Bill Gropp

William Gropp is the Grainger Distinguished Chair and Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University (1982) and has contributed extensively to parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical methods for PDEs. His research focuses on high performance computing, programming models, and scalable algorithms.

Education: B.S. Mathematics (Case Western Reserve, 1977), M.S. Physics (University of Washington, 1978), Ph.D. Computer Science (Stanford, 1982).

Research Interests: Gropp's work spans HPC, parallel computing, and numerical methods. He co-developed the MPI standard and MPICH implementation, and contributed to the PETSc library. His current projects include the Delta and DeltaAI supercomputers, Illinois Computes, and exascale initiatives.

Scientific Awards: AAAS Fellow (2018), ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award (2016), SIAM/ACM Prize (2015), and 2024 ACM Software System Award. Member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Grants & Leadership: Director of NCSA, leader of the Midwest Big Data Hub, and contributor to NSF-funded projects. His teams support AI/ML infrastructure and exascale computing. He advises on HPC policy and serves on committees like the Computing Community Consortium.

Labs/Teams: NCSA, Siebel School research groups, collaborations with DOE, NSF, and industry partners. His work drives advancements in cyberinfrastructure and computational science.