Gropp takes key role with IACAT

William Gropp, the Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been appointed the new deputy director for research for the University's Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies (IACAT). "Bill is an extraordinary scientist with a deep knowledge of computing technology. More important, he has a track record of working with researchers who are seeking to use computing to tackle the most pressing issues in their disciplines," says IACAT Director Thom Dunning, who also leads the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). "His energy and leadership experience will be great assets in advancing the Institute's mission to transfer computer science and engineering innovation to a broad range of disciplines." Gropp will work with Dunning and other IACAT leaders to:

• develop and implement a strategy for advancing the Institute's role in research and education and to oversee the activities in the research themes to ensure consistency with this strategy and the excellence of the research;
• encourage synergy within the research projects in IACAT and between the IACAT research projects and the technology research, development and deployment activities in NCSA; and
• encourage synergy between the research projects in IACAT and related activities on the Illinois campus.

"IACAT's three research themes, embracing advanced information systems, computing and creativity, and petascale computing, are an example of the tremendous strength of Illinois in all areas of advanced computing," Gropp says. "I am excited by this opportunity to take part in building on these strengths to make Illinois a leader in advanced computing." Gropp is an ACM Fellow and a Gordon Bell Award winner. His research interests are in high-performance scientific computing, with particular emphasis on parallel computing, and he is a co-principal investigator on the Blue Waters project to build the first sustained-petascale resource for open scientific computing.