LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 9 October, 2008 — William Gropp, a developer of the message passing interface, has been named this year’s winner of the IEEE Computer Society’s Sidney Fernbach Award.
Established in 1992 in memory of high-performance computing pioneer Sidney Fernbach, the award recognizes innovative approaches to HPC applications. It acknowledges outstanding contributions in developing numerical algorithms and mathematical software that are important for computational modeling and simulation, or for using high-performance computers to solve large computational problems.
Gropp, the Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 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 UIUC 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 received his BS in mathematics from Case Western Reserve University in 1977, an MS in physics from the University of Washington in 1978, and a PhD in computer science from Stanford in 1982. After serving as assistant and associate professor in Yale University’s Computer Science Department, in 1990, he worked in the numerical analysis group at Argonne from 2000-2007. Gropp was also a senior scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and a senior fellow in the Argonne-University of Chicago Computation Institute from 1999-2007.
Gropp will receive his Sidney Fernbach certificate and accompanying $2,000 award at SC08, the International Conference for Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis in Austin, Texas. Along with this year’s recipient of the Seymour Cray Award, Gropp will give a talk in a plenary session at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, 19 November. Previous Sidney Fernbach Award recipients include Edward Seidel, John B. Bell, Marsha Berger, and Jack J. Dongarra.
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