Oct. 14, 2020 — The National Center for Supercomputing Application’s (NCSA) Director and Chief Scientist William “Bill” Gropp has been voted IEEE Computer Society 2021 president-elect and will serve as president in 2022. The president oversees IEEE CS programs and operations and is a nonvoting member of most IEEE CS program boards and committees. The IEEE CS is the world’s preeminent organization for computer science, engineering, and technology
This is the latest honor for Gropp, a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2016, the Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE CS named him the recipient of the ACM/IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award for highly influential contributions to the programmability of high-performance parallel and distributed computers. In 2008 he was the recipient of the IEEE CS Sidney Fernbach Award for outstanding contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches.Gropp, who holds the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is currently IEEE CS Vice President for Technical and Conference Activities and a Board of Governors member since 2017.
Active in the HPC industry since 1987, Gropp played a major role in the development of the MPI message-passing standard. He is co-author of one of the most widely used implementations of MPI, MPICH, and has been involved in the MPI Forum from the beginning of MPI. He has written many books and papers on MPI including “Using MPI” and “Using Advanced MPI.” He is also one of the designers of the PETSc parallel numerical library, and has developed efficient and scalable parallel algorithms for the solution of linear and nonlinear equations.
