Dr. Horst D. Simon

Dr. Horst D. Simon is Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Director of the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
 
In his role as the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences, Horst represents the interests of the Lab’s scientific computing divisions, NERSC and Computational Research, in the formulation of Laboratory policy, and leads the overall direction of the two divisions. He also coordinates constructive interactions within the computing sciences divisions to seek coupling with other scientific programs.
 
Horst joined LBNL in early 1996 as director of the newly formed NERSC Division, and was one of the key architects in establishing NERSC at its new location in Berkeley. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is DOE’s flagship supercomputing facility for unclassified research funded by DOE’s Office of Science and currently supports nearly three thousand users at more than 300 institutions. Under his leadership, NERSC has enabled important discoveries in fields ranging from global climate modeling to combustion to astrophysics.
 
As founding director of Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division, he helps conduct applied research and development in computer science, computational science, and applied mathematics. His research interests are in the development of sparse matrix algorithms, algorithms for large-scale eigenvalue problems, and domain decomposition algorithms for unstructured domains for parallel processing.
 
Horst’s 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. He was a member of the NASA team that developed the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, a widely used standard for evaluating the performance of massively parallel systems. (NAS stands for NASA Advanced Supercomputing.) He is also one of four editors of the twice-yearly “TOP500” list of the world’s most powerful computing systems.
 
He is editor of Proceedings of the Conference on Scientific Applications of the Connection Machine: Nasa Ames Research Center, Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics: Implementations and Results (Scientific and Engineering Computation), Scientific Applications of the Connection Machine, and author of HARP: A dynamic inertial spectral partitioner (RIACS technical report).
 
He also authored or coauthored Wirklich Intelligente Rechner (Really Intelligent Computers in German) in Spektrum der Wissenschaften, Experience in using SIMD and MIMD Parallelism for Computational Fluid Dynamics in Applied Numerical Mathematics, Floating Point Arithmetic in Future Supercomputers in International Journal of Supercomputer Applications, and Estimating the Largest Eigenvalue of a Symmetric Positive Definite Matrix with the Lanczos Algorithm in Mathematics of Computation. Read his full list of publications!
 
Horst is on the Editorial Board of International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, Journal of Scientific Programming, Advances in Engineering Software, Computing and Visualization in Science, NHSE Review, and Scientific Computing World. He is a Reviewer for Computing Reviews and Mathematical Reviews.
 
He is Scientific Advisor for Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum (ZIB), Berlin, Germany, on the International Advisory Panel for the Institute of High Performance Computing (iHPC), Singapore, on the Industrial Advisory Board of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Swiss National Center of Scientific Computing (CSCS), Manno, Ticino, Switzerland, and is on the SCOMA Advisory Board, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
 
Horst earned a Diploma in Mathematik from Technische Universität Berlin in 1978 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982. He served in the Bundeswehr (German Federal Armed Forces) from 1972 to 1973.