Please join us to honor Professor Marc Snir upon his retirement from the University of Illinois.
Marc Snir is the Michael Faiman Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He graduated with a PhD in Mathematics from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979 and served as a senior lecturer there for several years, as well as an assistant professor at New York University.
Snir joined the Illinois Department of Computer Science in 2001 as department head after working as a senior manager at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He also was director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory from 2011 to 2016.
At Illinois, Snir was head of the department until 2007. He oversaw a period of faculty growth and led the department in establishing or reestablishing its status as a preeminent center for information management and knowledge discovery; formal methods and formal verification, validation and testing of software; and human-computer interactions. The Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science also opened under Snir’s leadership.
Much of Snir’s research at Illinois, IBM, and Argonne has focused on high-performance computing.
At IBM, Snir led the Scalable Parallel Systems research group that was responsible for major contributions to the IBM SP scalable parallel system and to the IBM Blue Gene system, both of which for a time were ranked No. 1 on the TOP500 supercomputing list.
Later at Illinois, Snir was one of the five co-principal investigators who crafted the proposal that created Blue Waters at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He focused on the supercomputer’s software architecture.
Snir also was co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at Illinois, which was backed by Microsoft and Intel and worked to accelerate the flow of parallel computing concepts to mainstream devices and applications.
Earlier in his career, Snir was heavily involved in the New York University Ultracomputer project. Ultracomputer was an influential early parallel architecture project, started in 1980.
Snir has published numerous papers and given many presentations on computational complexity, parallel algorithms, parallel architectures, interconnection networks, parallel languages and libraries, and parallel programming environments. He was a main contributor to the widely used MPI message passing library.
At Illinois, Snir also has graduated 10 PhD students.
Snir is an AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow. He won the IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing and the IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. Snir also was recently awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa Degree from ENS, Lyon, France.
Snir also was named a “Rock Star of HPC” by insideHPC.com in 2010, and he received a 2014 Illinois Computer Science Distinguished Service Alumni Award.
Refreshments provided.
No RSVP required.
