Marc Snir
Marc Snir | |
|---|---|
| Born | Israel |
| Occupation(s) | Computer scientist, professor |
| Years active | 1980–present |
| Known for | Parallel computing, Message Passing Interface, Blue Waters supercomputer software |
| Notable work | Development of software for Blue Waters supercomputer, co-director of UPCRC |
Marc Snir is a computer scientist of Israeli-American descent, holding the Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professorship within the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His expertise lies primarily in the area of parallel computing. Snir served as the principal investigator responsible for developing the software for the petascale Blue Waters supercomputing system and was a co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC) at Illinois, a collaboration funded by Intel and Microsoft.
Between 2007 and 2008, he was the director of the Illinois Informatics Institute. From 2011 until 2016, Snir led the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, and previously, from 2001 to 2007, he chaired the Computer Science Department at Illinois. Prior to these roles, he held a senior management position at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he managed the Scalable Parallel Systems group, contributing significantly to advancements in IBM’s IBM RS/6000 SP and Blue Gene supercomputer projects. In recognition of his influential work in high-performance parallel computing research, development, and standardization, Snir was honored with the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award in 2013.
Snir obtained his doctorate in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979. Early in his career, he participated in the NYU Ultracomputer initiative (1980–1982) and subsequently held a position at Hebrew University (1982–1986) before joining IBM. He was instrumental in the creation of the Message Passing Interface. His scholarly contributions encompass topics such as computational complexity, parallel algorithms, system architectures, interconnection networks, programming languages, software libraries, and development environments.
He holds Fellow status with several prestigious organizations, including the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE. Additionally, Snir is an active member of the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association and participates on the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation’s NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE).