Bio
Jeffrey S. Vetter, Ph.D., is a Corporate Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). At ORNL, he is currently the Section Head for Advanced Computer Systems Research and the founding director of the Experimental Computing Laboratory (ExCL). Previously, Vetter was the founding group leader of the Future Technologies Group in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division from 2003 until 2020. From 2016 until 2020, Vetter held a joint appointment at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. From 2005 through 2015, Vetter was a Joint Faculty Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. At GT, from 2009 to 2015, Vetter was the Principal Investigator of the NSF Track 2D Experimental Computing XSEDE Facility, named Keeneland, for large scale heterogeneous computing using graphics processors, and the Director of the NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence.
Vetter earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He joined ORNL in 2003, after stints as a computer scientist and project leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The coherent thread through his research is developing rich architectures and software systems that solve important, real-world high-performance computing problems. Recently, his team has been investigating the effectiveness of radically diverse architectures, including deep memory hierarchies with non-volatile memory, and heterogeneous processors such as GPUs, SoCs, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), for important HPC and streaming applications. In fact, he helped to coin the term Extreme Heterogeneity.
Vetter is a Fellow of the IEEE and AAAS, and a Distinguished Scientist Member of the ACM. In 2018, Vetter was awarded the ORNL Director's Award for Outstanding Individual Accomplishment in Science and Technology. In 2010, as part of an interdisciplinary team from Georgia Tech, NYU, and ORNL, Vetter was awarded the Gordon Bell Prize . In 2020, along with a large team from IBM and LLNL, Vetter received the SC20 Test of Time Award for the paper from SC02, entitled “An Overview of the Blue Gene/L Supercomputer.” Also, his work has won awards at major venues: Best Paper Awards at the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), EuroPar, and the 2018 AsHES Workshop, Best Student Paper Finalist at SC14, Best Paper Finalist at the IEEE HPEC Conference, and Best Presentation at EASC 2015. In 2015, Vetter served as the Technical Program Chair of SC15 (SC15 Breaks Exhibits and Attendance Records While in Austin). His recent books, entitled " Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale (Vols. 1 -- 3)," survey the international landscape of HPC. Vetter recently served as a member of the SRC Decadal Plan Executive Committee.
Recent sponsors of his team's work include the Department of Energy Office of Science (SC), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Currently, Vetter serves as a level 3 manager and software project PI in the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP), a PI for the Domain-Specific System on a Chip program in the DAPRA Electronics Resurgence Initiative, a PI of the ASCR Sawtooth project to investigate solutions to challenges in emerging memory and storage systems, in addition to other roles.