Snir Named HPC "Person to Watch in 2012"

University of Illinois computer science professor Marc Snir has been named one of HPCWire’s "People to Watch in 2012."

Each year, HPCwire announces its annual "People to Watch" list, comprised of an elite group of community leaders selected from academia, government, business, and industry who we predict will be impacting the world in 2012 and beyond.

“The recent flurry of news last fall surrounding IBM’s departure from the 10 petaflop NCSA petaflop “Blue Waters” Project and Snir’s role as a co-PI for the project will share the focus of a lot of attention this year as the supercomputer nears its delivery date, slated for fall 2012. Combined with his role as a one of the original co-founders and as a co-chair for the relatively new Graph 500, all but guarantees that Snir will be a person of interest to follow this year,” writes HPCWire in announcing Snir’s selection.

Snir, the Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor in computer science, has been a leader in shaping high performance computing (HPC) architectures and parallel programming, including contributions to IBM’s SP and Blue Gene systems and to MPI, the standard communications library used in HPC. 

A distinguished researcher and scholar, Snir chaired the Department of Computer Science from 2001 to 2007.  While at Illinois, he has also co-directed the Intel and Microsoft Universal Parallel Computing Research Center, was the first director of the Illinois Informatics Institute, is the associate director for Extreme Scale Computing at NCSA, and is co-PI of the Blue Waters petascale computing project. In addition, Snir co-chaired the National Research Council’s Committee to Study the Future of Supercomputing, and he is a co-author of its influential 2004 report, “Getting Up to Speed: The Future of Supercomputing.” 

Snir is also serves as the Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division (MCS) at Argonne National Laboratory.
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Contact: Marc Snir, Department of Computer Science, 217/333-4219.

Writer: Jennifer La Montagne, associate director of communications, Department of Computer Science, 217/244-6568.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.