Five Named Argonne Distinguished Fellows in 2021

October 21, 2021

Oct. 21, 2021 — Of the 1,400-plus researchers and scientists who do extraordinary work at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, five have earned the laboratory’s highest title, Argonne Distinguished Fellow, for 2021.

They are Pete Beckman, Lois Curfman McInnes and Rick Stevens from the Computing, Environment and Life Sciences (CELS) directorate; Jeffrey Elam from the Energy and Global Security (EGS) directorate; and Stephen Gray from the Physical Sciences and Engineering (PSE) directorate.

Argonne names Pete Beckman, Jeffrey Elam, Stephen Gray, Lois Curfman McInnes, and Rick Stevens as Distinguished Fellows in 2021. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)

Similar to a tenured professorship at a major academic institution, the Distinguished Fellow distinction is reserved for a rare few. Only 3% of research staff at Argonne have earned this rank.

This year’s Distinguished Fellows are empowering Argonne’s scientific mission for the benefit of our country,” said Argonne Director Paul Kearns.  ​Pete, Jeffrey, Stephen, Lois and Rick are all recognized around the world for their scientific and technical leadership, their exceptional achievements, and their impactful contributions to research and development. Their work has been integral to Argonne’s position at the forefront of discovery.”

2021 Argonne Distinguished Fellows

 

Pete Beckman, CELS

Beckman has been an internationally recognized name in computing circles since 2011, when he published a visionary international roadmap for exascale software in the International Journal of High Performance Computing (HPC) Applications. He was an early advocate for supercomputing with Linux and has been a leader in the HPC operating system community since his first Extreme Linux workshops. That work led to Beckman becoming the technical leader for a collaboration between the DOE and Japanese Ministry for Technology on HPC system software. His vision and creativity, combined with superb leadership skills, led to past successes as director of engineering and later chief architect of the TeraGrid project, a National Science Foundation-funded effort to build a $100M national grid infrastructure, as well as director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility to oversee the deployment, acceptance and transition to operations of the IBM Blue Gene/P system. Currently, Beckman is co-director of the Northwestern Argonne Institute of Science & Engineering.

Jeffrey Elam, EGS

Elam came to the attention of the public as co-inventor of the ​Oleo Sponge,” an engineered foam that absorbs oil from water. It won top invention and the Editor’s Choice Award in 2017 from the R&D100 Awards. However, those in the field of materials science and innovative coatings were already well acquainted with Elam’s contributions. The Oleo Sponge was Elam’s fifth R&100 Award and he is a prolific Argonne inventor with more than 70 patents and applications, including patents licensed by industry that have led to several commercial products. A senior chemist and group leader in functional coatings, Elam is one of the world’s foremost leaders in atomic-layer deposition. He is credited with distinguished and sustained contributions to the science and technology of thin film coatings to solve critical materials challenges. Among these is the world’s largest microchannel plate, a solid-state, two-dimensional electron amplifier critical to a variety of imaging and sensing applications. Elam is a Fellow of the American Vacuum Society.

Stephen Gray, PSE

Gray, a senior scientist, is well known for his work on applying quantum theory to better understand chemical reactions and for his computational work on interactions of light with nanoscale materials. He began at Argonne as a chemist in 1990, and today continues to make contributions to Argonne’s growing quantum information science efforts. In 2009, he began working in the Center for Nanoscale Materials, where he served as group leader of the Theory and Modeling Group for 10 years. His scientific measurables include 266 peer-reviewed publications, over 130 invited talks, over 1,000 citations per year and 49 papers cited more than 100 times. Gray is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Lois Curfman McInnes, CELS

McInnes’s early work on nonlinear solvers and her novel contributions to the multi-award-winning Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific computing (PETSc) helped make PETSc one of the most successful long-term software projects ever supported by DOE. Today, as a computational science leader, she focuses on high performance computational science with emphasis on scalable numerical libraries and community collaboration toward productive and sustainable software ecosystems. Deputy Director of Software Technology for DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, McInnes co-leads the IDEAS scientific software productivity project, which focuses on improving software productivity and sustainability as a key aspect of advancing scientific productivity. In 2011, she shared honors with another Argonne Distinguished Fellow, Barry Smith, when they jointly won the DOE Ernest Orlando Lawrence award for their work on PETSc. In 2017, her co-authored paper describing PETSc methodology was included in the DOE Office of Science’s 40th anniversary collection of the top 40 papers that ​changed the face of science.”

Rick Stevens, CELS

Stevens, the CELS associate laboratory director, is widely recognized for his outstanding, far-reaching and sustained impact on the future course of the laboratory and on the scientific computing community. For 35 years, he has developed innovative tools and techniques used widely in high performance computer systems, advanced collaboration environments and computational problems in the computational sciences. He has led national initiatives that are successfully using these technologies to tackle challenging science and engineering problems. Stevens has also made outstanding technical contributions to the design, development and deployment of high performance computing architectures — from terascale computing to petaflops systems software and architectures. His fundamental contributions extend to application of high performance computing to the biological sciences. Stevens is a Fellow of the Association of Computer Machinery and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.


Source: Kristen Mally Dean, Argonne National Laboratory

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire