John Mellor-Crummey promoted to full professor

April, 2008

The Rice University Board of Trustees has approved a promotion for Dr. John Mellor-Crummey from Associate Professor to Professor, effective July 1, 2008.

Dr. Mellor-Crummey joined Rice University in 1989 with joint appointments in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research focuses on software technology for high performance parallel computing, tools for measurement and analysis of application performance, compiler and run-time technology for parallel and scientific computing, application performance modeling, and compiler technology for domain-specific languages.

Currently, he is deeply involved in the US Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. As part of the SciDAC program, he is serving as co-principal investigator for two multi-institutional centers— the Performance Engineering Research Institute (PERI), as well as project director for CScADS.

He has over 90 published papers and has served on numerous national and international committees.

CScADS researcher named project director of Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

March, 2008

Pete Beckman has been appointed project director of the ALCF. He also will serve as acting division director for the Leadership Computing Facility. Pete will be responsible for bringing the 500-TF IBM BG/P through acceptance testing and into early science, bringing the 100-TF BG/P into INCITE production, upgrading the storage and I/O systems, and transitioning the ALCF organization into steady-state operations. He will also recruit additional staff and users to the ALCF and chart a path for the future.

Pete previously served as the ALCF's chief architect and has more than a decade of experience in large-scale computing and project management. He has worked in systems software for parallel computing, operating systems, and Grid computing for 20 years. He also worked in industry, serving as vice president of Turbolinux's worldwide engineering efforts, managing development offices in the United States, Japan, China, Korea, and Slovenia.

CScADS researcher named NERSC director

October 27, 2007

Kathy Yelick, professor of computer science at the University of California–Berkeley and an internationally recognized expert in developing methods to advance the use of supercomputers, has been named director of the DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Yelick, who has also been head of the Future Technologies Group at Berkeley Lab since 2005, will officially assume her new job in January 2008.

Yelick has been the recipient of many teaching and research awards and is the author or co-author of two books and more than 75 refereed technical papers on topics covering parallel applications, libraries, languages, compilers and architecture.

In 2006 she was named one of the 16 “People to Watch in 2006” by the newsletter HPCwire. The editors noted that “Her multifaceted research goal is to develop techniques for obtaining high performance on a wide range of computational platforms, all while easing the programming effort required to achieve high performance. Her current work has shown that global address space languages like UPC and Titanium offer serious opportunities in both productivity and performance, and that these languages can be ubiquitous on parallel machines without excessive investments in compiler technology.”

In addition to high performance languages, Yelick has worked on parallel algorithms, numerical libraries, computer architecture, communication libraries and I/O systems. Her work on numerical libraries includes self-tuning libraries that automatically adapt the code to machine properties. She is also a consumer of parallel systems, having worked directly with interdisciplinary teams on application scaling and her own applications work includes parallelization of a CFD model for blood flow in the heart. She is involved in an NCR study investigating the impact of the multicore revolution across computing domains and was the author of a Berkeley study on this subject, known as the “Berkeley View.”