Pete Beckman, senior computational scientist at Argonne and co-director of the Northwestern Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering, received a 2015 Argonne National Laboratory Distinguished Performance Award. Beckman was nominated for his outstanding contributions in high-performance computing technologies and infrastructure and for his leadership in international policy planning for emerging extreme-scale systems.

As director of engineering for TeraGrid, Beckman designed and deployed the world’s most advanced Grid system for open science research. He subsequently directed the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in deploying BG/P, one of the world’s fastest open science supercomputers; and he led the Argonne team working with IBM on designing BG/Q, one of DOE’s two leadership-class computing facilities.

Beckman has been widely called upon to assist federal agencies in planning for emerging exascale architectures. He participates in the DOE exascale efforts as the co-leader of the software planning team. He cofounded the International Exascale Software Project, funded by government partners in the U.S., EU, and Japan to develop a software roadmap and coordinate open-source scientific software infrastructure. He also spearheaded the Big Data and Extreme-Scale Computing international workshops and coorganized the 2013 and 2014 meetings, funded by the National Science Foundation and DOE ASCR, to tackle problem solving at the exascale.

Beckman also has conducted breakthrough research in advanced systems.  He leads the Waggle project, which has designed a new sensor network that supports advanced computation and will be deployed in downtown Chicago in 2016 as part of the Array of Things project. He also is the lead of the DOE ARGO project, which is creating a radical new paradigm for an operating/runtime exascale infrastructure, addressing the challenges of power management, lightweight threads, and resource management.

The University of Chicago Distinguished Performance award is presented by the UChicago Argonne, LLC Board of Governors. The award includes an engraved medallion, a certificate, and a monetary award of $3500.