Josh Furlani

Josh Furlani is an infrastructure architect with seven years at the University at Buffalo’s Center for Computational Research, where he works across every layer of research computing, from the physical rack to the software running on it. He designs and builds datacenter environments end to end: rack layout and hardware selection driven by efficiency and automation goals, network fabrics built for scale and reliability, and the automation tooling that ties it all together. He has led major architectural transitions on both the network and compute sides, moving the organization toward modern leaf-spine networking, virtualized and containerized infrastructure with datacenter-level fault tolerance, and an observability platform that provides visibility across the environment.

Alongside the infrastructure work, he writes the software that runs on it: he is co-lead developer of Grendel, an open-source provisioning server built for HPC-scale deployments, and leads a ground-up rewrite of a legacy bioinformatics analysis pipeline for modern high-performance computing.

At Empire AI, Josh helps manage and support the high-performance computing infrastructure that powers the consortium’s research. His work helps ensure that Empire AI’s advanced computing systems remain reliable, resilient, and available to researchers across New York.