SCIENCE

Horst D. Simon, an internationally recognized expert in high performance computing, has been named associate laboratory director for Computing Sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Simon“I’m extremely pleased to have Horst assume this responsibility,” Berkeley Lab Director Charles Shank said in announcing the appointment. “This is a critical time for the Laboratory’s computing sciences programs, and I greatly value Dr. Simon’s leadership. I look forward to working closely with him in these important assignments.” Simon joined LBNL in early 1996 as director of the newly formed National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Division and was one of the key architects in establishing NERSC at its new location in Berkeley. The NERSC Center, established in 1974, is DOE’s flagship facility for unclassified supercomputing. Simon is also the founding director of Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division, which conducts applied research and development in computer science, computational science, and applied mathematics. As the associate laboratory director for Computing Sciences, Simon will have overall responsibility for three LBNL divisions – the NERSC Center, Computational Research, and Information Technologies and Services. He will continue to serve as division director for both the NERSC Division and for the Computational Research Division. In making the announcement on Feb. 23, LBNL Director Shank noted that Simon “is widely respected for his contributions to science.” Simon earned his Ph. D. in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and continues his research in the development and application of high performance linear algebra algorithms. His recursive spectral bisection algorithm is regarded as a breakthrough in parallel algorithms for unstructured computations, and his algorithm research efforts were honored with the 1988 Gordon Bell Prize for parallel processing research. Simon is also widely known for his work in assessing the performance of supercomputers. He was member of the NASA team that developed the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, a widely used standard for evaluating the performance of massively parallel systems. He is also one of four editors of the twice-yearly “TOP500” list of the world’s most powerful computing systems. From 1994 to 1996, Simon was with the Advanced Systems Division of Silicon Graphics, Inc. From 1989 to 1994, he worked for Computer Sciences Corporation as manager of a research department supporting the NAS (Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation) Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Before that Simon was the manager of the Computational Mathematics Group of Boeing Computer Services, where he worked from 1983-89.