To celebrate its 35th anniversary, HPCwire has introduced a new annual recognition called the HPCwire 35 Legends.

This initiative honors 35 influential figures who have significantly shaped the high-performance computing (HPC) field over the past 35 years. The list includes researchers, inventors, and executives who have driven technological and commercial advancements in HPC.

The program is supported by major sponsors including Intel, Hammerspace, HPE, NCSA, and Vdura. The first 17 honorees have been announced, with the rest to be revealed next month. All honorees will be featured on a dedicated microsite and in a downloadable magazine.

Among the first honorees announced was council member Bill Gropp, recognized for his leadership at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he helped expand its programs and infrastructure, including crucial GPU resources for the NSF’s ACCESS program. 

He is also a computer science professor at the university and holds a distinguished chair in engineering, and is the principal investigator of NSF-funded systems Delta and DeltaAI. 

In the HPCWire article, Gropp said, “Computing gives you a tool to answer questions that can’t be answered in any other way, and I find this exciting. HPC, of course, gives you the most powerful tools to answer the hardest problems.”

Read more on the other legends here.