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Gropp, Former NCSA Leaders Selected for HPCwire’s Inaugural ‘35 Legends’ List

Honors and Awards
Portrait of Bill Gropp.

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NCSA Director Bill Gropp and two former Center directors were chosen for the first-ever HPCwire “35 Legends” list in celebration of the publication’s 35th anniversary.

Thirty-five honorees will be announced each year, selected by HPCwire editors and advisors based on their contributions to the high-performance computing community over the past 35 years and celebrated for the different ways they’ve helped move HPC forward.

Gropp, NCSA’s Founding Director Larry Smarr and Former Director Daniel Reed were among the first 17 honorees announced in July. The remaining HPCwire 35 Legends will be made public in August.

NCSA Director Bill Gropp

HPCwire highlighted Gropp’s leadership as director at NCSA in his 35 Legends profile, saying he “has driven significant growth in its programs and infrastructure,” including providing essential GPU cycles for the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) program ACCESS. Gropp is also a professor of Computer Science in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and holds the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering. Additionally, he is the principal investigator for the NSF-funded Delta and DeltaAI systems.

“Two of Gropp’s most significant contributions to HPC are the PETSc parallel numerical library and the MPI standard. His contributions played a crucial role in developing the MPI standard, and he started and led the creation of the MPICH implementation of MPI, both of which remain widely used today.”

NCSA’s history of leadership in advanced computing is a shining example of the growth that’s occurred in the HPC field itself.

“Computing gives you a tool to answer questions that can’t be answered in any other way, and I find this exciting,” Gropp told HPCwire. “HPC, of course, gives you the most powerful tools to answer the hardest problems.”

NCSA Founding Director Larry Smarr

In Smarr’s profile, HPCwire dubbed him “a pioneer in scientific computing, supercomputer applications and internet infrastructure,” highlighting the NCSA founding director’s many contributions to the HPC field, including “a move that revolutionized the field of HPC itself” when he co-submitted a 10-page proposal to the NSF in 1983 titled “Center for Scientific and Engineering Supercomputing” – informally known as the “Black Proposal” after the color of its cover – which was the first unsolicited submission to be approved by the NSF and led to the founding of four supercomputing centers at Cornell, Illinois, Princeton and San Diego, with a fifth established later at Pittsburgh.

Former NCSA Director Daniel Reed

Among his many accomplishments, Reed played a pivotal role as a principal investigator and chief architect for the NSF TeraGrid scientific computing infrastructure, which later evolved into NSF XSEDE and ACCESS, programs that NCSA has continued to help steer.

“Compiling this list has been a personal ride down memory lane,” said Tom Tabor, founder and CEO of Tabor Communications Inc., publishers of HPCwire. “Being at the helm of HPC’s leading news outlet for the last 35 years has been one of the most exciting and rewarding parts of my life – period. I’ve really savored the opportunity to be in the room with some of the most brilliant people in our industry, all of whom are wholeheartedly committed to improving the quality of life on our planet. Being part of these discussions has been extremely stimulating and fulfilling.”

Check out the HPCwire announcement for more on the initial 35 Legends list.

ABOUT NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing, expertise and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students and collaborators from around the globe use innovative resources to address research challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been assisting many of the world’s industry giants for over 35 years by bringing industry, researchers and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

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