Gropp Awarded Blue Waters Professorship

CS Professor William Gropp was one of 12 University of Illinois faculty members to be selected as a Blue Waters Professor. Paul Fischer, who will be joining the CS Department this summer, also received this distinction. This honor comes with substantial computing and data resources on the Blue Waters supercomputer at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

William Gropp

“This extraordinary opportunity will boost the efforts of these outstanding researchers and will result in high-impact work that enhances the reputation of the University of Illinois,” said Illinois Provost Ilesanmi Adesida. “The Blue Waters Professors will be ambassadors for Illinois’ capabilities and expertise in computational science and engineering.”

Gropp, the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science, is known for his research in parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical methods for partial differential equations. He uses Blue Waters for research on the effective use of extreme-scale systems, which may require new algorithms and programming systems.

The Blue Waters Professors were selected for this honor through a competitive process and this appointment confers a significant commitment of Blue Waters computing resources, up to 240,000 node hours per year. Many of these accomplished computational scientists are already using the supercomputer after receiving resources through the national allocation process (overseen by the National Science Foundation) or the campus allocation process. The resources they receive as Blue Waters Professors are in addition to these other allocations.

Blue Waters is one of the world’s most powerful supercomputer, capable of performing quadrillions of calculations every second and of working with massive amounts of data.

The Blue Waters Professors will give updates on their work in an upcoming lecture series. Other recipients of Blue Waters professorships include Aleksei Aksimentiev (Physics), Daniel Bodony (Aerospace), David Ceperley (Physics), Bryan Clark (Physics), Paul Fischer (Mechanical Science and Engineering), Larry Di Girolamo (Atmospheric Sciences), Sharon Hammes-Schiffer (Chemistry), So Hirata (Chemistry), Athol Kemball (Astronomy), Andre Schleife (Materials Science and Engineering), and Klaus Schulten (Physics).

For more information on the other recipients of the Blue Waters professorships, see the NCSA website.