These individuals are selected from leaders in academia, government, industry, and vendor communities, who HPCWire believes will influence of high-performance computing in the near-future and beyond.
Snir heads Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division (MCS), which has long been a world leader in advanced computing and scalable software. His research focuses on parallel architectures and algorithms, programming models, tools, and performance analysis.
“I am honored to be recognized by HPCwire as a leader in high-performance computing,” said Snir. “Argonne has long been at the forefront of advanced computing and scalable parallel software, and I hope to continue this tradition as we enter the exascale era.”
In addition to his position at Argonne, Snir is Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He also continues to serve as co-PI of the petascale Blue Waters project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Snir received his doctorate in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, he was on the faculty of New York University and later the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He subsequently worked at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where he led the research group responsible for major contributions to the IBM SP scalable parallel system and the IBM Blue Gene system; he also was a major contributor to the design of the Message Passing Interface. In 2001, he joined the faculty at UIUC, where he chaired the Department of Computer Science until 2007. He was the first director of the Illinois Informatics Institute, co-director of the Intel and Microsoft Universal Parallel Computing Research Center, and is co-director of the Illinois INRIA Center for Petascale Computing.
Among his other honors, Snir received two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards for his research on hierarchical memory models and on parallel system architecture and software structure and a Corporate Award for work on scalable parallel communications and software technologies. He also is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
By Gail Pieper.