Dear Colleagues,
For more than 18 years, Bill Gropp has been a fixture in the Illinois research enterprise—advancing foundational understanding in computing, training dozens of students, and leading the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to impressive new heights. Now, after nine years as Director of NCSA, Bill will retire at the end of the year.
It is difficult to fully quantify Bill’s impact, on campus and far beyond. His advocacy for computing and data for all researchers at Illinois culminated in both Illinois Computes and the Office of Data Science Research. He championed partnerships with multiple colleges in digital agriculture, astronomy and health. From the groundbreaking of the Blue Waters supercomputer project to leadership in AI with the Delta and NAIRR projects, the nation’s funding agencies have looked to Bill and NCSA to imagine and build the future of computing. He was named one of 35 HPC Legends in 2024 by HPCWire, advanced research computing’s leading trade journal.
Beyond his role at NCSA, in 2011, Bill became the founding director of the Parallel Computing Institute, a unit within the College of Engineering. In 2013, he was the first person to be selected for the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science, a professorship position established by Siebel Systems founder and U. of I. alumnus Tom Siebel. He is a professor of Computer Science in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, and holds a Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering.
Recently, Bill was among six researchers to receive the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Software System Award for their innovative work on MPICH, a high-performance and widely portable implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. Created more than three decades ago, MPICH has become the standard bearer for MPI, efficiently supporting different computation and communication platforms and enabling cutting-edge research.
We are grateful that Bill will continue to serve as NCSA’s director through the end of the year, and I will appoint Rayadurgam Srikant, himself a Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, to serve as interim director following Bill’s departure. NCSA is one of our university treasures and—with the current emphasis on high-performance computing and AI—a national leader. I look forward to next steps that will identify candidates to build on Bill’s successful tenure and lead NCSA’s next chapter.
I hope you will join me in thanking Bill for his unfailing dedication to science and engineering and wish him the very best for the years ahead.
Sincerely,
SUSAN A. MARTINIS
Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation
Stephen G. Sligar Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Professor of Biochemistry
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation
Fourth Floor, Swanlund Administration Building
601 E. John St. | M/C 304
Champaign, IL 61820
217.333.0034 | martinis@illinois.edu
research.illinois.edu
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