INTERCONNECTS

After 20 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and four years as the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Daniel A. Reed has accepted an appointment as founding director of a new interdisciplinary computing institute based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Duke and North Carolina State universities are partnering with UNC on the institute. His start date is January 2004. "My wife Andrea and I first met in North Carolina, we have many friends there, and we still own a house on the North Carolina beach," Reed said. "Those ties, plus the opportunity to build a broadly based institute with strong emphasis on biomedical research and the arts and humanities, made this a very personal choice. "I have spent almost all of my professional life at Illinois, and I have been privileged to work with a truly outstanding set of students, faculty, and researchers,” Reed added. “I am very proud of what we have built, both at NCSA and in computer science-- world-class research and education facilities, one of the world’s largest computing infrastructures, and international scientific collaborations with some of the best and brightest.” "Dan Reed's vision has been extraordinary," said Nancy Cantor, chancellor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, home of NCSA. "He has brought us to the table in discussions of building the nation's future computing infrastructure. At home, he has brought NCSA into collaboration with faculty in projects all across our campus, from the life sciences to the arts and humanities. He is leaving NCSA in superb shape, positioned for a bright future. We owe a great debt of gratitude to Dan for his leadership." Rob Pennington, currently head of NCSA's Computing and Data Management Directorate, will serve as interim director of the center until a permanent successor for Reed is in place. Pennington has led NCSA's efforts to develop the world's largest academic-based Linux cluster computing systems, and he provides strategic direction to NCSA's software development, computing operations, and data and information management efforts. Danny Powell will remain NCSA's executive director, managing the day-to-day operations of the center and linking NCSA staff and programs with nationwide research efforts and NCSA's private sector partners. "Working with Dan and NCSA these past few years has opened my eyes to a wealth of amazing technologies and ideas," said Charles F. Zukoski, vice chancellor for research at UIUC. "Under his leadership, NCSA has become an even stronger and more vital part of our campus research community. With Rob Pennington at the helm, NCSA has yet another talented leader to steer the center through transition and continue to build upon its reputation for innovative research and discoveries that impact science and society. I look forward to working with the new NCSA leadership during this exciting time." "Dan has been one of the pillars on which our extraordinary accomplishments in computer science have been built over the last 20 years," said UIUC Provost Richard Herman. "He was centrally involved in such developments as the expansion of our nationally and internationally prominent computer science department, the addition of the new Siebel Center for Computer Science, securing the $53 million TeraGrid project from the National Science Foundation, and building the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world. His leadership and vision of large-scale computing have made major, lasting contributions to this institution and the nation." Reed was named director of NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and of the National Computational Science Alliance, a nationwide effort to prototype the nation’s cyberinfrastructure, in 2000. He is also a principal investigator for the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project, an effort launched in 2002 to build and deploy the world's largest, most comprehensive computing infrastructure for open scientific research. Reed came to the U of I in 1984 as an assistant professor of computer science and was head of the department from 1996-2001, a period of enormous growth. During his time as department head, computer science received a $32 million gift from alumnus Thomas M. Siebel, which led to the new $74 million Siebel Center for Computer Science. At the same time, the U of I committed to expand the department to over 60 faculty members, making it the largest and one of the most highly ranked computer science departments in the country. Reed is a respected international leader in the computer science community and among the U.S. agencies that support research and development. He is a member of several national collaborations, including the NSF Center for Grid Application Development Software and the Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. He also serves on the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), the Biomedical Informatics Expert Panel for the NIH’s National Center for Research Resources, and the board of directors of the Computing Research Association. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He recently chaired the community workshop for the High End Computing Revitalization Task Force. In 2001, the University of Illinois named Reed a recipient of the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professorship in recognition of his distinguished service as a university faculty member. Reed's ongoing research interests include tools and techniques for capturing and analyzing the performance of parallel systems, performance I/O systems, and collaborative virtual environments for real-time performance analysis. Reed received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1983 from Purdue University. He holds an M.S. in computer science from Purdue and a B.S. in computer science from the University of Missouri at Rolla.