As SDSC's Associate Director for Program Development and Integration, Simmons will seek out new directions and opportunities and form teams to take best advantage of them. Margaret Simmons is a computer scientist who has spent most of her career as an employee of the University of California. PET's goal is to become a successful, ongoing example of what collaborations among universities, industries, and government can accomplish. The others are the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Minnesota, Syracuse University, Mississippi State University, and a group of five historically black colleges from the Southern tier of states.
PET is thus a major project in metacomputing, software tools, and visualization.
Earlier, Simmons spent many years at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She obtained a degree in mathematics from the University of Houston in 1959, and worked for a time at the Cornell University Computing Center as a programmer. In 1973, her husband accepted a position at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Simmons went to work there as a programmer. She worked on the suite of Monte Carlo neutron transport codes begun by the legendary Stan Ulam and Nick Metropolis, which have long been a mainstay, not only of the U.S. weapons program, but also of engineering design for nuclear power plants and medical radiology facilities. After several years, I decided that I needed more formal training in computation and returned to graduate school.