Bio
Al Geist is a Corporate Research Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is the Chief Technology Officer of the Leadership Computing Facility and Chief Scientist for the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. He is also the Chief Technology Officer of the DOE Exascale Computing Project. His recent research is on Exascale computing and resilience needs of the hardware and software. He leads the ASCR technical Council on Resilience and is the PI on the multi-lab Extreme-Scale Algorithms and Software Institute.
For 20 years Al led the 25 member Computer Science Research Group. In his 35 years at ORNL, he has published two books and over 200 papers in areas ranging from heterogeneous distributed computing, numerical linear algebra, parallel computing, collaboration technologies, solar energy, materials science, biology, and solid state physics. He is one of the original developers of PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), which became a world-wide de facto standard for heterogeneous distributed computing. Al was actively involved in the design of the Message Passing Interface (MPI-1 and MPI-2) standard. More recently he was involved in the development of FT-MPI, a research prototype to explore how to make MPI applications fault tolerant.