Prof. Gropp Selected as Inaugural Winner of HPC Community Leadership Award

11/17/2009

Bill Gropp has been selected as the inaugural winner of the HPC Community Leader Award by insideHPC.

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University of Illinois computer science professor Bill Gropp has been chosen as the inaugural winner of the High Performance Computing Community Leader by insideHPC.

The award was established to recognize the people and organizations who make the most impact on High Performance Computing, and who, according to insideHPC, “have persevered through technology, budget or organizational challenges to place innovative HPC solutions in the hands of users in business, engineering, technology, and science.”

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

 

"Those of us who have worked with Bill for many years have always known that he exemplifies true leadership," said Michael Heath, interim head of the University of Illinois department of computer science. "Not only has he played a major role in advancing high performance parallel computing, but he has done so with particular emphasis on its role in scientific computing. His ability to work both sides of the equation have enabled him to make vital contributions that solve some of the most pressing issues in science and computing."

According to insideHPC:

“Bill Gropp’s best known legacy to the HPC community is the MPI standard. Many people suggest that node level parallelism will run out of sensible programming paradigms long before inter-node largely due to MPI scaling well beyond the scale of resources around at the times of its introduction. Gropp can be regularly heard arguing how MPI can evolve to keep our millions of lines of legacy applications scaling to systems with millions of cores, and he has made major contributions in hierarchical numerical methods for the numerical solution of partial differential equations.”

Gropp serves as co-PI for the Blue Waters petascale computing project to build the world’s fastest computer at Illinois, and is the deputy director for research of the University’s Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies.  Gropp also serves as the chair for the department’s Scientific Computing Group and is the Paul & Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science.

"Bill's insights into scientific applications is keen, and his knowledge of scientific computing broad. His contributions to the HPC community as well as to the University of Illinois' extreme-scale computing efforts are invaluable. The Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project and Illinois' Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies would not be the success that they are without him. The HPC Community Leadership award is a well deserved honor," said Thom Dunning, who leads Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies.

 


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This story was published November 17, 2009.