The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is proud to share that council member William “Bill” Gropp was invested as the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on April 30th as a recognition of his exceptional contributions to research, teaching, and leadership within the computer science community. 

Gropp serves as the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he has launched programs and resources for the community, such as Illinois Computes. This program offers computing and data storage resources, technical expertise and support services to researchers from all domains across the three universities of the University of Illinois System.

His career at the university has been marked by numerous achievements, including his continued role in the development of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard and software and algorithms for highly parallel scientific computing. Additionally, he received the ACM/IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award for his work in 2016.

Gropp’s impact extends beyond his research contributions; he is also recognized for his advocacy for research computing and engagement, which has helped transform the campus community.

He has also contributed to the betterment of computing at the CCC through authoring various requests for information, quadrennial papers, and whitepapers, such as infrastructure for artificial intelligence and pandemic preparation. He also attended visioning roundtable discussions on the future of computing research, and serves as a member of the CCC’s Executive Committee. 

Gropp is honored to continue his important research through this role: . “This chair provides resources that let me explore new ideas and develop new initiatives in applying high performance computing to research.”

Read more about Gropp’s accomplishment here: https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/ncsas-bill-gropp-invested-as-grainger-distinguished-chair-in-engineering/