HPCWire has named William D. Gropp, Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Parallel Computing Institute, one of its People to Watch in 2013. According to the publication, the annual list is comprised of “the best and brightest minds of HPC whose hard work, dedication and contributions” are predicted “to reach beyond the spectrum of high performance computing and will influence the direction that technology will lead us in 2013 and beyond.”
“As this year’s reining General Chair for SC13, Gropp-watching is on the rise,” writes HPCWire in announcing Gropp’s selection. “Upon closer examination, it’s pretty apparent why he’s the point person for setting the 2013 conference back on track.” Supercomputing 2013, to be held in Denver later this year, is the premier conference in high performance computing, with nearly 10,000 attendees annually.
Gropp, who is the chief applications architect for the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer, is also the Deputy Director for Research for the Institute of Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies and a researcher in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. His research interests are focused on developing parallel computing standards that can be efficiently and widely implemented; developing tools to understand and improve the performance and correctness of parallel programs; and establishing innovative methods for parallelism that will match radical changes in computer architecture.
Notably, Gropp played a major role in creating the MPI, the standard interprocessor communication interface for large-scale parallel computers. He 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. In addition, he co-authored the Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc), one of the leading packages for scientific computing on highly parallel computers.
Gropp is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and SIAM, has received the IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award, the IEEE TCSC Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing, two R&D 100 Awards, and was named the inaugural HPC Community Leader by insideHPC.com.
This is the second year in a row that an Illinois computer science professor has been named an HPCWire “Person to Watch.” Last year, Marc Snir, the Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor of Computer Science, was recognized.