Last week, at 2008 Almaden Institute, I had the privillege of inviting and introducing one of the key note speakers, Dr. Horst Simon. He gave a truly fascinating talk. Here is my introduction:
Our distinguished key note speaker today is Dr. Horst Simon. Dr. Simon holds a PhD in Mathematics from UC Berkeley.
He is best known for his breakthrough work on highly parrallel recursice spectral bisection algorithm and for his work on partitioning sparse matrices. He has won the Gordon Bell Prize and has received H. Julian Allen Award from NASA.
He has been a Senior Manager at Silicon Graphics, Computer Sciences Corporation, and Boeing, and has been on the faculty at State University of New York. From 1996-2006, he served as Director of Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center which is the flagship scientific computing facility for the Office of Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. He is currently Associate Lab director at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Director of Computational Research Division. He is an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley, and recently led creation of a multidisciplinary new initiative Computational Science and Engineering.
He has served on boards of several organizations and on editorial boards of several journals in high-performance computing arena.
In my view, he is Mr. Supercomputing in the academic world today. He is co-author of TOP 500 which is a twice-yerarly revised list of the world’s most powerful computer systems, and provides the most direct window into future of computing.