Gropp Honored with IEEE TCSC Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing

3/16/2010

Prof. Gropp received the Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing by the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing.

Written by

William Gropp, the Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been awarded the 2010 IEEE Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing by the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC).  Prof. Gropp was honored for “outstanding contributions to the development of the Message Passing Interface (MPI), scalable implementation of MPI (MPICH-1 and MPICH2), domain decomposition algorithms, and scalable tools for the parallel numerical solution of PDEs (PETSc library).”

Computer Science Professor William Gropp
Computer Science Professor William Gropp
Illinois computer science professor Bill Gropp

The IEEE TCSC Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing was established in 2008 to recognize significant and sustained contributions to the scalable computing community through the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC), coupled with an outstanding record of high quality and high impact research.

“Bill Gropp has been a major influence on the field of high performance parallel computing, and has made vital contributions that solve some of the most pressing issues in science and computing,” said professor Rob A. Rutenbar, the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and computer science department head.  “We are pleased and proud that he has received this prestigious recognition of his work.”

Gropp’s career has been characterized by his ability to work both the architecture and application sides of the HPC equation, advancing high performance parallel computing, with particular emphasis on its role in scientific computing.

Gropp’s research interests are in parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical methods for partial differential equations. His work investigates methods for combining numerical analysis techniques with parallel processing techniques to form solutions appropriate for execution on modern computing systems. His research also addresses issues such as scalability and hierarchical memory models in parallel computers.

Gropp played a major role in creating the MPI, the standard interprocessor communication interface for large-scale parallel computers. Gropp is also co-author of MPICH, one of the most influential MPI implementations to date, and co-wrote two books on MPI: Using MPI and Using MPI2. He also co-authored the Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc), one of the leading packages for scientific computing on highly parallel computers.

Among his other accomplishments, Gropp developed adaptive mesh refinement and domain decomposition methods with a focus on scalable parallel algorithms, and discussed these algorithms and their application in the book he co-authored, Domain Decomposition: Parallel Multilevel Methods for Elliptic Partial Differential Equations.

Gropp is involved in several other advanced computing projects, including performance modeling, data structure modification for ultra-high-performance computers, and development of component-based software to promote interoperability among numerical toolkits.

Gropp serves as co-principal investigator for Blue Waters, a project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to build the first sustained-petascale resource for open scientific computing. Gropp also serves as deputy director for research at the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technology at Illinois.

Gropp is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the ACM and IEEE, has received the IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award honoring innovative uses of high performance computing in problem solving, has received two R&D 100 awards, and was named the inaugural HPC Community Leader by insideHPC.com.

 


Share this story

This story was published March 16, 2010.