Jim Serafin, facility manager of the Computational Facilities Complex (CFC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named 2016 Mission Critical Facility Manager of the Year Runner-Up.

According to the nomination form, Jim has “demonstrated an ability to ‘bridge the gap’ between facilities and IT through his relationships and leveraging collaboration opportunities.” One key is the monthly meetings that Jim and his team hold with its data center customers to review scheduled preventive and predictive maintenance workorders. According to his nomination, “This knowledge is invaluable to IT customers integrating their outage requirements with facilities’ needs and providing a sound basis for planned facilities outage requests.”

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing (OLCF) facility is one of the world’s most powerful computing facilities. According to the website, the OLCF was established at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2004 with the mission of accelerating scientific discovery and engineering progress by providing outstanding computing and data management resources to high-priority research and development projects. The OLCF is home to Titan, the nation’s most powerful supercomputer for open science with a theoretical peak performance of 27 petaflops (quadrillion calculations per second). This capability “is on par with each of the world’s 7 billion people being able to carry out approximately 3 million calculations per second.”

In addition, the CFC also hosts significant classified computational capabilities for the U.S. government and Jim is on call 7x24 in support of unplanned data center emergencies including storms and flooding over the 2015 holiday season. His quick and decisive actions prevented power outages and any impact on computing. The facility is driving to meet Executive Order 13639 — Planning for Federal Sustainability in the Next Decade by meeting energy and sustainability goals and participating in the DOE Better Buildings Challenge: Data Center Accelerator program to realize a 25% improvement in PUE by 2020.

Serafin has worked at UT-Battelle, the managing contractor for ORNL since 2008. He received a bachelor of science in civil engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from the University of Tennessee and is a licensed P.E. in that state. He also has a PMP certification.

Serafin is married with two daughters.