Starting January 1, 2015, he will serve a four-year term on the committee, which is responsible for the long-term guidance, planning, oversight, and strategic direction of the conference.

SC has long been the premier international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. The conference attracts leading researchers worldwide to present their latest work through technical papers, tutorials, posters, panels, invited talks, workshops, and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions.

Thakur has been actively involved in the SC conference series. He was technical program chair for SC12, technical papers co-chair for SC11, system software area co-chair for SC10, and tutorials co-chair for SC09.

 ​“SC is a major annual event, drawing over 10,000 registered attendees last year,” said Thakur. ​“I hope to use my experience to ensure the conference’s continuing success in providing a forum for viewing advances in high-performance computing. I expect the next four years will be particularly exciting as we move closer to the exascale era and the challenges it presents.”

Thakur received his Ph.D. in computer engineering from Syracuse University in 1995. He then joined Argonne’s MCS Division, where he developed the ROMIO implementation of MPI-IO and was involved in the development of MPICH, a high-performance, portable implementation of the Message Passing Interface standard and winner of an R&D 100 award. Currently he is involved in several exascale-related projects, including the DOE-funded Center for Exascale Simulation for Advanced Reactors and the Argo project that is developing an exascale operating system and runtime prototype.