Gropp is among HPCWire's "People to Watch" in 2013

HPCWire has named PCI Director William D. Gropp one of its people to watch in 2013. According to the publication, "The annual list is comprised of an elite group of the best and brightest minds in HPC whose research, dedication and hard work will be making a difference in the HPC community and in the world with their contributions."

Gropp, who is also the chief applications architect for the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer, is the General Chair for Supercomputing '13, to be held in Denver in November. In addition, he is the Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science and Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory; he was appointed Deputy Director for Research for the Institute of Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies at Illinois in 2008.

His research interest focus 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. As HPCWire says: "He is widely acknowledged as playing a major role in the development of the MPI message-passing standard."