R. Srikant has been named director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Srikant began his duties as the new director of NCSA on January 1, following the departure and semi-retirement of NCSA’s previous director Bill Gropp.
Srikant joins NCSA from the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering and professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Srikant is also co-director of the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute that is managed alongside the University of California, Berkeley.
“I’m very excited to begin this new journey with NCSA,” Srikant said. “My focus is on supporting our excellent researchers and staff, strengthening collaboration across the center, and ensuring that NCSA continues to thrive in its research, service and impact missions.”
NCSA is a familiar place for Srikant. He steps into this role following a stint serving as the acting director of operations at NCSA for several months in 2023, as well as countless research collaborations between his home department in Grainger and the high-performance computing experts at NCSA.
“I am confident that Srikant’s expertise and collaborative approach will be invaluable at NCSA,” said Senior Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation Susan Martinis in her announcement. “As we celebrate NCSA’s 40th anniversary this year, I know that Srikant’s vision for what’s ahead will propel us into another 40 years of innovation in AI, machine learning and other accelerating areas in the research landscape for computing.”
Srikant had a busy first month as head of NCSA, which included hosting Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker for a tour of the National Petascale Computing Facility, where they discussed the emergence of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and the impact of HPC on the state of Illinois.
“Meeting with Gov. Pritzker was a rewarding opportunity to showcase how NCSA’s innovations resonate from Illinois to the global stage,” Srikant said. “We’re proud to be at the forefront of advanced computing that drives transformative economic growth and industrial leadership across our state.”
Srikant earned a doctorate and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Illinois and completed his bachelor’s in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. His research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, communication networks, quantum computing and applied probability.
Srikant’s work on the mathematical analysis and design of algorithms for the internet, wireless networks and data centers has been recognized with major awards, including the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Field Award for Computers and Communications and the ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award. He is also a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and more than 25 of Srikant’s former students and post-docs are faculty members at leading institutions, including Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Tech, Northwestern University, and the University of Texas at Austin, and several others hold executive and research and development positions at prestigious technology companies such as Nvidia, Amazon, Google and Meta.