PayPal Joins HTC Steering Committee

As digital payment leader PayPal, an eBay company, has joined the Steering Committee of the High Performance Computing (HPC) User Forum, IDC estimates that PayPal actually saved more than $700 million by moving up to HPC in a very innovative way for real-time.

According to Earl Joseph, program vice president for HPC at International Data Corporation (IDC) and executive director of the HPC User Forum, PayPal's Arno Kolster will serve as the company's primary representative and Ryan Quick will serve as alternate.

Arno Kolster is Senior MTS, Database Architect, at PayPal. His main career focus over the past 25 years has been database architecture, database administration, and operations architecture for a number of different industries including oil and gas, emergency services, finance and e-commerce.

His interest in HPC and technical computing came about as a result of finding solutions to solving real-time data analytics across distributed systems at Web scale.

He and Ryan Quick received IDC HPC Innovation Excellence Awards in 2012 and 2014 and often speak about HPC and its roles at PayPal.

He's a member of the prestigious Royal Philatelic Society of London and the American Philatelic Society. Mr. Kolster received a degree in Computer Science from The University of Calgary.

"IDC estimates that PayPal has saved more than $700 million by moving up to HPC in a very innovative way for real-time and predictive fraud analysis," said Joseph. "High performance data analysis – big data using HPC – is the fastest growing part of the HPC market and is attracting many commercial users. We look forward to having PayPal's perspective on the steering committee."

The HPC User Forum is directed by a steering committee consisting of HPC users from government, industry, and academia, and is operated for the users by IDC.

The HPC User Forum was founded in 1999 to advance the state of high-performance computing through open discussions, information sharing, and initiatives involving HPC users in industry, government, and academia, along with HPC vendors and other interested parties.

The organization has grown to more than 150 members.

The next HPC User Forum meeting will be held April 13-15, 2015, in Norfolk, Virginia.