William D Gropp

William D Gropp is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign holding the Thomas M. Siebel Chair, and serves as Acting Director and Chief Scientist of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). His career spans foundational contributions to parallel computing infrastructure and scientific computation.

Gropp pioneered the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard and developed MPICH—the reference implementation that became the global lingua franca for parallel programming. His work enables portable scientific applications across supercomputing platforms, driving advances in fluid dynamics, nanosimulations, biology, and fusion research through tools like the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc).

His major honors include:

• ACM Software System Award (2024) for MPICH's 30-year impact
• ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award (2016) for programmability contributions
• SIAM/ACM Prize (2015) for computational science engineering
• ACM, IEEE, and SIAM Fellowships
• Election to the National Academy of Engineering

Gropp co-founded ACM SIGHPC in 2011 and authored 187+ publications including the seminal book Using MPI. His NCSA leadership advances supercomputing infrastructure for nationwide scientific discovery.