John C. Toole
Director, National Coordination Office (NCO)
Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program
(March 1995 – July 1997)
John C. Toole became Director of the National Coordination Office for Computing, Information, and Communications (NCO) and Chair of the Computing, Information, and Communications (CIC) R&D; Subcommittee of the Committee on Computing, Information, and Communications (CCIC) of the National Science and Technology Council in March of 1995. He was appointed to this position jointly by Dr. Gibbons, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Dr. Anita Jones, Chair of the CCIC and Director of Defense Research and Engineering at the Department of Defense.
John C. Toole previously served as Executive Director for High Performance Computing for DoD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), responsible for planning, initiation, leadership, and coordination of interrelated research and development efforts in HPC technology within DARPA, other components of the Department of Defense, and Federal Agencies. From August 1993 to October 1994 he served as Acting Director of the Computing Systems Technology Office (CSTO), which was responsible for advancing the frontier of computing systems technology to insure DoD had technologies to meet its future mission requirements. These technologies included scalable computing systems, microsystems design and prototyping, scalable software, networking, and associated technologies.
In March 1994, he retired from the U.S. Air Force after serving for over 22 years. Prior to these recent positions, he served as Deputy Director of CSTO for two years, and as a DARPA program manager in the Microsystems Design and Prototyping Program for five years. In other related experience in the Air Force, he managed a VLSI Computer Aided Design (CAD) branch, attended the University of Texas at Austin in computer engineering, spent several years in hardware/software performance analysis of large scale computing systems, and has designed and implemented portions of real time operating systems. Before entering the Air Force, he received a BS and MSEE from Cornell University.