Prof. Marc Snir Named "HPC Rock Star"

6/10/2010

CS Prof. Marc Snir is insideHPC's newest HPC Rock Star. Snir works on parallelism from the extreme scale to the desktop.

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Illinois computer science professor Marc Snir was named insideHPC.com's newest Rock Star of HPC.  As the Faiman and Murgo Professor of Computer Science, Snir leads both the Blue Waters petascale effort and the MS-Intel funded UPCRC center, among several other centers and efforts, making him "one of the few individuals today shaping both high end supercomputing and the mass adoption of parallel programming."

Illinois computer science professor Marc Snir
Illinois computer science professor Marc Snir
Illinois computer science professor Marc Snir

From the article:

"During his time at IBM, Snir contributed to one of the most successful bespoke HPC architectures of the past decade, the IBM Blue Gene. He was also a major participant in the effort to create the most successful parallel programming interface ever: MPI. In fact Bill Gropp, another key person in that effort, credits Snir with helping to make it all happen, “The MPI standard was the product of many good people, but without Marc, I don’t think we would have succeeded.”

Today Snir is the Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a department he chaired from 2001 to 2007. With a legacy of success in his portfolio, he is perhaps busier today than ever as the Associate Director for Extreme Scale Computing at NCSA, co-PI for the petascale Blue Waters system, and co-director of the Intel and Microsoft funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC). Trained as a mathematician, Snir is one of the few individuals today shaping both high end supercomputing and the mass adoption of parallel programming."

Read the complete article and interview to learn more about Snir's past and future HPC innovations: http://insidehpc.com/2010/06/10/rock-stars-of-hpc-marc-snir/


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This story was published June 10, 2010.