Frederica Darema

Proposer of the Single Program, Multiple Data (SPMD) programming model, Darema introduced SPMD in 1984, establishing what has become the most common style of parallel programming. In computing, Single Program, Multiple Data (SPMD) is a technique employed to achieve parallelism and is a subcategory of MIMD. Tasks are split up and run simultaneously on multiple processors with different input in order to obtain results faster. It is also a prerequisite for research concepts such as active messages and distributed shared memory.

She also proposed the Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems (DDDAS) in 2000, which is a new paradigm whereby the computation and instrumentation aspects of an application system are dynamically integrated in a feed-back control loop, in the sense that instrumentation data can be dynamically incorporated into the executing model of the application; and in reverse, the executing model can control the instrumentation. Such approaches have been shown to enable more accurate and faster modeling and analysis of the characteristics and behaviors of a system, and can exploit data in intelligent ways to convert them to new capabilities, including decision support systems with the accuracy of full scale modeling, efficient data collection, management, and data mining.

Darema received her B.S. degree in 1969 from the School of Physics and Mathematics of the University of Athens, Greece, her M.S. degree in 1972 from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and her Ph.D. degree in 1976 from the University of California at Davis, where she attended as a Fulbright Scholar and a Distinguished Scholar; both in Theoretical Nuclear Physics. After Physics Research Associate positions at the University of Pittsburgh and Brookhaven National Laboratory, she received an APS Industrial Fellowship and became a Technical Staff Member in the Nuclear Sciences Department at Schlumberger Doll Research.

Subsequently, in 1982, Darema joined the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member in the Computer Sciences Department, and later established and became the Manager of a research group at IBM Research on Parallel Applications. She also served in the IBM Corporate Strategy Group examining and helping to set corporate-wide strategies. She has served at the National Science Foundation from 1994, where she managed the New Generation Software and Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems programs. From 1996 to 1998 she completed a two-year assignment at DARPA, where she initiated a new thrust for research on methods and technology for performance engineered systems.

Darema has been a member of the Senior Executive Service and has served as Director of Mathematics, Information and Life Sciences at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in Arlington, Virginia. She provided executive direction in the planning, conduct, and coordination of broad, frequently large-scale, and critical basic research and development program activities. These included areas such as advanced mathematical and computational methods for dynamic systems; information and decision systems; bio-systems; human cognition and socio-cultural systems.

She was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2004, and is the recipient of the 2011 Technical Achievement Award, "For pioneering contributions to novel techniques for complex systems modeling and simulation".