball Camp

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

Chemistry class

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

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

NSW Metropolitan

Bankstown Bruins

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

Conference championship game winner!

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

ASWU student government

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

Mario & Luigi

Study Abroad — Technology & Culture

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

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

Meeting people everywhere

Club Basketball

NIRSA Championship Series

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

Mandelbrot Zoom — generated with GPU parallel computing

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

On the CS books

Sleeping on the job

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

Teaching at PNNL TechFest

• 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

ExaGO visualization

Software to optimize the entire US power grid — running on the world’s fastest supercomputers.

E3SM — Earth System Climate Modeling

PNNL TechFest

2022 — Quantum

2023 — HPC Workshop

2024 — Virtual Envs

I presented at PNNL’s annual science festival three years running.

My PNNL Desk

Multi-monitor setup for serious work

Adjunct Professor — Fordham University (2024)

My teaching assistant

Taught CISC2200 — Data Structures in the Fall ’24 semester at Fordham in Manhattan. Updated the syllabus from C++17 to C++23.

Course site: dsm.fordham.edu/~rrutherford4

AWS — Centre for Quantum Computing

My desk at AWS SF

The AWS office

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

Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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

Next to a quantum computer model

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

IBM Quantum

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