Gropp named SIAM Fellow

CSL researcher William Gropp, the Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science, was recently named a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). He was honored “for his development of algorithms and software for high performance scientific computing, including the development of MPI.”

William Gropp

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.

“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 serves as Director of the Parallel Computing Institute at Illinois, and is a 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.

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is an international community of over 13,000 individual members, including applied and computational mathematicians, computer scientists, and other scientists and engineers. SIAM advances the fields of applied mathematics and computational science by publishing a series of premier journals and a variety of books, sponsoring a wide selection of conferences, and through various other programs.