Bill Gropp

Who is Bill Gropp?

William Douglas "Bill" Gropp is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where, since 2013, he has held the Thomas M. Siebel Chair. He is also the Deputy Director for Research Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies, and the Director of the Parallel Computing Institute. Gropp helped to create the Message Passing Interface, also known as MPI, and the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation, also known as PETSc.

Gropp 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. 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.