William (Bill) Douglas Gropp

Co-creator of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc), Gropp has served as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, holding the Thomas M. Siebel Chair from 2013. He has also served as the Deputy Director for Research at the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies, and as the Director of the Parallel Computing Institute.

MPI is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed to function on a wide variety of parallel computers. The standard defines the syntax and semantics of a core of library routines useful to a wide range of users writing portable message-passing programs in different computer programming languages such as Fortran, C, C++ and Java.

Gropp received his B.S. degree in Mathematics in 1977 from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and his M.S. degree in Physics in 1978 from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. In 1982, he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in Stanford, California.

His research interests include parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical methods for partial differential equations, investigating methods for combining numerical analysis techniques with parallel processing techniques to form solutions appropriate for execution on modern computing systems. His research has also encompassed issues such as scalability and hierarchical memory models in parallel computers.

Gropp held the positions of Assistant Professor from 1982 to 1988, Associate Professor from 1988 to 1990, and Professor in the Computer Science Department at Yale University. In 1990, he joined the Numerical Analysis group at Argonne, where he served as a Senior Computer Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division, a Senior Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and a Senior Fellow in the Argonne-Chicago Computation Institute. From 2000 through 2006, he also served as Deputy Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne.

He was awarded the Sidney Fernbach Award in 2008, "For outstanding contributions to the development of domain decomposition algorithms, scalable tools for the parallel numerical solution of PDEs, and the dominant HPC communications interface." In 2009, Gropp received an R&D 100 Award for PETSc, and in February 2010, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, "For contributions to numerical software in the area of linear algebra and high-performance parallel and distributed computation." In March 2010, he was honored with the IEEE TCSC Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing. He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE and SIAM.