Rob Pennington is the director of the Innovative Systems Lab and the CTO at the NCSA. He is responsible for on-going work to identify and define the usefulness of innovative systems to scientific and engineering research applications, including systems with FPGAs, and other new computing technologies. As CTO, he oversees the major technical directions for NCSA. He had been the interim NCSA director, the associate director with responsibility for the NCSA computing, storage and network environment and for HPC strategy and directions. His experience with distributed systems and clusters goes back almost twenty years, including leading the Advanced Systems group at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and astronomical data acquisition and reduction systems at the University of Minnesota. Rob has a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Rice University (1985) and a B.S. in Chemical Physics for East Tennessee State University.