Alan Tackett received his M. S. in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Physics from Wake Forest University in 1998.  He then went to Vanderbilt University as a post-doc in the department of Physics and Astronomy.  In 2000 he transitioned to being the project leader for VAMPIRE at Vanderbilt, a 55 node Beowulf compute cluster dedicated for campus research.  Following from the success of VAMPIRE and with the support of a large group of VU researchers, a proposal for the entity now know as ACCRE (Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education) was submitted to the Academic Venture Capital Fund of Vanderbilt University. An $8.3 million grant was received to transform the cluster into a University-wide resource capable of meeting the needs of any researcher on campus. The scope of the operation was expanded from a compute cluster to include data storage and data visualization capabilities.  Currently ACCRE has over 1500 processors and over 200TB of storage. Dr. Tackett is now the ACCRE Technical Director and Research Assistant Professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy.