Biography
William Gropp is a professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign, where he holds a Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and previously held positions at Yale University and Argonne National Laboratory. Gropp’s research spans parallel computing, scientific software, and numerical methods for partial differential equations, with influential contributions to widely used HPC software and standards. From 2016 to 2025, he served as Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He now chairs the Computing Community Consortium for the Computing Research Association. He is a Fellow of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of multiple major awards in high‑performance computing.
Talk: “Performance Engineering for Parallel Systems”
Abstract: The end of Dennard or frequency scaling in computer processors nearly twenty years ago has caused a transformation in computing. Innovations in computer architecture have enabled continued improvements in performance, but at the cost of increasing software and algorithmic complexity. Software has also undergone major transformations, making it both easier and harder to exploit the changes in hardware. This talk will provide some background on the transformations in computing over the last two decades and discuss how performance engineering can help guide the developments of algorithms and applications in this rapidly changing environment. I will close with several challenges for system software developers.