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Dr. Richard C. Murphy
Principal Member of Technical Staff
Sandia National Laboratories and Affiliated Faculty
New Mexico State University
Dr. Murphy leads Sandia’s new X-caliber project, which is a DARPA Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) effort to create radically lower-power systems, from embedded to supercomputers at all scales. This is quite a coup for Sandia and for Murphy, since for the previous DARPA HPCS program only industry was allowed to lead the teams, a totally different atmosphere from what Murphy is creating at with his team at Sandia National Lab.
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To accomplish Sandia’s mission, Dr. Murphy leads a team comprised of powerful industry partners and distinguished researchers from academia to provide the technical expertise to all aspects of the project, including the high performance computer architecture, algorithms development, supercomputing, system software, programming methods, applications, and microelectronics in 3-D packaging and silicon photonics.
Murphy also chairs the newly formed Graph 500 benchmark steering committee, which is literally made up of a “who’s who” of industry luminaries, with Dr. Thomas Sterling (LSU), Dr. Robert (Bob) Lucas (USC/ISI), Dr. Peter Kogge, (University of Notre Dame) Dr. Marc Snir, and Dr. William (Bill) Gropp (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) all on the team.
Murphy’s passion and primary focus is in creating supercomputers capable of solving large-scale informatics problems, which are significantly more data intensive than traditional physics problems in HPC. Murphy originally joined Sandia National Laboratory in 2006, when upon his arrival he created a new research program in processor and memory architecture. This helped to highlight awareness of the importance of research in these areas within the Department of Energy (DOE). In 2007, Murphy was instrumental in helping to form the DOE Institute for Advanced Architecture. If that wasn’t enough, in the past year he also helped to launch the new measure of system performance for large-scale informatics applications.
During his career in industry, Dr. Murphy was the technical lead for a portfolio of projects in dynamic hardware resource management while working in the Enterprise Server Products Group at Sun Microsystems. Murphy also co-founded a startup company during this time, Kinementium, with the goal of creating the first 3D mall on the Internet during the dot-com era. Amazingly, Murphy started his first company at the age of 14, and built his first network protocol and programming language while still in high school.
Dr. Murphy holds a BS in computer science, BA in government,an MS and PhD in computer engineering, all from the University of Notre Dame, and is a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society.
