Argonne National Laboratory

Pete Beckman

Co-Director, Northwestern Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering and Argonne Distinguished Fellow

Biography

Pete Beckman is a recognized global expert in high-end computing systems. During the past 30 years, his research has focused on software and architectures for large-scale parallel and distributed computing systems. For the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, Beckman leads the Argo project focused on low-level resource management for the operating system and runtime. He is the founder and leader of Argonne’s Waggle project for artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing. Beckman also co-directs the Northwestern University / Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering and leads the Sage project funded by the National Science Foundation to build a nationwide infrastructure for AI at the edge to support ecological research for the National Ecological Observatory Network and urban research for the Array of Things. Beckman also coordinates the collaborative technical research activities in extreme-scale computing between the U.S. Department of Energy and Japan’s ministry of education, science, and technology and helps lead the Big Data and Extreme Computing BDEC) series of international workshops. He also coordinates 5G wireless research activities at Argonne.  

In previous positions, Beckman helped found Indiana University’s Extreme Computing Laboratory. He also founded the Linux cluster research team at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Turbolinux-sponsored research laboratory that developed the world’s first dynamic provisioning system for cloud computing and HPC clusters. Beckman joined Argonne National Laboratory in 2002. As director of engineering and later chief architect for the TeraGrid, he designed and deployed the world’s most powerful Grid computing system for linking production high performance computing centers for the National Science Foundation. He served as director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility from 2008 to 2010. As a senior computer scientist at Argonne and senior fellow at Northwestern University, he leads diverse research teams to tackle challenges in large-scale, distributed computation, from the edge to the HPC center.

Education

  • Indiana University, Ph.D., 1993
  • Anderson University, B.A., 1985

 

Awards, Honors and Memberships

  • Best paper: Workshop on Large-Scale System and Application Performance with HPDC, 2011
  • ALCF wins HPCWire Reader’s Choice award for ​“Best Application of Green Computing”, 2009
  • Best paper: IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, 2006
  • LinuxWorld Expo 2002, Best-in-Show Product Excellence Award for Best Network/ Server Application
  • Supercomputing 1998, Best Industrial Collaboration, High-Performance Computing Challenge
  • Supercomputing 1995, Best Integration of Heterogeneous Application

  • Selected Professional Activities

  • Advisory Committee, IEEE Cluster 2011
  • Program Committee, International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers (ROSS), 2011
  • Outreach Director, Summer Institute Program Co-Director, Center for Scalable Application Development Software, 2007-2011
  • Workshop Co-Chair, ScienceCloud, 2010
  • Technical Program Committee, 2ndIEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, 2010
  • Co-founder International Exascale Software Project, 2008
  • Steering Committee & Program Committee Vice-Chair, 2009 IEEE Cluster Computing Conference, 2009
  • Program Committee, Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Annual Conference, 2009
  • Technical Committee, 2nd workshop on Many-Task Computing on Grids and Supercomputers (MTAGS), 2009
  • Technical Committee, Workshop on Many-Task Computing on Grids and Supercomputers (MTAGS), 2008
  • Organizing Committee, Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Annual Conference, 2008
  • Editor, Special Issue on Urgent Computing Applications for CyberTechnology Watch, 2007
  • Organizer, Urgent Computing 2007 Workshop, Argonne National Laboratory, April 25-26, 2007
  • Program Committee, International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium 2006
  • Program Committee, Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing, Seoul, 2006
  • Steering Committee, IEEE Cluster 2006
  • Program Committee, PoPPP’05, 2005
  • Co-General Chair & Program Chair, CCGRID, Chicago, 2004
  • Program Committee, Extreme Linux Workshop, USENIX Technical Conference, 2004
  • Steering Committee, IEEE Cluster 2003, Hong Kong
  • Program Vice-Chair, IEEE Cluster 2002
  • Program Committee, 4th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference, USENIX, 2000
  • Program Chair, Extreme Linux Workshop Committee, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 1999
  • Program Co-Chair, 3rd Workshop on Runtime Systems for Parallel Programming (RTSPP), San Juan, 1999