Marc Snir

Leader of the research group responsible for major contributions to the IBM SP scalable parallel system and to the IBM Blue Gene system, Snir is a parallel computing expert whose research and engagement in various supercomputing initiatives has helped to advance the elite class of systems that drive major scientific discoveries.

He has served as Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory, in Argonne, Illinois from 2001 to 2007. He has also held a Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professorship in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition, he has had a courtesy appointment in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

He has served as Principal Investigator (PI) for the software of the petascale Blue Waters system and co-Director of the Intel and Microsoft funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC). Snir received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979. From 1980 to 1982 he worked at New York University (NYU) on the NYU Ultracomputer project, and from 1982 to 1986 he worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 1986 he joined IBM, and until 2001 he served as a Senior Manager at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, where he led the research group that was responsible for major contributions to the IBM SP scalable parallel system and to the IBM Blue Gene system, a project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. Snir is a major contributor to the design of the Message Passing Interface. From 2007 to 2008 he served as Director of the Illinois Informatics Institute, and from 2007 to 2012 he served as Lead Architect at Blue Waters software.

He published numerous papers, the most recent of which are: with Almasi, G.S.; Cascaval, C.; Castanos, J.G.; Denneau, M.; Donath, W.; Eleftheriou, M.; Giampapa, M.; Ho, H.; Lieber, D.; Moreira, J.E.; Newns, M.; and Warren, H.S., Jr., "Demonstrating the scalability of a molecular dynamics application on a Petaflop computer," International Journal of Parallel Programming, 30(4):317–351, 2002; with J.J. Dongarra, S.W. Otto, and D.W. Walker, "A Message Passing Standard for MPP and Workstations," Comm. of the ACM 39(7), July 1996, 84–90; and with T. Agerwala, J. Martin, J. Mirza, D. Sadler, and D. Dias, "SP2 System Architecture," IBM Systems Journal 34(2), 1995, 152–184. Republished in Turning Points in Computing: 1962–1999, IBM Systems Journal 38(2) 1999, 414–446.

Snir has given many presentations on computational complexity, parallel algorithms, parallel architectures, interconnection networks, parallel languages and libraries, and parallel programming environments. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has served on the Computing Research Association Board of Directors and on the NSF CISE advisory committee.

He is the recipient of the IEEE Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing and the 2013 IEEE Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, "For contributions to the research, development, theory, and standardization of high-performance parallel computing including the IBM RS/6000 SP and Blue Gene systems."