William D. Gropp

William D. Gropp serves as the Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he holds the prestigious Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science and the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering within the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. His leadership extends to major NSF-funded initiatives including the Delta and DeltaAI supercomputing systems.

Gropp's research centers on high performance computing, with particular expertise in parallel I/O systems, scalable numerical algorithms for partial differential equations, and programming models for massively parallel applications. His work bridges theoretical computer science with practical implementation through widely adopted software frameworks.

Gropp has received numerous prestigious honors including election to the National Academy of Engineering (2010) and fellowships from ACM, IEEE, SIAM, and AAAS. In 2024, he was named one of the 35 HPC Legends by HPC Wire, recognizing his foundational contributions to the field.

• AAAS Fellow (2018)
• SIAM Fellow (2011)
• National Academy of Engineering Member (2010)
• IEEE Fellow (2010)
• ACM Fellow (2006)
• 35 HPC Legends by HPC Wire (2024)
• HPCWire Readers Choice Award for Outstanding Leadership in HPC (2023)

Gropp leads multiple major research initiatives including the Midwest Big Data Hub and the MPI Forum, serving on the Computing Research Association board and Computing Community Consortium executive committee. His current projects focus on heterogeneous computing systems, data movement optimizations, and next-generation MPI implementations.

As Director of NCSA, Gropp oversees significant cyberinfrastructure resources including the Delta supercomputer, designed to accelerate adoption of GPU computing and non-POSIX file systems by the computational science community, and DeltaAI, an AI/ML optimized supercomputer.