Gropp, Vaidya Named IEEE Fellows

University of Illinois computer science professor Bill Gropp and computer science affiliate professor Nitin Vaidya (ECE) have been named IEEE Fellows for the class of 2010.  Gropp was selected for his contributions to high performance computing and message passing, and Vaidya was selected for his contributions to wireless networking protocols and mobile communications.

The grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in the profession and is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon those with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The accomplishments that are honored have contributed importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, bringing the realization of significant value to society.

“This well warranted recognition of two of our faculty members by one of the most prestigious professional societies in our field affirms the consistent record of excellence they have exhibited in their research, as well as the great respect they command among their peers,” said Michael Heath, interim head of department and Fulton Watson Copp Chair in computer science.

Bill Gropp
Professor 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 Parallel Multilevel Methods for Elliptic Partial Differential Equations.

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 the University of Illinois.

Gropp is a fellow of the ACM, has received the IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award honoring innovative uses of high performance computing in problem solving, and was recently named the inaugural HPC Community Leader by insideHPC.com.

Nitin Vaidya
Computer science affiliate faculty member and electrical and computer engineering professor Nitin Vaidya’s research interests span networking and systems topics, and include as communications networks, wireless networks, and distributed systems. 

His work is currently focused on theory and protocols for multi-channel wireless networks, secure multi-hop wireless networks, and rate and power control for wireless networks.  His group is also developing a multi-channel, multi-interface wireless mesh testbed known as Net-X.  

Net-X provides support for exploiting various forms of diversity available in a wireless network in the form of multiple channels, interfaces, transmission rates/power-levels etc.  The goal of the Net-X project is to develop generic OS support for utilizing interface capabilities, such that the support is cleanly integrated into the network stack.